Life at the segregation academy

Elizabeth Spiers has a good piece on what education is like at the kind of school Nikki Haley attended:

After her failure to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War generated a wave of criticism last month, Nikki Haley assured her potential constituents that she had Black friends, and that she understood the war’s origins. Growing up in South Carolina, she said, “literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery.” Conveniently producing Black friends is, alas, not surprising, but claiming she learned that the Civil War was a battle over slavery in second and third grade is.

Governor Haley attended a segregation academy, a type of private school established in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education by white parents who did not want their children attending school with Black children.

By 1975, the number of private schools in South Carolina grew more than tenfold, enrolling as many as 90 percent of the white children in some majority Black counties. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that discrimination on the basis of race wasn’t legal at private schools, either, but even today, many segregation academies remain overwhelmingly white.

Ms. Haley graduated in 1989 from Orangeburg Preparatory School. Orangeburg was the product of a merger between Wade Hampton and Willington Academy, also segregation academies, the former of which was named after one of the largest slaveholding families in South Carolina. At one point, graduates of Hampton received Confederate flag lapel pins, which were meant to symbolize resistance against integration. The year Ms. Haley graduated, her high school yearbook featured at most a handful of Black students.

I attended a segregation academy, too: Edgewood Academy in Elmore, Ala., from first grade until I graduated in 1995. Though the town was about 30 percent Black, none of the 33 people in my graduating class were. My parents say they sent me and my two younger brothers there because they thought we’d get a better education, and because it was affordable (annual tuition is now $6,210, which would have been roughly $2,000 the year I matriculated), an important consideration for a family whose sole breadwinner was a lineman for Alabama Power.

When I was at Edgewood, there were no A.P. classes, no college test prep and no real expectation that any of us would go to college unless we really wanted to (which, for the girls, would be largely to find husbands). The science teachers taught us Creationism and the principal used a big wooden paddle on misbehaving students, no matter how young or old they were.

Our history textbooks positioned the Civil War as a states’ rights issue, a narrative that was reinforced by teachers, many of whom — as Governor Haley suggests — did mention slavery, but said the idea that it was a root cause of the war was liberal propaganda. We were told that some slaves had good relationships with their owners and were grateful to be taken care of, as if they had been awarded cushy jobs with excellent benefits instead of being torn from their families, abused and treated as if they were subhuman. We took field trips to the Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury, but not to the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, which was the same distance from us.

My fifth-grade teacher told us that if Jesus were alive in Alabama he would have been a white Dixiecrat, that God frowns on what she called race mixing and that children who are the products of interracial marriages are to be pitied because they’re mistakes. (I wonder now how she would have treated me if she knew that I was the product of an interracial marriage — which, as an adoptee, I found out only well after I graduated.)

I don’t know which textbook Nikki Haley’s school used, but I know just by virtue of the fact that she attended a segregation academy that her understanding of the Civil War was shaped by white teachers and administrators who were not inclined to grapple with the evils of slavery.

It’s not a coincidence that Chris Rufo cut his teeth at a crank anti-evolution outfit. This is the kind of education he wants at public schools everywhere.