How An Alabama Town Staved Off School Resegregation
I recently traveled to rural Wilcox County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, to understand the origins of the local “segregation academy” and how it still divides the broader community. It was the first story in our series about segregation academies, private schools that opened across the Deep South after the U.S Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. White Southerners opened hundreds — perhaps thousands — of these schools, which allowed white children to flee just as Black children arrived in the public schools. Now, 70 years later, ProPublica has found that hundreds of these academies still operate. Where they do, schools often remain segregated — and as a result, so do entire communities.