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newcomers were greeted with insults and jeers from the white students, as well as other forms of indignity and danger, such as being spit on or having rocks thrown at them. Black students were also oftentimes segregated at lunch, on the playground, and, in some cases, in their classrooms . White teachers were sometimes as rude and unkind toward the black students as the white children, although many of the black students desegregating the white schools reported respectful and fair treatment at the hands of the white teaching corps. The worst instances of white harassment typically occurred in the first year or two of desegregation . Although the harassment of black parents and students declined somewhat after 1967, the two years of pressure had its intended effect. Only the most dedicated black parents subjected themselves and their children to a system of school desegregation that whites continued to resist with passion. Not surprisingly, the number of black students crossing over to the white schools under the freedom-of-choice system continued to remain quite small: fewer than 7 percent by the 1968–69 school year.19 Even as Mississippi officials claimed that they had eliminated the state’s dual school system by agreeing to freedom-of-choice plans, the state continued to champion its equalization program as a way to improve the black schools, where the vast majority of Mississippi’s black children continued to receive their education. As in the past, however, the state’s equalization program fell short of actually equalizing black and white education, because the state still did not have the necessary funds to construct two quality school systems. When additional federal money became available under the ESEA (much of it through the Title I program , which was designed to supplement the instruction of disadvantaged children), the state used these new federal funds to help with equalization expenses, such as upgrading black schools or hiring additional teachers at black schools to relieve overcrowding, items that should have been covered by the regular state budget. Even more problematic, some districts used the Title I money to upgrade white schools, and in a few instances, to supply the needs of private, segregation academies.20 So, while white hostility to school desegregation kept the number of black transfers to the white schools down, the state continued to only half-heartedly make the necessary investments to improve conditions in the black schools. Leake County, one of the first three locations to experience school desegregation in 1964, is a good example. In 1967, fewer than ten blacks had enrolled in the previously all-white Carthage High 134 Charles C. Bolton School, primarily, according to one observer, because “the experience of the Negro students at the white schools have not been encouraging and as a result people are quite apprehensive about sending their children to formerly white schools.” At the same time, the local black high school, Jordan High, was seriously overcrowded, with many classes of forty or more, well above the state-mandated maximum class size. One parent of a Jordan student complained that conditions at the school were so bad that on some days classes were not even held; students would spend a good part of the day in extended recess.21 Ultimately, freedom-of-choice schools represented merely a new way to delay abolishing the South’s dual system, a fact increasingly recognized by the federal courts. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, characterized freedom-of-choice plans as a beginning, not the end, of a process to end the South’s dual school system and ordered school boards to adopt plans that led to real school integration. The following year, in a Mississippi case, Alexander v. Holmes, the Supreme Court ruled that “‘all deliberate speed’ for desegregation is no longer permissible. . . . The obligation of school districts is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate only unitary schools.” A judgment on whether or not a school system had actually created a unitary school system would be based on whether or not individual schools remained racially identifiable as “black” schools or “white” schools.22 As the Alexander litigation worked its way through the federal court system, white Mississippians lamented the possible abolition of freedom of choice. They could not really envision a system that truly integrated the public schools; indeed, for over fifteen years, they had managed to evade the Brown mandate, and they urged their leaders...

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