Private schools

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.