Do not be deceived: they protested desegregation with their own schools because they weren’t racists (right?)
This photo (taken from Southernspaces.org/Nashville Public Library) is worthy of a dissertation. If you asked these guys if they were racists they would likely say, “no.” It is this type of duplicitous thinking that dominated white Southern gospel-centered churches in the Southeast in 1964-1965. So many will argue that their churches were not racist even though they silently did not pursue race-mixing in their congregations while claiming to be “friends” of blacks.
Pay attention, then, to all the “Christian” schools all over the South that launched during, or soon after, 1965.
Here’s a 1970 story from a high school in Clarksdale, MS,
During the first year of desegregation, the former all–white ninth grade was given special permission to stay where they were on the white high school campus. The school district did lose 378 of the 381 white seventh and eighth grade students (Ellard, 1975, p.119) because, according to the court order, those grades were required to attend the former Riverton Junior High School in the black part of town. Oakhurst Baptist Church in Clarksdale served as a temporary school. During the summer of 1970 Lee Academy, a private “white–flight” school, was built just outside of town. The next year, most of the white students attended the new academy.
The whole story here.
Just read Open Friendship in a Closed Society. Very eye-opening about stuff like this.
the southern confederate loving Calvinist you are attacking basically believe that Segregation was good and ok because white culture was superior and the black culture in the schools ‘brought down the whites’ morally.
Which is why a discussion on the roots of Cracker Culture with the Neo-Confederates would be fruitful. They think the Old South was the last Christian and moral nation of Christendom.
Such a conversation might be important to have, but I’m not so confident it would be fruitful. The only comfort for many poor, illiterate whites (who did suffer a great deal after the Civil War) was to tell themselves how superior they were to blacks. That kind of psychological balm is painful to part with. Ultimately, people believe these things because they want to. The yearning for an idyllic (nonexistent) past is at least as old as the Middle Kingdom pharaohs who sought to recapture the unsullied glory of the Old Kingdom.