PUBLIC FUNDS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS

In 1963, South Carolina’s governor and General Assembly decided to pay students’ way to private schools through tuition grants.

“Freedom of choice” was the rallying cry.

“Public education would not be hurt by such competition; it could well be that this competition would stimulate progress in public education,” said Gov. Donald S. Russell, who wanted $1 million for the grants.

This legislative session, a debate over funds benefiting private schools returns. This time, tuition tax credits are the mode, but talk about progress and competition will be revived. So it’s important to know there’s a history here.

Back then, the General Assembly agreed to $250,000. Close to half was provided to students in Charleston, Orangeburg, Sumter and York counties. Provided to white students, that is.

The governor and General Assembly were in a rush. Harvey Gantt enrolled at Clemson University in January 1963. Desegregation lawsuits were pending in Clarendon, Charleston, Darlington, Sumter and Orangeburg school districts.

Even though Brown v. Board of Education ended legal segregation in 1954, South Carolina’s public schools remained segregated. When Brown, which began in Clarendon County as Briggs v. Elliott, returned to South Carolina for implementation in 1955, Judge John J. Parker provided a new stumbling block.

He ruled Brown did not require integration. “It merely forbids discrimination.” So the long stall by Southern states continued.

‘FREE TO CHOOSE’

Sen. L. Marion Gressette led the S.C. School Committee, also called the Segregation Committee, which proposed the grants.

The legislation’s authors said education would be advanced if children and parents were “free to choose between public and private educational institutions.”

In debate in May 1963, Gressette said he had “no intention as long as I live” of allowing the NAACP or federal government to “take over the schools of South Carolina.”

He denied the effort was “a rich man’s bill” or that it would destroy public education.

Dillon Sen. Roger Scott tried to pin him down: “We may as well say it. It’s about white people and Negroes.”

Scott added, “We are not going to travel too fast as long as half our population spends its time trying to hold the other half back.”

The American Association of University Women objected, saying the tuition grants would “dilute the state’s energy when the state needs all of its strength to improve education in the public schools.”

And Dreher High School students signed a petition calling the grants an illegal attempt to finance private education.

EMPHASIS ON INDEPENDENCE

In Orangeburg, 23 black parents and their children had sued for admission to the city’s junior high and high schools. In June 1964, 1,000 white parents attended a meeting to hear plans for a private-school system.

In September, the state Department of Education received its first tuition-grant applications, 23 of 27 from Charleston. There, a court order had admitted 11 African-American children to all-white public schools.

For the next few years, private schools were founded almost monthly: Beaufort Academy in Beaufort; Robert E. Lee Academy in Bishopville; Jefferson Davis Academy in Blackville; Stonewall Jackson Academy in Calhoun County; East Cooper Private School, Miss Mason’s School Inc. and Charleston Preparatory School in Charleston; Hammond School in Columbia; Patrick Henry Academy in Estill; Francis Marion Academy in Hemingway; Wade Hampton Academy in Orangeburg; Thomas Sumter Academy in Sumter.

“The main purpose is to give the white children their freedom of choice,” said dentist Ben E. Thrailkill, president of Francis Marion Academy, holding classes for 75 students at a campground.

Leading the surge was Orangeburg’s T. Elliott Wannamaker. The founder of Wannamaker Chemical Co. was head of the Organizational Committee for Private Schools and a trustee of Wade Hampton Academy.

He joined forces with Beaufort pharmacist Charles Aimar and others to found the S.C. Independent School Association.

“We bought a twin-engine plane to fly around the state,” said Aimar, later SCISA’s president and board chair. The two would fly into a small town, meet with parents and businessmen and get a school under way — about 60 in all, Aimar estimates.

Aimar focused on free enterprise, on independence from church or state, on the dangers of socialism and communism in his reminiscing.

But Wannamaker was a member of the local Citizens Council, said John White, a College of Charleston archivist researching Citizens Councils. Sometimes described as the Ku Klux Klan wearing ties, their stated purpose was defending segregation.

After Wade Hampton Academy opened in an Orangeburg private home and a Baptist church with 293 students, a countermovement arose. “Many parents now fear that the public schools will be destroyed,” said Harris Marshall, superintendent of the Orangeburg school district.

Orangeburg school officials initially refused to release teachers from contracts or to participate in the tuition grants program. But when the first checks were mailed, $28,696 went to Wade Hampton parents, $10,298 to nearby Thomas Sumter parents.

Tuition grants were paid to parents, who received from the state and any participating school district the per-pupil cost of a public education. A grant couldn’t exceed the per-pupil expenditure, about $260. The new schools charged $250 to $300.

Older established schools, such as Camden Military Academy and Charleston’s Ashley Hall, refused to participate.

NAACP’S LAWSUIT

Within a week of the first checks being mailed, the NAACP sued. U.S. District Judge J. Robert Martin granted injunctions halting payments to the Orangeburg, Sumter and Charleston schools.

“This was an effort, really, to make an end run around Brown v. Board of Education, and the ultimate purpose was to abandon public schools and go to private segregated schools with public taxpayer funds,” said Matthew J. Perry, then an NAACP attorney, now a U.S. District judge.

The U.S. Justice Department thought so, too.

In October 1965, the federal government intervened under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the Legislature kept tuition grants in its 1966 budget.

The NAACP, contending tuition grants were another legislative scheme to support segregation, asked for a three-judge panel, so an appeal would go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When the state’s attorneys tried to lift the injunctions, Justice attorneys argued South Carolina “has the obligation to refrain from subverting its public school system by diverting state funds from the public schools to private schools that it permits to operate on a racially discriminatory basis.”

A three-judge panel ruled the tuition grants act unconstitutional in June 1966, saying it circumvented the requirement South Carolina not discriminate on the basis of race or color in public schools. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

The fight was short, but damage had been done. Counties with a black majority now were home to private schools serving most, if not all, white students.

“What happened was the tax base for public schools just evaporated,” Columbia attorney Tom Turnipseed said. The first executive director of SCISA and a former state senator, Turnipseed serves on boards of such organizations as the Center for Democratic Renewal and Americans for Democratic Action.

“These were the political leaders, the white folks who ran the town, who ran the school boards. They set up these private schools and didn’t support the public schools.”

Turnipseed noted, “We never said it had anything to do with school integration or desegregation. We denied that vehemently. We talked about local control, about better schools with a lower pupil-teacher ratio.

“Was it code? Oh, absolutely.”