Dual Benefits: White Philanthropy, Black Students, and Elite K–12 Private Schools

• In Event: 61.034 - Analyzing the Arc: What History Teaches Us About Civil Rights and Educational Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This paper will examine the intersection of black educational opportunity and white philanthropy in the mid-20th century by focusing on the Stouffer Foundation. The Foundation, a white southern organization that operated from 1967 to 1976, provided scholarships to nearly 140 students of color, mostly black students, to desegregate and attend historically white elite K-12 private schools.
Perspectives
Historically white, elite K-12 private schools (i.e. “independent schools,” “preparatory schools,” or “academies”) are characterized by high academic standards. They are also intended to be catalysts for the creation of power networks and the accumulation of social capital. In the post-Brown era, leaders of elite independent schools, due to a host of reasons, yielded to national expectations of desegregation and began to diversify their student populations. By 1960 only one-third of such schools had enrolled a black student. By 1967, over 3,700 black students were attending independent schools, and within three years this number increased to over 7,600. To distinguish themselves from segregationist academies or havens for white students fleeing public school desegregation, independent school leaders created and supported a variety of initiatives including those of philanthropic organizations to recruit students of color.
Methods
This paper is a historical narrative that interweaves context, cause, and chronology. Case study methodology is also employed as this project provides an in-depth understanding of an organization over time. In addition, oral history, which documents individual lives and untold historical accounts, is employed.
Data
Data sources include a) minutes, reports, and programmatic information from the Stouffer Foundation’s archival records at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and b) oral history interviews conducted by the author with Stouffer Foundation leaders and recipients.
Results
Upon founding the Stouffer Foundation, Anne Forsyth, the daughter of Anne C. Stouffer and granddaughter of R.J. Reynolds (owner of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina), believed that the Foundation served a dual purpose. The Foundation would aid black students’ educational opportunities, and white students would be better prepared for the changing world by interacting with black students. This paper interrogates this dual purpose by considering recipients’ experiences and the ways in which Stouffer Foundation administrators recruited students of color, prepared them to enter these educational spaces, and supported their matriculation.
Scholarly Significance
Scholars such as James Anderson and William Watkins have documented the complex relationship between southern black educational opportunity and white philanthropy during the Jim Crow era. Few historians , however, have considered how this relationship continued after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, especially at the K-12 level. My project extends the history of this relationship with considerations of liberalism and conservatism in the southern political context. Additionally, this study furthers our knowledge about which programs supported black students in elite private schools in the mid-20th century as these once “closed” spaces became open.

Author

• Michelle A. Purdy, Washington University in St. Louis