Was It for Their Good? Black Students and the Desegregation of a Southern Private School, 1967-1972

• In Event: Lessons From Below: Reshaping Southern and U.S. Educational History

Abstract

Objectives
This paper will reveal the experiences of the first black students who attended the Westminster Schools (plural in name only) in Atlanta, Georgia—a leading elite, independent school founded in 1951. Seven black students desegregated Westminster in 1967, and the first black students graduated in the 1972. In examining these students’ experiences, the author seeks to elucidate the extent to which the desegregation of elite private schools served the public good and private interests.

Perspectives
This paper, as an extension of a larger study, highlights a relatively untold historical intersection in the South—the histories of black education and independent schools. The unequal yet sophisticated system of black education that existed in the South following the Civil War through the 1960s consisted of both public and private segregated schools. Thus, it is a logical conclusion that as black southerners desegregated public schools that they would also consider desegregating white private schools. Yet, we know little about how independent schools (the most privileged of private schools) established prior to Brown v. Board, positioned themselves during desegregation as segregationist academies proliferated. Even more striking, absent are the ways in which these schools responded to the enrollment of black students and these students’ experiences.

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 institution as it changed over time. Third and central to this paper is oral history, which documents individual lives and untold historical accounts

Data Sources
Because of the absence of their voices, oral history interviews with ten black alumni of Westminster, some of their parents, and several white alumni will be elevated. Archival materials, analyzed with considerations of historical external and internal criticism, including Westminster school newspapers, yearbooks, and administrative papers, local newspapers, and regional and national sources will serve as context.

Results
During the initial years of desegregation, black students courageously navigated a social experiment, relying on their previous schooling experiences, families, and communities.
Racism permeated the experiences of black students both in overt and subtle ways. Yet, Westminster continued to send all of its students mixed signals about race and racism. Moreover, the school did not change structurally as the administration and faculty remained nearly all-white throughout the first five years of desegregation.

Scholarly Significance
In the South, as the Civil Rights Movement transitioned into the Black Power Movement, the federal desegregation of public schools continued. Occurring simultaneously was the desegregation of elite, white independent schools. The students who entered Westminster and other independent schools in the late 1960s joined a group of black Americans who gained access to educational institutions that had historically educated members of the white power structure. Yet the institutions themselves were creations of a society permeated by racism, thereby reflecting and reinforcing the inequities of the larger society. Despite it all, these students forged pathways in a new educational opportunity for black southerners and changed white students’ notions of race and power.

Author

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