Respectable private schools, not segregation academies, preserved segregation longest

Evidence

For many observers, of the time and since, the short, strange career of the city’s segregation academies seemed evidence that Atlanta’s school desegregation was a story played out solely in the realm of public schools. To be sure, “segregation academies” as they were commonly defined—private schools established by leading segregationists, in direct response to court rulings against public school segregation, and for the explicit purpose of evading those rulings—did not play a major role in the resistance of Atlanta’s whites. But other private schools, established by major religious denominations, long before rulings against segregated education, did, in truth, provide shelter for segregation. Most scholars have neglected to address their role in white resistance, but in many ways, they deserve as much attention as the more obvious segregation academies, if not more. Segregation academies were, in a perverse way, proof of segregationists’ sincerity, a sign of the lengths to which they would go to maintain white supremacy. But as segregation persisted in older, more “respectable” private schools, it contradicted these schools’ outspoken support of desegregation elsewhere. It was proof of what could charitably be called a double standard of class, but what was at the time denounced as simple hypocrisy. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 393

Categorization

• QUESTION: Kruse claims scholars neglected religious schools’ role in white resistance — worth verifying whether the historiography has since corrected this gap.
• XREF: connects to: Religious schools that preached integration privately remained segregated by class and race — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 394; Church-affiliated private schools outlasted public schools as refuges of segregation — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 405