In Touch With Brown vs. Board of Education

By Betty Miller Buttram
FWIS Contributing Writer

The United States Draft was passed by Congress on September 16, 1940. During the first draft in 1940, men between the ages of 21 and 36 could register. Twenty million young men signed up and 50% were rejected because they were illiterate.

Black men were passed over for the draft because of racist assumptions about their abilities and the viability of a mixed-race military. But this changed in 1943, when a quota was imposed meant to limit the number of Black men drafted. They were restricted to labor units but as the war progressed, they were trained for combat.

I watched the ceremony on television honoring the men who fought and were able to return home from the June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allied Invasion of Normandy. President Biden paid tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen and the Red Ball Express composed of African American truck drivers who delivered supplies to troops through enemy territories.

I thought about the Black soldiers who survived and came back home to America to the same old racial intolerance of Jim Crow laws. Education for a Black person was not to be. However, the first U.S. Draft in 1940, the 50% of the men who registered were rejected because they were illiterate. To be educated is good for all the people.

I want to pass on to the readers of this article some historical information about Wilcox County in the state of Alabama from the Online news publication of ProPublica in their May 18, 2024, issue and a little more research on the internet.

In 1954, nine years after WWII ended, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled and decided in Brown v. Board of Education that the Nation’s public schools were to be desegregated. This decision did not go well with the southern states, and they found a way of getting around that decision.

Public schools in Camden, Alabama, in Wilcox County were mostly populated by White students. Black students were educated at private schools run by Presbyterian organizations. Their school of attendance in Wilcox County was Camden Academy.

Beginning in 1956, parents of the public-school students started establishing hundreds of segregation academies which were private schools formed to educate their children. Southern legislatures provided state money to help these parents to get their children into these academies.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain and took over the property of Camden Academy. The school was kept open for several years by the school board but finally closed and the school was dismantled. The small population of Black students attended Wilcox High, then a public school for white students. They were not welcomed.

Wilcox Academy in Wilcox County, Camden, Alabama is a private school established in 1970. Alabama Independent School Association (AISA) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACA) accredit the Academy. The AISA is an organization of private schools in Alabama. It began with a group of eight segregation academies, grew by sixty by 1971-1972 school year. The organization today serves seventy member schools, all but two are in the State of Alabama. The SACA accredits over 13,000 public and private institutions from preschool to college in the Southern United States.

In 1976, the laws that permitted these racially discriminatory operations, including government subsidies and tax exemption were invalidated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions. All these private schools were forced to accept African American students. To get around that mandate, these segregated academics changed their admission policies, ceased operations, or merged with other private schools.

Wilcox Central High School is the only public school in Wilcox County today. It has enough room for 1,000 students, but only has an enrollment of merely four hundred, all Black students. It has a medical training lab and a competition-sized swimming pool.

It was stated in the article that Black and white residents in Camden, Alabama would like to see their children schooled together but they are not sure how to make it happen.

Politics, money, attitude, and fear have played significant roles in resisting Brown v. Board of Education for the past 70 years in the southern states.

Laws are mandated to change situations and sometimes the new law does not make the change happen when it comes up against resistance.