A Narrative History of the Desegregation of Private Boarding Schools in the American South, 1967-1975

FAIN: FZ-287393-22

Mosi Secret
Unaffiliated independent scholar

A book chronicling an experiment conducted in the 1960s by the Stouffer Foundation, a North Carolina-based philanthropy, to desegregate all-white southern boarding schools.

In the late 1960s, a group of white, southern philanthropists conducted a social experiment that they hoped would change the character of the South. They recruited and paid for 140 talented black and brown students to desegregate all-white, southern boarding schools, then havens for white families fleeing court-ordered integration. The question at the heart of the effort was novel: Could the program make white children less bigoted by exposing them to black students? For nearly 10 years, the North Carolina-based philanthropy, called the Stouffer Foundation, desegregated 20 schools and attempted to study what happened. My project is a narrative history of this experiment, tracing the arc of the participating students’ lives and examining the era’s promise of desegregating America’s schools and professions. I hope my work will have reverberations in the ways we historicize the civil rights era, and contribute to wider discussions around social integration and race in American democracy.