Trump And GOP Push Plan To Further Segregate American Public Schools
Caroleen Dobson is a poster girl for the MAGA effort to defund public schools and return to the days of Jim Crow and de facto segregation.
Dobson, an Alabama lawyer and member of the far right Federalist Society, has been endorsed by trump for congress. Dobson graduated in 2005 from one of many so-called, all-white, private “segregation academies” that were created in southern states to bypass the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools.
Segregation academies have shut down in recent years but Dobson hopes they can reemerge in the form of greater support of school vouchers and school choice so that white children can attend segregated, private schools, just like Dobson did. Trump also has called for a greatly expanded school voucher program, universal school choice and an end to the U.S. Department of Education, toward the same ends. The plans are reflected in the so-called Project 2025, a wide-ranging, far right blue print for a new trump administration.
Dobson and trump are players in an epic battle to maintain white power on various fronts, from expanding school vouchers to anti-abortion laws that maintain high rates of white births, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and reinforcing a criminal justice system that disenfranchises millions of African Americans and other people of color.
Dobson graduated high school from the Monroe Academy, a private school in the tiny Black Belt city of Monroeville in Wilcox County with a population of 10,600. Segregation academies like the Monroe Academy were key to perpetuating segregated schools in areas that were predominantly Black.
Dobson has openly supported Alabama’s CHOOSE Act, a tax credit program that allows parents to receive up to $7,000 to offset private or public school costs and instructs the state legislature to appropriate $100 million to fund it, starting in 2026. States including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia have enacted similar programs that have drawn praise from trump.
Most recently, national pro-voucher advocates spent more than $4.5 million in lobbying in Tennessee for candidates who claim they will support school choice proposals in 2025.
The nation’s most powerful voucher influencers include the School Freedom Fund, a pro-voucher group tied to the Club for Growth; the American Federation for Children, which was founded by former trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch family’s free-market group.
The School Freedom Fund is a super PAC that is wholly funded with a $5 million contribution from billionaire trump supporter, Jeffrey Yass, a co-founder of the Susquehanna International Group investment firm. The fund also gets significant support from another trump supporter, Richard Uihlein, the billionaire founder of shipping supplies company Uline Corp. Yass and Uihlein are major donors to the conservative Club for Growth.
The American Federation for Children Growth Fund is the largest organization in the United States promoting school choice programs, including school vouchers, corporate tax credit, and other school choice programs. The Dallas, Texas-based organization is led by William Oberndorf, a billionaire businessman and Republican political donor.
Thirty-two states have school voucher program but many have strict income requirements or are tailored for students with disabilities. Trump and others want to radically expand the vouchers through a universal school choice program “so that parents can send their children to the public, private, or religious school that best suits their needs, their goals, and their values.” Universal school choice will allow parents to send children to high achieving private schools while public schools that are in under-funded, predominantly black areas are neglected.
Alabama was among the first states that provided public money to white students leading to the creation of private schools in an effort to avoid school integration.
“I am running to fight for Alabama families, and Alabama families are having their security threatened,” Dobson said in a statement. “Our country is being invaded. Illegals are pouring across our southern border. Between the crime, the drugs, the terrorist cells, and just the sheer weight of so many non-taxpayers on our social services, our country is going to collapse. To address these critical issues, I am committed to supporting President Trump’s agenda. This includes securing our border to prevent further illegal entry, completing the wall, and strictly enforcing the ‘stay in Mexico’ policy.”
In addition to trump, Dobson has been endorsed by Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., state Sen. David Sessions and a variety of law enforcement and agricultural groups. Britt is strongly aligned with trump and supported the ex-president’s baseless claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Virginia was the first state to respond to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by establishing and funding segregation academies. By 1970, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina also had defied the court’s decision. Between 1961 and 1971, non-Catholic Christian schools doubled their enrollments nationally. By 1969, 300,000 of 7.4 million white students attended segregated school in 11 southern states. Segregated private schools lost their tax-exempt status in Coit v. Green (1971). Virginia was also the first to be told in federal court in 1976 that segregation academies were unconstitutional, leading to their decline.
“Over the past 50 years, the attempt to integrate the public education system and to achieve full racial equality in other areas has been resisted and openly defied, by policy-makers and the public, to the detriment of the laudable aim of achieving racial equality in America,” Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. wrote in his book, “All Deliberate Speed.”
The Wilcox academy website says its mission “is to provide a quality education for our students in a nurturing, non-threatening, positive, and well-disciplined learning environment. We will strive to provide our students with opportunities to meet individual needs and to provide learning experiences that encourage growth in areas of development. Our students will become responsible, respectful, life-long learners who are able to meet the challenges of a demanding society.”
As of 2022, Wilcox, formed in 1970, was the only school remaining of the Alabama segregation academies. As of 1990, no black students had ever attended the school. In 2012, Wilcox County’s population was 27.4 percent white and 71.8 percent black. The Wilcox Academy, is now a modest Christian school, and its enrollment is still predominantly white students. The Wilcox Academy enrollment is down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.
The county’s public high school, Wilcox Central High, has a full-size swimming pool and medical-training lab. It could serve 1,000 students but its enrollment is barely 400, and virtually all are Black students, drawn from across the 888-square mile county.
Now, 70 years after the Brown v Board Of Education ruling, about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies are still operating throughout the south. Across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all 12 of the remaining segregation academies are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black, according to a ProPublica report.
Amberly Faye Sheffield wrote as part of her thesis at Auburn University about how white resisters founded and built white private segregation academies in rural Alabama.
During Reconstruction, like many rural counties throughout the South, Wilcox’s white residents were far outnumbered by the Black enslaved population. For many years following Reconstruction, Black schools in Wilcox County were privately owned, poorly funded and run by Presbyterian organizations while white education was rooted in the well-funded, public system.
“White enslavers remained in power, however, because of the violence enacted on the enslaved. Slaves were subjected to backbreaking labor and poor living conditions, a combination of which often led to outbreaks of illness. Their punishments were often public and harsh, with some never recovering from their injuries,” Sheffield wrote.
In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme court required that government funded schools desegregate but it did not set a timeline for desegregation.
Throughout the 1960s, Wilcox County’s white population relied heavily on the members of the Wilcox County Board of Education to prolong segregation and keep their racial order in place. Wilcox County’s white residents took a series of actions to block desegregation with resistance tactics such as “freedom of choice,” district zoning and, finally, segregation academies.
Alabama and many other southern states simply ignored the Supreme Court ruling for almost a decade. That ended in 1963, when 14 Black Alabama students sued Macon County to attend Tuskegee High School. In 1965, the Alabama state legislature approved $3.75 million to fund tuition grants that paid for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.
Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, with private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy.
By 1971 Alabama had created the two segregation academies, the Wilcox Academy and Catherine Academy. Six more soon opened and more followed.
“Whites throughout Alabama created a tidal wave of segregation academies in 1970. By the start of the school year, twenty-three more schools had opened throughout the state,” Sheffield wrote.
In Mississippi, the transition from all-white public schools to all-white private schools happened quickly and without a hitch. Segregation academies gained large support in Mississippi because of their ability to organize through the white supremacist, Citizen’s Council. Roughly 56,000 white students transferred to segregation academies, stayed home, or moved when their families took them out of their hometown to avoid attending desegregated schools, Sheffield wrote.
In the 1980s, the Wilcox Academy and private schools throughout the nation received federal funding and support from the Reagan administration based on Reagan’s belief that schools should return religion to the classroom. Reagan also claimed that “private schools were the engines of diversity.”