The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870â?"1980

Epilogue

217 EPILOGUE In December 198, the Mississippi legislature, meeting in special session, passed the Education Reform Act of 198.The legislation provided $106 million of new money—during a recession—for public kindergartens, a 10 percent pay raise for public school teachers, and the placement of reading aides in the public schools. The law also reinstated the compulsory education requirement abolished after the Brown decision, tightened teacher certification requirements, and reorganized the State Department of Education. New sales and income taxes financed the reforms. Governor William Winter was the driving force behind this sweeping education package. Winter had pressed for the changes after becoming governor in 1980, but an initial attempt to pass the reforms during the 1981 legislative session had gone down to defeat. The proposed kindergartens generated the most opposition. Both religious fundamentalists and some outspoken white supremacists resisted state sponsorship of early education, the former on the grounds that families should provide such instruction and the latter because they “didn’t want preschool age white and black children mixed.” Despite the early setback, Governor Winter persevered and took his cause to the people of Mississippi. He campaigned tirelessly across the state, holding community meetings and delivering scores of speeches. He found Mississippians“standing up for what is good for Mississippi in the Education bill,” and a groundswell of popular support for the education act brought initially reluctant legislators back to Jackson in December 198 for a special session to reconsider and ultimately pass the reform legislation.1 While education reform succeeded in large part because of the political skill and determination of Governor Winter and his staff, the measures never would have become law without biracial support for the reforms among Mississippi’s citizens, most of whom continued to send their children to public schools. Despite the initial flight from the public schools in 1970, the number of white Mississippians who turned to private education to avoid school integration never exceeded 10 percent; in 1999, almost 91 percent of Mississippi school children still attended public schools. In fact, beyond the Delta and some of the state’s largest urban areas, where the white exodus from public education was sometimes total, most whites had stayed with the public schools after 1970,even if they objected to the principle of school integration and how it had been forced on the state.As a result, in 1981 and 198 many whites saw the battle over Governor Winter’s education measures as a referendum on the preservation and improvement of their state’s public school system in the postintegration era. Ted Alexander, the leader of the Mississippi Association of School Superintendents, believed the act demonstrated that “we’ve had racial disorder and disharmony, but we are willing to make this kind of investment for black children in Mississippi, for white children in Mississippi.”A history teacher from Brookhaven noted that “Mississippi’s public education is in a contest with private education and we’ve got to win. What the governor’s program says is public education is going to survive and do well.” Robert Fortenberry, superintendent of the Jackson city schools,called the legislation“a recommitment on the part of the public to public education.” Much of the opposition to Governor Winter’s attempt to improve public education came from private school supporters, who, according to one white observer, used arguments against the reforms that “had a racial overtone.” Even the discussion over how to fund the education program in part revolved around what opponents of the improvements saw as a contest between public and private education for the hearts and minds of whites in the state.GovernorWinter had originally proposed that an oil and gas severance tax pay for most of the program, but conservative legislators , such as Ellis Bodron of Vicksburg, had successfully argued for the use of the sales and income taxes. Bodron believed that since“[t]he primary beneficiaries [of the education legislation] will be people who cannot afford to put their children in private schools,”they should pay for the improvements.3 White opponents of Governor Winter’s education reform program such as Bodron saw the program as primarily designed to improve the public schools for whites who unfortunately had to send their children to such 218 EPILOGUE institutions. Interestingly, Bodron’s calculations did not consider that black Mississippians might also derive some benefit from the reforms. Yet black Mississippians typically believed that the...