The Broken Child - Chapter 9

The Day Everything Changed

October 29, 1970, was D-Day when it came to the battle to keep Mississippi schools segregated and the rise of what would become known as "segregation academies."

Before 1970, the South found ways to delay, obscure, and avert the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education ended these efforts, effectively changing the language in Brown, demanding changes "with all deliberate speed" to "immediate changes." It also led to the Justice Department taking over several districts in Mississippi to institute the necessary changes, including Jackson Public Schools.

Ross Barnett had spoken about closing the public schools before integrating them. John Bell Williams, who had been more moderate on race issues, began discussing a plan to open private schools in defiance of the Justice Department. Richard Nixon promised to restrain the Justice Department but didn't.

Mississippi Democrats who felt betrayed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Johnson's Great Society, which focused on impoverished areas of the Mississippi Delta, began to leave the party and join the Republican Party as part of a movement that became known as the "Southern Strategy." Before this, the "black and tan" Republican party in Mississippi was progressive on issues of integration, but they soon lost all control and say in the New Mississippi Republican Party.

I've written this part of the story as a two-hundred-and-seventy-page book that will never see the light of day. After discussing the issue with my friends and family, I came to several conclusions about this project that would have been my first book. First and foremost, I believe this is an issue that a historian or journalist should take up. I'm a raconteur. That is not the same.

I also have emotional attachments to many people in the story, some positive and some negative. I know that parts of this story would change their reputation and how the world remembers them, and I'm just not the guy to do that. As it is, some people won't speak to me after reading this chapter.

I've decided to cover just the bare bones of the story and focus on the part my family played in it and its effect on my life. I think that's fair. I hope a younger, better historian and writer will take up the torch one day and illuminate this part of Mississippi's history.

Until Alexander v. Holmes, most people in Jackson, Mississippi, were satisfied with the job Dr. Kirby Walker, superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, had done to quiet the race issue and kept their children in the system.

Twenty years before, there began a movement among the Episcopal and Catholic congregations in Jackson to develop a parochial school system along the lines found in Memphis and New Orleans. While their formation had been entirely separate from the issue of segregation, people with concerns about the Brown decision began finding places on their boards. There was somewhat of a firewall on racial issues with these schools in that both the larger Catholic and Episcopal churches had an anti-segregation stance. Even though some locals fought it, the movement to desegregate Catholic and Episcopal organizations moved along much more smoothly and quickly than others.

Ross Barnett proposed a plan to close public schools and give everybody an "education voucher" to spend at whatever private school they wished. At the time, the prevailing opinion was that a private school could do whatever it wanted regarding race. That opinion would ultimately be challenged in court and found to violate the public accommodations part of the Civil Rights Act.

Three separate groups began fomenting plans to open private schools that would remain segregated according to race. At first, they had difficulty getting off the ground in Jackson. Dr. Walker promised to integrate Jackson Public Schools without violence, and he accomplished this by having at least one black student in every public school. Most people in Jackson were satisfied with that and didn't feel compelled to spend the money to open private schools.

The Citizen's Council had plans to open private, segregated schools as early as 1963—popular among working class, white Jacksonians. The rising new Republicans saw them as uncouth, essentially "poor white trash," without using that phrase. Although nearly everyone used that phrase, nobody ever admitted to using it. There was a similar situation with the word "nigger," although people used the latter much more freely than the former.

Two young Jackson educators became unhappy with what was happening in Jackson Public Schools. They began planning to open private "preparatory" schools like those on the East Coast and Atlanta, even though they had almost no money to do so.

In 1959, Loyal M. Bearrs decided that new math and whole language were destructive to good education and started a one-room academy where he used textbooks from the nineteenth century that focused on phonics. Bearrs had little interest in segregation issues. Having taught education at Millsaps College and worked in Jackson Public Schools, he had specific ideas about how things should be done.

Before Alexander v. Holmes, Loyal Bearrs had fewer than twenty students enrolled at Jackson Academy, including his children. As the case progressed, a group of young new Republicans approached him with the prospect of making his school substantially larger to act as an escape plan for upper-middle-class white kids wishing to avoid the integration of Jackson Public Schools but didn't want to have anything to do with the Citizen's Council schools, even though they wanted the same things. They were interested in doing it, but before 1970, they didn't have the money.

Jesse L. Howell had been a successful Junior High School principal. Before 1970, he wanted to open an upper-class" preparatory" school but also lacked the money. With Alexander v. Holmes in the news, he, too, found new Republicans interested in his idea but not yet willing to put up the money.

Before 1970, most people in Jackson were willing to go along to get along. The decision in Alexander v. Holmes caused a panic, though, and the action of the Justice Department caused a stampede. The Citizens Council, Bearrs, and Howell suddenly found people clamoring to build their schools and open them immediately.

In the school business, my father's salesmen suddenly found themselves buried in requests for proposals for entire schools' worth of desks, blackboards, bleachers, and lockers. We stood to make a great deal of money, with one caveat: how do we get paid? St. Andrews had taken seven years to raise the funds, build, and equip their new school. In 1970, there were plans for six new schools to be planned and built in less than a year, with no money.

My dad was personal friends with many of the New Republicans forming the new boards of what became private schools. As the pressure to build and open the new schools mounted, the founders of Jackson Academy and Jackson Prep turned to my father for financial terms and conditions. In later years, my father would admit how grateful he was that our bank wouldn't allow us to extend that much credit to these new schools, as they were not extending terms to them either.

The solution became for some of these young doctors, lawyers, and insurance men to offer personal notes and letters of credit to cover the supplies and equipment necessary to open the new schools. The Citizen's Council Schools took more time, but they could do the same thing. Even with all these precautions, we still ended up holding the bag with over a million dollars in unpaid accounts receivable that had to be written off by 1980.

We were just some of the ones called upon to make this happen. Designing and building six schools in less than a year was challenging. Ultimately, all the segregation schools ended up looking like warehouses and military buildings because those were the fastest and cheapest to build.

The original plan was for Jackson Academy to be the feeder school to Jackson Prep, but a disagreement early on saw the JA Board split in half with a group forming the First Presbyterian Day School. While Billy Simmons kept control of the Citizens Council Schools from start to finish, there would be disputes for control within them. Loyal M. Bearrs soon regretted making a deal with this new board and abandoned the school he founded to open Bearrs Academy on the other side of the highway.

My Uncle Boyd had been a teacher, but my father and Grandfather never were. They had been in the School Supply business since before the Great Depression, though, and counted scores of professional educators among their closest friends. In 1970, many came to them for advice. Advice they didn't have to give.

Kirby Walker was superintendent of Jackson Public Schools for over thirty years. Despite having no money to speak of, Jackson Public Schools had one of the best academic reputations in the South. Their sports program was nothing to sneeze at, either. Walker was a close and loyal friend of my Grandfather and Uncle Boyd. Dr. Walker was a pallbearer when their mother, Carrie Boyd Campbell, died in 1943.

By 1970, Dr. Walker was in his early sixties. Rather than deal with the Nixon Justice Department taking over the school system he devoted his life to, he chose to retire. My Grandfather threw a party for him at the Capitol City Club in the Walthal Hotel.

Until then, my parents intended to keep all four of us in public schools. My parents were products of the Jackson Public Schools, our best customers.

The Justice Department put the Jackson Public Schools under the auspices of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). HEW planned to bus black students into white schools until all the schools in Jackson had a racial mix that matched the city's seventy percent white and thirty percent black population. Their plan included racially balancing teachers and administrators, as well as students.

I started the school year with a young white teacher in Second Grade at Casey Elementary School. Before Christmas, HEW replaced her with a middle-aged black woman. She soon requested a transfer back to a black school, and before school began again for the Spring Semester, my mother told me we would have a third new teacher.

This third teacher would be something different. My mother explained that she would be half-white and half-black. The concept of racial mixing was rare in Mississippi in 1970, and I had never heard of it. When my mother said the new teacher would be half white and half black, I envisioned someone white on one side and black on the other—or maybe she'd have stripes or spots. Either way, I was warned never to mention it and to stare absolutely never.

When I met my new teacher, she was a disappointment. Possessed of neither stripes nor spots, her skin could have passed for white, but her facial features were prominently African. Her hair was fine like mine but extremely curly, and she made little effort to shape it into anything recognizable. In her late forties, she impressed me as someone constantly tired, uncomfortable with the turn her career had taken, and hoping to serve out her time until she could retire too. While it wasn’t our fault, even the youngest student could tell when their teacher just didn’t want to be there.

Playing Gin Rummy with my Grandfather at the Country Club of Jackson, the freshly retired Kirby Walker, unaccustomed to day drinking, gave my Grandfather some earnest advice.

"Jimmy, I don't know what's going to happen with the schools in Jackson. You better tell Jim (my father) to get those boys into private school," he said.

My father was against the idea of moving us to private school, even though most of his peers pressured him to join them. Daddy's closest friend, Rowan Taylor, was on the Jackson Public School Board and worked to alleviate the panic about schools that happened in 1970.

This was a challenging decision. Even if he had not been a family friend, Kirby Walker's opinion carried much weight because of his professional reputation. He dedicated his life to education, and if he said it was time to get out, that certainly had to be considered.

My father liked to put his foot down and become immovable. He got a perverse pleasure out of people trying to change his mind when he had already made a decision. Another factor would come into play here, though. At Casey, my report card showed that I failed every subject. I found it so difficult to speak to my teacher that I had twice wet myself rather than ask to use the restroom.

My father blamed the HEW for rotating three different teachers in my class in one year. Moving us to Council Schools was out of the question. Daddy had no love for these new Republicans either, so JA or First Pres. were out. Our neighbor and his cousin Ben had been thinking about St. Andrews. Mildred Peterson, who had been our neighbor when we were on Northside Drive, taught third grade there. St Andrews didn't yet have a high school, so my oldest brother went to Prep. He was given the option to move when St. Andrews opened its high school two years later, but he decided to stay where he was.

You can trace the white flight that plagued Jackson, Mississippi, for the next fifty years to October 29, 1970, and the ensuing panic. By the following October, over thirty percent of all the white students enrolled in Jackson Public Schools would be in private schools, which didn't exist the year before. Although my new school was built before 1970, I would be among them.