The story of one Mississippi county shows how private schools are exacerbating segregation

The scoreboard glowed with the promise of another Friday night football game in Liberty, Mississippi, a small town near the Louisiana border. The Trojans, in black and gold, sprinted onto the field to hollers from friends and families who filled barely half the bleachers.

The fans were almost all Black, as is the student body at the county’s lone public high school. Scanning the field and the stands would give you little indication that more than half the county’s residents are white.

In some swaths of the South, a big event like high school football unites people. But not in Amite County.

Just beyond the Trojans’ scoreboard, past a stand of trees, another scoreboard lit up. At Amite School Center, a small Christian private school, cars and pickup trucks crammed every inch of space on the front lawn and in its parking lots. A charter bus for the visiting team, another private school, rumbled near the entrance to the field.

A good 500 people, nearly all of them white, filled the bleachers and flowed across the hill overlooking the field. They cheered from lawn chairs and waggled cowbells as cheerleaders in red-and-white uniforms performed a daring pyramid routine.

A child waved a handmade white poster that read, “Go Rebels.”

Amite School Center, like many private schools across the Deep South, opened during desegregation to serve families fleeing the arrival of Black children at the once all-white public schools. ProPublica has been examining how these schools, called “segregation academies,” often continue to act as divisive forces in their communities even now, five decades later.

In Amite County, about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. More than 600 children attend two private schools — which were 96% white. Other, mostly white students go to a larger segregation academy in a neighboring county.

“It’s staggering,” said Warren Eyster, principal of Amite County High until this school year. “It does create a divide.”

The difference between those figures, 80 percentage points, is one way to understand the segregating effect of private schools — it shows how much more racially isolated students are when they attend these schools.

Considerable research has examined public school segregation. Academics have found that everything from school attendance zones to the presence of charter schools can worsen segregation in local public schools.

But the ways in which private schools exacerbate segregation are tough to measure. Unlike their public brethren, they don’t have to release much information about themselves. That means few people on the outside know many details about these schools, including the racial makeup of their student bodies — at a time when legislatures across the South are rapidly expanding voucher-style programs that will send private schools hundreds of millions more taxpayer dollars.

But a new ProPublica analysis shows the extent to which private schools segregate students. We dug into decades of private and public school data kept by the U.S. Department of Education, including a survey of the nation’s private schools conducted every other year by its National Center for Education Statistics. Outside of academia, few people know about this data.

The surveys are imperfect measures. Schools self-report their information, and about 1 in 4 didn’t respond to the most recent round in 2021. But the surveys are the only national measure of this kind. ProPublica used them to determine how often students attended schools with peers of the same race in tens of thousands of private schools nationwide and compared that to public schools.

A stark pattern emerged across states in the Deep South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — where about 200 majority-Black school districts educate 1.3 million students. Alongside those districts, a separate web of schools operates: private academies filled almost entirely with white students. Across the majority-Black districts in those states, private schools are 72% white and public schools are 19% white.

Many of those districts are home to segregation academies, which siphon off large numbers of white students. In many areas, particularly rural ones, these academies are the reason that public school districts scarcely resemble their communities — and the reason that public schools are more Black than the population of children in the surrounding county.

Which county has the largest chasm? Amite.

Along the two-lane country roads through Amite County, fear still mingles with the red clay. Civil rights violence scarred the place just a few generations ago. At least 14 lynchings and other terrifying acts of racist violence took place here, including one of the nation’s most infamous unsolved civil rights murders. In neighboring Pike County, the town of McComb became known as the “bombing capital of the world” for its violent resistance to civil rights.

“You can’t forget things like that,” said Jackie Robinson, chair of the Amite County Democratic Committee. A Black woman, she remembers going to the neighborhood store with her grandmother and being called a racial slur. Her mother told stories of crosses burning.

Robinson said she encounters Black residents who won’t put campaign signs for Black candidates in their yards. They fear that white residents, who own most of the local businesses, might shut them out if they do.

White adults outnumber Black ones, and white elected officials control the school district that educates mostly Black children.

Only one school trustee is Black. She sent her children to the local public schools, but few, if any, of the white trustees did. One longtime white board member, whose children attended Amite School Center, has as his Facebook profile picture a photo of the private school’s football team. ProPublica reached out to all of the school board members multiple times, but none responded.

That school board hired a superintendent who is white. It selected high school and middle school principals who are white. And all of the people collecting $7 cash from each spectator at the football game appeared to be white.

Janice Jackson-Lyons, a Black woman, ran for a school board seat in 2020 against the white incumbent with the private school Facebook photo. She described her campaign message as: “I’m reaching for all children. I’d love to see all the kids go to school together because all the kids in Amite County are going to compete for jobs with people from all over the world.” She lost by 60 votes.

Woran Griffin, who volunteers with Amite County High School’s football team, ran for a board seat in November. He and another Black resident, an educator in a neighboring school district, both lost to white candidates. “There are too many whites running kids they don’t know nothing about,” he said.

They are among the Black residents who wonder: Why do white people who never sent their kids to the public schools keep challenging Black candidates who have? Many Black residents figure it comes down to control — over property tax rates, district spending contracts and hiring.

“I call that a plantation-style school,” said local resident Bettie Patterson, a Black woman who served on the school board years ago.

Amite County has one of the lowest property tax rates for funding schools in Mississippi. And when the board consolidated schools in 2010, it shuttered the elementary school in Gloster, a mostly Black town in the county, and moved all students to Liberty, a mostly white one. The only school left in Gloster is a Head Start for preschoolers.

Superintendent Don Cuevas wouldn’t comment on the racial dynamic of the board. “We have a good school system,” he said. “We have a safe school system. Everybody’s treated equal.”

Several Amite public school teachers and parents described watching the PTA, the booster club and a parent liaison position disappear. They said they don’t feel their input is welcome. But Cuevas said the district wants to be selective about when it asks for money from its families, many of whom have very low incomes, when the district doesn’t need it.

“Financially, we’re set,” Cuevas said. “We handle money very well.” He pointed to renovations at the elementary school, including improvements to the parking lot and plumbing, a new iron fence around the entire property and a guard shack. The superintendent said it was to ensure safety and order, but Griffin said the fence felt “like a prison wall.”

Multiple Black educators told ProPublica that the district had passed over qualified Black teachers with local roots for jobs and promotions.

Jeffery Gibson, who grew up in Gloster, was a PE teacher and Amite County High School’s head football and a track coach last year when, he said, he applied for two open administrative positions. Given he had coached multiple state championship teams, received his administrator license and worked as a lead teacher, he figured he’d be a strong candidate.

“I know the kids,” Gibson said. “I can motivate them. I can get them to do what I ask. I can get them to reach their full potential. I’m from there.” But he said the district didn’t respond to his applications, so he took a job as the athletic director of a larger district.

ProPublica identified 155 counties across the Deep South with private schools that likely opened as segregation academies. Roughly three dozen of those schools are in Mississippi. One in Amite County has never — over nearly 30 years of responding to a federal survey — reported enrolling more than one Black student at a time.

The other, Amite School Center, began reporting enrollment of Black students in the past decade, but not enough to come close to reflecting the population of children in Amite County, where almost half of school-age kids are Black. In the 2021 federal survey, Amite School Center reported student enrollment was 3.5% Black. It employs no Black teachers.

When asked if his school still creates divisions in the community, ASC’s Head of School Jay Watts said no: “I haven’t seen it here.” The school has a policy that says it doesn’t discriminate based on race.

The nonprofit Christian academy, home of the Rebels, opened hastily in 1970 “in the wake of court ordered all-out racial desegregation of the Amite County Schools,” a local Enterprise-Journal story said a few months beforehand.

Back then, A.R. Lee Jr., a doctor and congressional candidate from Liberty, was president of the nonprofit Amite School Corp. As violence erupted in other Southern towns, Lee told a Mississippi newspaper reporter, “The fact that we have a private school here is the reason everything is calm. If we didn’t have it, it wouldn’t be calm in Amite County.”

In the front office of the modest one-story school, which educates just over 300 students across all grade levels, a Confederate flag with “ASC” emblazoned in the center is tacked to a cabinet. Down a hallway, Watts sat at a desk beneath an impressive deer mount, a wooden paddle perched against the office’s doorframe. He welcomed questions from a reporter who showed up without an appointment.

Watts seemed eager to share what his school offers: a Christian-based education that eschews government interference.

“We are charged with educating academically, physically, spiritually, emotionally,” Watts said. “I’m not sure that that’s the mission of the public schools. They’re there to educate academically. I think our mission is broader.”

Because ASC is private, it can operate without the government dictating whether teachers can lead prayer, what tests they administer — and whether or not that paddle gets used. Watts said many of its families think the broader culture is changing in ways they don’t agree with.

“We don’t have to let a girl go to the boys’ bathroom or a boy go to the girls’ bathroom,” he said.

Josh Bass, the school’s athletic director and basketball coach, worked at public schools earlier in his career, then came to ASC from a larger academy in neighboring Pike County. He said he and his wife enrolled their three children at ASC primarily due to their Christian faith: “If it’s not biblical leadership, then I don’t want it for my child.”

He insisted that racial segregation isn’t the school’s goal today. “That might have been at one time, 100 years ago, and some people hang on to that,” Bass said. “We want all to have an opportunity to go to these schools and be a part of what we’re trying to lead them to be.”

The men also recognized that even though ASC’s tuition is relatively low compared to many other private schools — under $6,000 a year per child — disparities in resources still create barriers. The median white household income in Amite County is $54,688, compared to $21,680 for a Black household, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

ASC has received $459,000 in donations over the past three years through a state tax credit program for certain educational charities, including private schools. But Watts said the school still lacks the money to offer financial aid.

Across the tree line at the public school’s district office, Cuevas said in terse tones that he had no comment about anything related to the private schools or the parents who choose them. He knew nothing about what ASC offers and therefore could not — and would not — compare the public schools to it.

“I don’t even know those answers,” Cuevas said. “I don’t know anything about the private schools. I don’t ask.”

He said he didn’t go out into the community to promote the schools he leads. Instead, he opened the schools’ doors and tried to educate whoever walked in. He’s unclear why so many white students don’t come.

“We don’t know why. We offer a good education,” Cuevas said.

Gibson, the public school’s former football coach, turned his pickup truck onto ASC’s jam-packed campus and found a slip of empty grass on the front lawn where he could park amid the football crowd. He had never set foot on this property even though he had worked and attended the nearby public schools.

Halftime approached as he headed toward the football field. A peal of parents’ yells — “Way to go!” and “Keep pushing!” — burst from the entrance. Once inside, Gibson scanned a sea of white people who filled the bleachers and packed together in lawn chairs, most of them strangers to him except for a few who worked at the public school district. The public schools pay more and offer better benefits.

Gibson had come to see one of his favorite players, a gifted senior who was on his team last year — and who was now the only Black player he saw on ASC’s team. It wasn’t hard to find the teen’s father. Nobody said anything unfriendly to him, but Gibson felt hundreds of eyes watching as he strolled over to the man, who stood front and center against the fence.

The player he came to see had transferred to ASC after Gibson left the public high school. Gibson had barely said hello to the teen’s father before the player scored a touchdown. Cheers cascaded from the crowd, and Gibson joined them.

But it felt strange standing there with so many white people at the “white school.” Back when he was growing up, he couldn’t have imagined such a thing. In college and after, while coaching in Oklahoma, Gibson made good friends who are white. As he cheered with the crowd at ASC, he wondered how many white friends he might have made here in Amite had the local kids all gone to school together.

He found an empty seat in the front row of the metal bleachers and took in the manicured field before him. It was so close to the one where he’d been a student and coach. Yet it felt like stepping into another world.