“Not to transform a culture, but to perpetuate it”: the role of whiteness in the desegregation of schools in Chattooga County, Georgia

In the summer of 1965, eleven years following the U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring segregated schooling unconstitutional, Chattooga County School Board voted to desegregate its public schools through a freedom of choice plan. The story of this rural Appalachian countys path to school desegregation through the eyes of the white community provides insight into the role of white privilege and white racial identity in both the initial uneventful phases of school desegregation and in the eventual resegregation of the school system some twenty years later. Through the use of personal interviews, newspaper articles, school board minutes, and school publications, the study uncovers the unspoken role of whiteness in this community both before and after school desegregation. The study reveals the extent to which white racial identity governed political, social, and economic decisions in both this rural mountain county and in the state as a whole. In Chattooga County, as in much of the state, the decision to follow the Supreme Court ruling was reached largely because whites believed that doing so would allow them to maintain control over the states public schools while also avoiding federal government interference. The unspoken, unidentified belief in white privilege that governed life in the county prior to desegregation continued to control the decisions of its white leaders. Some twenty years following the desegregation of its schools, white parents in the county in growing numbers began to remove their children from the desegregated county school system to place them in the largely segregated schools of the independent Trion School System. The study provides evidence of the role of whiteness in the continuing resegregation of schools in Chattooga County and has implications about this movement in schools throughout Georgia and the Southeast.INDEX WORDS: Whiteness; School desegregation; Appalachian history; Oral history; Southern history; Racial identity; Georgia history; Education; Resegregation; School history