Is the school choice movement historically tainted by racism? American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten described vouchers in 2017 as “slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” Historian Nancy MacLean recently depicted vouchers as a product of an unholy alliance between economist Milton Friedman and segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education.

According to this narrative, vouchers came out of the “Massive Resistance” program of Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., who sought to circumvent Brown by rerouting education...

African American students George Nelson and Leslie Hamm are turned away by authorities at Stratford Junior High School in Arlington, Va., Sept. 5, 1957.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

Is the school choice movement historically tainted by racism? American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten described vouchers in 2017 as “slightly more polite cousins of segregation.” Historian Nancy MacLean recently depicted vouchers as a product of an unholy alliance between economist Milton Friedman and segregationists after Brown v. Board of Education.

According to this narrative, vouchers came out of the “Massive Resistance” program of Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., who sought to circumvent Brown by rerouting education funding to private schools in 1950s Virginia. Friedman, the story goes, opportunistically assisted the segregationists in creating a voucherlike tuition-grant system that allowed white parents to transfer children out of integrated schools and into private “segregation academies.”

These critics have their history backward. As early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration. Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes and began attacking school choice as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.

The overlooked story of Virginia’s racist antivoucher movement traces its origins to Charlottesville’s Venable Elementary School in 1958. Facing court-ordered integration from an NAACP lawsuit, Venable closed its doors for the fall semester and transferred its white student body to a makeshift network of private classrooms.

Four months later, a pair of court rulings struck down the school-closure strategy. In the spring of 1959 anxious parents flooded into a PTA meeting at Venable to hear from John S. Battle Jr., the school board’s attorney in its fight against the NAACP. Battle said white schools could desegregate on paper, then use zoning and enrollment caps to block black students’ transfer applications.

Battle’s plan had a vulnerability: It couldn’t stop integration if the Virginia General Assembly passed a tuition-grant bill. Such a measure emerged as a flanking move against House Speaker Blackburn Moore, a Byrd lieutenant who initially resolved to keep schools like Venable closed in defiance of the courts. An uneasy legislative coalition formed between moderate “cushioners,” who wished to slow integration to a gradual process, and antisegregation liberals from Northern Virginia.

If a school receives tuition grants, Battle warned in a speech at Venable, “then any negro who obtains one under this law can seek to enter that school.” If any current students at all-white schools transferred elsewhere, “it will have the effect of leaving many classrooms practically vacant.” The enrollment caps would fail, leading to the “negro engulfment” of Virginia’s white public schools.

If Virginia adopted tuition grants, Battle wrote in a letter to Gov. J. Lindsay Almond, the subsequent “departure of white pupils from their public schools will make integration much easier to accomplish.” Battle correctly predicted that the federal courts would soon require private schools to accept black students as a condition of state funding, leading to their integration as well. “I refuse to believe that we should allow a few negroes to run us out of our good white schools,” Battle concluded. The only path left for segregation was to tie it to “the most effective place; namely the pocketbook” of school funding.

Battle’s message resonated among public-education interests, which thought their funding would be imperiled by vouchers. An internal memo from a Charlottesville teachers group presented a plan for “containing integration.” The tuition-grant program, the memo said, attempts “to get as many pupils as possible so that integration will be as extensive as possible, thus making public schools unacceptable to as many people as possible.” Budget cuts would soon follow. The Virginia Education Association, the state teachers union, embraced the strategy and circulated a transcript of Battle’s remarks to every superintendent in the commonwealth.

The union’s stance intensified after a 1962 Richmond Times-Dispatch survey suggested that tuition-grant transfers into integrated schools, public and private, outnumbered those seeking segregation. “The pupil scholarship program is being so greatly abused as to increasingly defeat its original purpose,” thundered a 1964 editorial in the teachers’ union newsletter. “Parents are using grants to send their children to integrated schools which the entire purpose . . . was to avoid.”

Friedman celebrated integration. As he wrote in his 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom,” de facto segregation persisted even in nominally integrated cities like Chicago. By contrast, vouchers lead to “an appreciable decrease in segregation and a great widening in the opportunities available to the ablest and most ambitious Negro youth.”

Most voucher advocates welcomed a 1961 federal court ruling that enjoined Prince Edward County from accessing state tuition-grant money after it closed its entire public school system to block integration. By contrast, voucher opponents such as Ms. MacLean usually praise the “save the schools” movement of the Northern Virginia suburbs for bucking Massive Resistance. Yet Arlington County, which in 1958 announced a plan to integrate, employed tactics straight out of Battle’s playbook. When the integration date arrived, they invoked zoning regulations, classroom capacity and even IQ tests to deny 30 out of 30 black transfer applications to an all-white school.

This dismal implementation pattern wouldn’t have surprised Friedman. He recognized educational competition as a powerful tool to break down segregationist institutions. Under school choice, “mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed,” he wrote. That is, of course, if the teacher’s unions didn’t obstruct the equalizing pressures of competition.

Mr. Magness is a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

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