Learning to Read in Jackson
loyal bearss, jessie howell, and sister simmons
In the 1950s, in Jackson, Loyal Bearss hated the Scott Foresman Reader so much that he started his own school. He scoured used book stores for copies of readers that didn’t teach whole language from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The current Jackson Academy website says he was progressive. The opposite is true. He was absolutely regressive, but he might also be right. His private school began classes in the clubhouse of the Jackson Zoo.
I am, in no way, qualified to discuss the relative value of Whole Language vs Phonics learning. As a former member of the Textbook Publishing Industry, I can tell you the Scott Foresman Reader was an economic juggernaut in the baby boom. If you know who Sally, Dick, and Jane are, you most likely learned to read from the Scott Foresman Reader.
As a person with marked learning disabilities, I can tell you that phonics is often considered better for dyslexic kids than whole language. While I was taught to read from the Scott Foresman Reader, I was made to read with help from Weir Connor, my mother’s love, and my own stubbornness. After a failed first attempt, they delivered me to Madora McIntyre in the third grade, able to read, albeit slowly. She taught me, through love and grit, that reading could be a creative force. If you read me now, it’s not so very different from watching a quadraplegic ski. It wasn’t supposed to happen by nature. Learning Disabilities shaped my education and my life from bow to stern, but not in a bad way.
Bearss was lured to North East Jackson because, thanks to Parham Bridges and Leland Speed, that’s where Jackson was growing. Twenty families, including his own, put up their own money to open a very small school with mixed grades in each of the two classrooms. The rest of Jackson, kindly, thought he was nuts.
Brown vs Board of Education challenged Mississippi’s segregated school system. In Jackson, Dr. Kirby Walker, who won many awards for building the Jackson Public Schools, developed a plan for gradual, controlled integration of the schools, hoping to avoid the riots and violence seen in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama. From that perspective, it worked. There was no violence in Jackson, at least not regarding the schools.
As the Alexander v Holmes County case advanced through the legal system, pro segregation forces in Mississippi began to panic. The White Citizens Council introduced legislation offering parents a cash dividend for moving their children from public to private schools. Coffee v State Education Finance Committee made these early attempts illegal. Interestingly, this legislation has returned in 2025 and has the favor of the current Speaker of the House.
When Alexander v Holmes was decided on the basis that Justice delayed is Justice denied, there was panic in Mississippi. Two things happened. Thousands of devoted Dixiecrats became republicans because Goldwater promised to protect them from integration; later, Nixon promised to protect them from busing.
Why they stayed with the GOP after Nixon betrayed them, I don’t completely understand. Nixon ordered his Justice Dept and the HEW to settle the points of Holmes in Mississippi as quickly as possible, without regard to methods. This allowed Nixon to focus on what he most wanted, Vietnam, and Leonid Brezhnev. I’ve often wondered if our fear of the Soviets wasn’t actually monsters under the bed. They seemed to regard us the same way. In truth, Russia was straining to maintain control of its boundaries, doubled in size since the Second World War, and corruption was eating away at its economic viability. Water under the bridge, and it’s not my bridge.
The other thing that happened was an absolute, all-hands-on-deck panic to get white kids the hell out of public schools. I have a friend who taught at Chastain at the time. In her career, she was a notable and successful educator. When Nixon’s HEW took over Jackson Public Schools, they moved her to four different schools in sixteen months. When Jessie Howell asked her to go with him when he started Jackson Prep, she went willingly.
There was tremendous social pressure to support Jackson Prep. Most of it fell on my dad since he was considered key to making it work financially. They also wanted free shit. Daddy wasn’t a big believer in free shit. Jackson Prep was for middle-class North East Jackson white kids. South and West Jackson were mostly negros and the children of plumbers. They could find their own way. Billy Simmons and the Citizens’ Council filled in that gap.
Some men approached Loyal Bearss with an offer to pour a ton of money into Jackson Academy if he agreed to their views on segregation and became a feeder school for Jackson Prep. Typically, a go-his-own-way kind of guy, it was an awful lot of money. Current parents and students of JA will probably find it shocking that JA was designed to feed students to Prep, but time was running out, and the plan had to be in place before school began in 1971.
This partnership with Bearss didn’t last long. He liked to do things his own way. He thought people were taking advantage of his reputation and his genius. They were. He started over with a new school, almost identical to the one he built initially for JA. Since he couldn’t call it Jackson Academy anymore, he called it Bearss Academy. It’s a daycare now and has changed hands several times.
Bearss vowed never to take on a money-bags partner again. Without that, his new school soon floundered. He often visited the Mississippi school supply, hoping to buy damaged supplies, furniture, and textbooks at a discount. He was stubborn. He was also kind of a genius.
By 1980, the link between JA and Prep had long been broken. That wasn’t very long. JA started thinking of starting their own High School. Prep moved their feeder academy to First Presbyterian. After fifty years, Prep recently decided to start its own primary school.
From 1960 until 1980, Jessie Howell and Loyal Bearss were the most notable educators in Jackson. Soon after, Sister Simmons decided to return to Jackson Public Schools and left her remarkable career at St Andrews. Simmons soon eclipsed anything Howell or Bearss ever accomplished with regard to educational theory. She literally changed everything.
Sister probably doesn’t know I feel this way. I’ll find a way to tell her.
