65th anniversary---5-17-1954--Brown vs BOE

65 years ago-----Brown vs Board of Education Decision in 1954

The decision sparked the birth of Alabama segregation academies like Montgomery Academy (1955) and St. James (1955)

There are at least 20 "private" schools in Montgomery


Five Biggest (About 800 students each)

• Montgomery Academy (807) (Artur Davis was a student there) 88.6% white

• St. James (925) 79.5% white

• Trinity Presbyterian (744) (98.2% white)...founded by Trinity Presbyterian Church, an all-white church that resisted efforts for blacks to join the congregation.^[2] Trinity School opened in a local church in 1970

• Montgomery Catholic (801) (76% white)

• Alabama Christian Academy (788) --founded 1942 (87% white) found in 1959---at its founding the (Montgomery) Academy didn't have the financial resources to build its own football field or other athletic facilities.^[11] However, the city of Montgomery allowed the school and three other segregation academies (the Saint James School, the Stephens-Spears School, and the Central Alabama Academy) to use athletic facilities at the city's public schools.^[11] In 1972, federal Judge Frank M. Johnson, whose son John was a student at the Montgomery Academy,^[12] enjoined the city from continuing this practice,^[13] writing that "In allowing private academies to use city facilities, Montgomery is providing aid to private, segregated schools, thus facilitating their establishment and operation as an alternative for white students who in most instances are seeking to avoid desegregated public schools."^[11]

In 1976 the Academy, along with the Saint James School, was named in a suit filed against United States Secretary of the Treasury William Simon and Commissioner of Internal Revenue Donald C. Alexander by five women from Montgomery charging that the two men had encouraged the development of segregated schools by allowing them tax-deductible status.^[14] The school was identified as a discriminatory institution by the plaintiffs in Allen v. Wright, a lawsuit by black parents that was decided in 1984 by the U.S. Supreme Court.^[15]

^{The Montgomery County Public School System will have to confront all of that history as they try to convince voters to approve an increase in property taxes to increase funding for the public schools this year, all while many of them send their kids to the aforementioned private schools.} 


An interesting story HERE about Mississippi Segregation Academies, including this note:

"When Pillow Academy commemorated the 50th anniversary of its opening a few years ago, there was only a single mention in the 36-page commemorative section in the Greenwood Commonwealth that inched near the white-supremacist reality of Pillow’s start. With mild absurdity, the line noted the all-white school opened when “throughout the South, citizens of both races were concerned about the volatility of forced desegregation.”

Which sounds exactly like the original Alabama Department of public Safety self-written History---in which they said state troopers were called to keep the peace. Like on the bridge in Selma?