The evolution of a segregation academy

[eddie gein]

Well from all that I'd say that this person didn't like sports...

And you are for sure, are an eidetiker. Wow!!!

[Suesbal]

Originally Posted by GrandviewGloria

Maybe/maybe-not

Sports may bring-together the kind of people who tolerate The Sports Culture. But they add enormously to levels of hatred, alienation, isolation, and disinvestment, in everybody else.

I know a couple of people who were among the first students, in the first year, of the Delta's premier private school - the one frequently resented by those at Greenville Christian. This is a mashup of personal accounts from various people, paraphrasing three decades' worth of stories I've heard, and inevitably mixing people's accounts:

"Forced Integration was wonderful! Public school (all-white, while I was there, but mostly violent white TRASH) was so horrible, I was planning to kill myself. I had an anchor, and was going to drown myself, before the bullies in our rural school district could torture me to death. But then (mirabile dictu!) the government stuck its nose into Mississippi's business, again, and integrated the schools. This saved my life. Thank you, President Kennedy! Thanks to you, I, and all my many cousins, got to go to private schools! My elders were oblivious to the bullying and its impending consequences. But, thank heavens, they objected to integration. Otherwise, they never would have spent the money, and I'd have died before reaching 15.

"I was snatched out of public school over Christmas Break, sent to town to live with my grandmother, and enrolled in Greenville Christian, which had been hastily expanded. The school was in the Hotel Greenville. It was interesting. The little skyscraper was still pure, unadulterated 1925 Art Deco, and we had assemblies in the Gold Ballroom and the Green Ballroom - completely unchanged from the Dollar Cotton era (except for some peeling paint and a bit of fallen plaster). Mostly, the kids at Christian were mean, neurotic Holyrollers, and the people running the place were of the 'Piper Laurie as Carrie White's Mom' variety. That said, AT LEAST THERE WAS NO VIOLENCE. Greenville Christian was way better than public schools, in that regard. As I said, IT SAVED MY LIFE.

"And, there were also a lot of newly-enrolled kids from top Delta families. I was being picked-up from school in a black Lincoln, with red velvet upholstery, and felt distinctly inferior to the Tatum children, getting into their Navy Blue Lincoln with navy leather upholstery. I knew Navy was nicer than black, which was for disreputable types (but, let's face it: our Lincoln was bought with money from gun-running, the Louisiana side of our family put Huey Long in office, and there were slot machines in one of our barns - so, of course we had the red velvet). If one sort of squinted, the whole thing was almost glamorous: a polished aluminum & greige granite Art Deco staircase... frosted Lalique sconces... ballrooms... Kids emerging from beneath a polished Art Deco marquee, toward curbside queues of those giant Late Sixties luxury cars, in front of that formerly-fabulous old building, on an elegant old oak-canopied boulevard. If one squinted... quickly... and didn't think too hard about it.

"But that was only for one semester. A new, better school was being formed. The new one was HEAVEN! The Christian School malevolence was gone. Everybody at the new private school was from a nice family - basically the kind of kids who'd made the town's public schools among the best in the nation - up there with Greenwich, Connecticut's and Marin County's. No more crazy religious types, trying to figure-out how they could trick me into doing something which would get me in trouble.

"The new school's Headmaster was dignified and cultured. The teachers were people of substance - one, the NATION's top Latin teacher. The queue of luxury cars moved to the new school. And, to the line of ordinary Lincolns, Cadillacs, and Imperials (and one Silver Shadow), were added the actual LIMOUSINES - partitions and all - of five families (two physicians, a merchant prince, and two towboat tycoons), who bought them for carpooling (three - modified for diplomatic use - were brought down Up-east). Wonderfully exotic Anouska Hempel types were being driven across from the Arkansas side of the river, for classes. The scion of the world's then-largest privately held corporation (sent to manage the family's Arkansas holdings), had extra air conditioning added to the rear of his Volvo wagon, for ferrying his tots across the river to school. We were well on the way to being better than Jackson Prep, and on a par with Saint Andrews. Everything was about LEARNING. The extraneous schmegegge which steals so much time and focus from students, was absent. And all of this wonderfulness lasted for exactly one year.

"The next year, we found out that an influx of rich Rednecks were now sending their kids to the new school. To appease THEM, and THEIR priorities, the school had stolen a total goon of a football coach away from another school, and had made him our Principal...and Coach, of course, which was the point of the ploy. First thing, first day of the new school year, he stands up there, and starts threatening us. Previously, there had been no discipline problem, or even a hint of a problem. Why would there have been a discipline problem? We'd been nice kids in a nurturing environment. Well, after those threats and insults from The Goon, we suddenly had a discipline problem.[/COLOR

"I overheard a cheerleader talking about a basketball game against Greenville Christian, where the students from 'Christian' were yelling antisemitic and anti-Sicilian slurs at the kids from our school. (the new, elite, school, was ethnically diverse, in-the-extreme, while 'Greenville Christian' was not).[/

St. Joseph in Greenville had its fair share of kids whose ancestors came from Sicily and Lebanon. I don’t know about Jewish kids.