Beatrice Alexander, a Black mother in Holmes County in the Mississippi Delta, was the woman who ultimately beat laws backing up segregated schools. She had sued the Delta school district for making no “meaningful” effort to integrate public schools and finally offer a truly equal education to Black children. She won her case when the U.S. Supreme Court told 30 Mississippi school districts to integrate by Feb. 1, 1970, with other southern district holdouts to follow suit.
White Noxubee County leaders were ready for that decision, however. They had refused since 1954 to give Supreme Court-mandated school desegregation efforts more than a wink and a nod. At the same time, white federal district judges in states like Mississippi sent mixed messages at best. Charles C. Bolton wrote in “The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980” that the state and its school districts made efforts in the “freedom of choice” years of 1964 to 1968 to invest more into Black public schools than they ever had in order to stave off full desegregation.
Until then, white Mississippi had intentionally starved Black public schools out of resources with inadequate or crumbling facilities with no plan to change it. In the shadow of the Brown decision, the Noxubee County School District and others started consolidating tiny Black schools and allocating more resources and building investment for what they still called “Negro schools,” Bolton wrote.
One Mississippi-based judge even ruled in 1966 in writing that Noxubee districts had to “abolish” separate schools, while threatening white district officials verbally that he would transfer 400 Black students into the white schools if white district officials didn’t improve the remaining schools. The idea was to buy themselves out of school integration.
Meantime, white State of Mississippi and Noxubee leaders were preparing for what they considered the worst outcome: forced integration. The same year Central Academy’s nonprofit formed, in 1964, the Mississippi Legislature passed a State-organized tuition-grant law to allow transfer of tax funds to white parents moving their kids to private segregated schools—what is today referred to as “school vouchers.”
That pay-off helped get early seg academies off the ground, including rural Leake Academy near Carthage and rabidly racist Citizen Council schools in Jackson, Bolton wrote. One of white Mississippi’s most urgent concerns was that mixed schools would lead to miscegenation, or race-mixing, with an inferior race, which would in turn destroy the supposedly superior white race.
Gov. Paul B. Johnson Jr. called the special session in 1964 that approved the early voucher law. He had run a virulently racist campaign the year before, repeating in his stump speeches that NAACP stood for “N—–s, Alligators, Apes, Coons and Possums.”