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Update: I would like to apologize for an error I made in the original version of this story. I stated that tuition payments to private schools are tax-exempt on the federal level. They are not. They sometimes are on the state level. The episode has been edited to reflect the correct information.

When Brown v. Board of Education passed the Supreme Court in 1954, segregationists stepped up their efforts to keep black children out of their schools. If they couldn't use public schools, they'd establish their own private academies.

In the 60's the Supreme Court struck down mandatory Bible reading and prayer in schools, causing some Christians to establish private Christian schools. This movement had unfortunate timing in that it lined up with the segregation academy movement. To our shame, many Protestant schools were segregation academies.

But this story isn't so easy. In this episode and the next, we'll explore the strange twists and turns of the private school movements of the 1960s and 70s. They illustrate just how tangled evangelicals are with schools, taxes, and racism.

Sources:

In Search of Another Country by Joseph Crespino
Reaganland by Rick Perlstein
The Evangelicals by Frances Fitzgerald
Article on Jeffersonian Ideology
The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (especially books 1 and 2)
Oyez.org article about the McCullum Case
Interview with Austin Steelman, professor at Clemson University
Oyez.org article about the Plessy case
Oyez.org article about Brown v. Board
Department of Labor article about the 1964 Civil Rights Act
Oyez.org article about the Green case

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