Segregation’s Shadow: School Vouchers

School vouchers (AKA "school choice") started as a tool of white flight and still widen inequity today.

Brown v. Board

In May 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision was meant to strike down school segregation - but white people lost their freakin’ minds.

Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd rallied a “massive resistance” campaign to thwart integration. And nowhere was this mAsSiVe ReSiStAnCe more over-the-top than in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

In 1959, after courts had to specifically order Prince Edward County to start desegregating, its white officials threw a full-blown racist temper tantrum and closed the entire public school system for five years instead.

Black children were left with no formal education, and white parents decided to open a private, whites-only academy. Naturally, Virginia’s legislature approved a state-funded voucher program to help them pay for it.

This was the blueprint for school voucher policies in America.