Session Abstract

This session investigates the complexity of southern politics undergirded by race from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, and the agency of African Americans to forge educational opportunity to challenge the morality of racism and solidify full participation in American democracy. Through examinations of the Stouffer Foundation, a white southern philanthropic organization that sought to desegregate southern elite private schools, African American student activism in Mississippi and South Carolina, and  the role of black leadership in a Mississippi Head Start Program, this panel includes emerging narratives from the desegregation era that contest and reshape southern history regarding educational equity as a “new” coalition of conservative politics developed. Further, this session interrogates the politics of space, place, and the lived experiences of students, parents, and educators. 

Framing this session are historiographies concerning southern politics, school desegregation, and African American educational history. Recent southern political histories by Joseph Crespino, Kevin Kruse, and Matthew Lassiter challenge top-down continuity political narratives focused on the origins and manifestations of white southern politics and the myth of southern exceptionalism. These historians situate their narratives in urban areas and consider the role of white flight and the rights southerners believed they were protecting. Giving us local perspective on school desegregation, scholars including Liva Baker, Scott Baker, Charles Bolton, and Jill Titus deepen our understandings of the intricacies among local, regional, and federal mandates, pressures, and resistance. The complexity of these new southern political histories and local desegregation accounts are not fully comprehensible without considering education as a centralizing force in the African American experience, as detailed by scholars such as James Anderson, David Cecelski, and Vanessa Siddle Walker. However, these three historiographies do not fully explicate the interconnectedness among the possibility of private schools desegregating rather than serving as havens for white students fleeing public schools, black high school student activism, and the promise and threat of black female educational leadership. The inclusion of such narratives provides a more robust examination of the intersection of southern politics, school desegregation, and African American educational opportunity.

In more detail the panel will proceed as follows. The first panelist addresses the changing roles of private and public education in the South by analyzing the role of a short-lived white southern foundation and its role in the desegregation of elite K-12 private schools, and the subsequent access granted to African Americans to these spaces.  The second presenter investigates how black high school activists organized to demand integration of public spaces, but utilized resources from their local public schools. Their experiences suggest that segregated schools were critical sites of resistance in the desegregation era. The third panelist examines how over 2,000 black working-class women in Mississippi, through their employment in the Child Development Group of Mississippi Head Start program, challenged the state’s closed political system and white supremacist ideology. Their challenge in turn antagonized a white power structure, at both the local and state levels, that was unaccustomed to financially independent and assertive blacks.