State tuition grants subsidized wealthy whites already in private school, not refugees

Evidence

With the courts supporting the scheme, tuition grants seemed to be the solution for segregationist parents. By the fall of 1962 more than one thousand tuition grants had been approved for a total exceeding $186,000. Closer inspection, however, showed that the grants were not a way for all whites to place their children in segregated private schools, but merely a handout to upper-class whites who already had their children there. A study by the Atlanta Constitution reported that 83 percent of the recipients had been enrolled in private schools well before the desegregation struggle. (One beneficiary of the grant program was a local black educator, who had long been sending his children to a northern prep school and was now happy to have segregationists help pay their way.) Furthermore, hundreds of the recipients lived in areas outside Atlanta, where no desegregation existed and, thus, where there was no “need” to flee the public schools. Such stories convinced many Georgians that the tuition grants were not a universal solution to desegregation, but rather one only for the rich. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 391

Categorization

• SEED: A voucher-history angle: ‘state-funded segregated schooling’ programs that ended up as subsidies for the already-privileged — direct parallels to modern private-school choice debates.
• XREF: connects to: Segregationist leaders urged privatization or abandonment of public lands rather than integration — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 278