Tarring School Vouchers With the Segregationist Brush

Virginia lawmakers of differing views on integration united behind school choice to outmaneuver ‘Massive Resistance’ hard-liners

Letter to WSJ.

"When segregationist lawyer John S. Battle Jr. charged that tuition grants would expedite the integration of Virginia’s public-school system, he unintentionally validated the logic behind Milton Friedman’s arguments for school choice. Daniel Kuehn would have us wave away Battle’s commentary, however, declaring it “out of step with most segregationists” (“The Segregationist History of School Choice,” Letters, Oct. 22).

This assessment would have likely surprised James J. Kilpatrick, the arch-segregationist editor of the Richmond News Leader whom Mr. Kuehn enlists as a counterexample to my op-ed “School Choice’s Antiracist History” (Oct. 19). In March 1959, Kilpatrick used his newspaper to bring Battle’s arguments to statewide attention, declaring in a bombastic headline: “Private Schools Are Linked to ‘Engulfment’ by Negroes.”

Other segregationists took notice. “Do you realize that every desk vacated by a white child in a public school means one more desk that may be occupied by a negro child?” queried the chairman of the Virginia Assembly’s education committee. Robert Williams, the head of Virginia’s largest teachers union, heralded Battle’s approach to the “grave problem with which we are now confronted.” These and other segregationist converts to Battle’s arguments against school choice are unsurprising, given that Battle was the state’s leading litigator against NAACP integration lawsuits. 

Battle’s position was not universal among segregationists. When tuition grants (vouchers) passed in 1959, they enjoyed the support of antisegregationist lawmakers such as John A.K. Donovan and moderate segregationist “cushioners,” who saw private schools as a “safety valve” to slow the process of integration. Mr. Kuehn’s commentary obscures the purpose of this unusual coalition: These legislators came together to outmaneuver the hard-line segregationist “massive resisters,” who resolved to openly defy Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Voucher advocates such as Friedman looked to the program’s results rather than its “somewhat intermingled” intentions. He correctly predicted that tuition grants would accelerate integration as they grew in popularity.

For the alternative, consider Virginia’s Arlington County, which declared itself “unalterably opposed” to the use of “tax monies for tuition in private schools” and borrowed from Battle’s playbook to sidestep a paper commitment to desegregate. In 1960 NAACP attorneys grilled Arlington’s school board chairman on the holdup. He answered by reiterating the board’s policy: “No child shall be required to attend a school in which that child becomes a racial minority.”

Phillip W. Magness

Great Barrington, Mass."