Sometime in the summer of 1972, Hillary Clinton was in steamy old Dothan, Alabama, pretending to be a mother who wanted to place her child in a white-only “academy.” (I was in Alabama, too, but further north in my native Birmingham, a recent high school graduate, focusing laser-like on getting to see the Rolling Stones in Tuscaloosa.)
Why was Hillary doing such a thing? Because she was working with Marian Wright Edelman in an organization that later became known as The Children’s Defense Fund.
Here’s the full New York Times article (12/27/2015), which gives not only a snapshot of young HRC’s life and values, but also provides some history—history that I and other Southerners lived in those days:
"How Hillary Clinton Went Underground to Examine Race in Education"
Here’s the background.
When Southern schools were desegregated, lo and behold a lot of “academies” popped up. These were private schools, often, as I recall, with “Christian” added somewhere in their names. The tuition was a barrier to African American kids’ enrollment. So was fear. It was pretty much understood that these schools were the wealthier and more powerful white folks’ response to integration of public schools. These stupid “academies” were the last bastion of segregation for upper middle-class and above whites. No one dared cross those people. You sort of have to be Southern, I guess, to understand the intense classism. But while these well-to-do whites usually didn’t get their hands dirty with cross-burnings and lynchings and bombings, they’re the ones who controlled the goon squads. (That’s another diary.)
The attitude of most African-American and liberal Southerners was essentially “we know what y’all are doing but alright. Stay over there on your little white islands—for now.” Desegregation of public schools was a long, drawn-out, battle enough.
My elementary school in Birmingham had not a single black child until I was in the sixth grade—1966, 12 years after Brown vs. Board of Education. And by “single black child” I mean exactly that. Gregory was the bravest person any of us had ever met. We knew it and immediately admired him.
Since Gregory was well-received by us white kids (who were starting to wonder what the fuck our elders were all upset about since Gregory added nothing but intelligence and good humor to our class), the next year, more black children attended Kennedy Grammar School—not named after JFK, who most white Southerners hated. That was 1967—13 years after Brown.
What’s even more remarkable about this previous lack of diversity in our neighborhood school is that I could walk out of my front door and look left and see the invisible but real dividing line between whites and blacks. Just two houses down began “The Quarters,” which was the old slaveholder days euphemism for ghetto. Everyone who lived on my side of that line was white. Everyone who lived on the other side of that line was black. It was a visible but separate world. Still, we whites and blacks interacted frequently—but our interactions were circumscribed by all sorts of strange social rules intended to enforce the “superiority” of the whites. But that’s also another diary.
In 1981-82, I taught in a little country school in Alabama. It was run-down and most of the kids who attended it, white and black, were poor. The school was about 55% white and 45% black, yet the town was mostly white. Why? The wealthier white kids went to some fucking “Christian” academy tucked safely away in the “nice neighborhood.” Their parents did not send them there to study the Bible.
Anyway, into this strange and often violently-enforced apartheid walked young Hillary Clinton.
DOTHAN, Ala. — On a humid summer day in 1972, Hillary Rodham walked into this town’s new private academy, a couple of cinder-block classrooms erected hurriedly amid fields of farmland, and pretended to be someone else.
Playing down her flat Chicago accent, she told the school’s guidance counselor that her husband had just taken a job in Dothan, that they were a churchgoing family and that they were looking for a school for their son.
The future Mrs. Clinton, then a 24-year-old law student, was working for Marian Wright Edelman, the civil rights activist and prominent advocate for children. Mrs. Edelman had sent her to Alabama to help prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies, the estimated 200 private academies that sprang up in the South to cater to white families after a 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate.
Her mission was simple: Establish whether the Dothan school was discriminating based on race.
Short answer: Yes. It was. All those damned academies were.
A look at Mrs. Clinton’s efforts that summer, through archives and interviews with more than 50 local officials, civil rights activists and people who knew her, reveals a summer job that was both out of character for the bookish law student and a moment of awakening.
Until her trip to Alabama, she had been relatively sheltered, her activism mostly confined to Ivy League debates and campus turmoil. Like many white activists from the North who traveled south to help on civil rights issues, Mrs. Clinton confronted a different world in Dothan, separate and unequal, and a sting of injustice she had previously only read about.
“I went through my role-playing, asking questions about the curriculum and makeup of the student body,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in “Living History.” “I was assured that no black students would be enrolled.”
And just a bit more about this project:
Segregation Persists
In 1972, Mrs. Edelman’s Washington Research Project, which later became the Children’s Defense Fund, and other groups published a seminal report, “It’s Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in 43 Southern Cities 18 Years After Brown.” That year, an estimated 535,000 students attended private schools in the South, compared with 25,000 in 1966.
Mrs. Clinton was one of a handful of young researchers and interns who worked in Washington reviewing documents, looking into the schools that had been granted tax exemptions, and coordinating with activists and lawyers in the South who had been at the forefront of integration efforts.
After Mrs. Clinton spent several weeks studying the issue and establishing relationships in Atlanta and Alabama, she and other researchers were sent to different parts of the South to gather data and report firsthand on the private schools. They delivered their findings to Mrs. Edelman’s and other advocacy groups that were trying to pressure the Nixon administration.
Much more about these academies then and now is at the link provided—if you’re an NYT subscriber or, like me, haven’t used up your allotted 10 free articles for the month.
Finally, people who know actual stuff about Hillary Clinton’s biography and the era in which she came of age take umbrage at the silly and incorrect “Goldwater Girl” bullshit. This is one reason why.
Thanks for reading.
