The stakes were high when Deep South school desegregation in the 1970s transformed the region’s classrooms, stadiums, and teachers’ lounges into America’s most integrated spaces, at least for a while. The Supreme Court called a halt to nearly two decades of post-1954 Brown v. Board of Education stonewalling, and racial history shifted in one sweep. Black and white, children and educators, lives changed. Old patterns shattered. The transformation, wrapped in clear historic moral purpose, affected over 11 million children.

And then there was us. I’m one of the estimated 500,000 Deep South white alumni of the segregation academies that sprouted up in 11 states to defy the ideal of racial equality.

Films like the Virginia-set “Remember the Titans” and “The Best of Enemies,” based on Durham, North Carolina events, center on that hard-won ’70s moment of public school transformation. The academies’ parallel stories? We don’t talk about it much. We alums prefer skipping over our high school history since the truth of our all-white alma maters inevitably brings on blowback today. (In my home state of Mississippi, U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s 1977 graduation from Lawrence County Academy ballooned into a campaign issue in last year’s Senate race. Governor Phil Bryant likes to say he attended Jackson public schools, but he spent his final years at McCluer Academy, graduating in 1973.) The Jackson Free Press broke both stories.

The fact is, however, our academy bona fides matter in far more scenarios than the unlikely one in which I run for office. Our academy educations matter all the time. They matter not just in terms of what people ought to know about us, but, just as importantly, in what we know — or dare to confront — about ourselves. Otherwise, we look so okay, right?

It’s over-Faulknerified to say so, but the past’s not past, and certainly not for white academy alums living and engaging in the 2019 world. Our story is not just history but an unfolding question: How does that defiant schooling still shape us and our heads by default? It does, of course, in unconscious and conscious ways.

Among Mississippi academy alums aren’t just ruby-red officeholders like Hyde-Smith in Washington and Bryant in the Governor’s Mansion. Many Mississippians who’ve marked our culture came out of white academies too. These include actor Sela Ward (Lamar School, 1973) and blockbuster novelists Donna Tartt (Kirk Academy, 1981) and Kathryn Stockett (Jackson Preparatory School, founded in 1970, her alma mater in 1987). Author Steve Yarbrough graduated from Indianola Academy in 1975 while writer-journalist Neely Tucker ruled as Mr. Starkville Academy 1982. Let the record reflect I was in the Pillow Academy Class of 1974 Hall of Fame. Hyde-Smith’s segregation academy was about 150 miles south of mine. Bryant’s academy in Jackson used to play mine in football. (In my memory, McCluer parents were famous for spoiling for a post-game fight with our parents.)

In Mississippi, our cohort represented 60 thousand-odd white children who disappeared from the state’s public schools as integration took hold in earnest. In 1964, the state had less than 20 private schools. The number rocketed to 236 by 1971.

I enrolled in Pillow Academy in January 1970, the moment when 33 Mississippi school districts, including our Delta town’s, were directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to cease the delay. Schools were to reopen after Christmas break fully integrated. In some districts, white students were told to take along their public-school textbooks at Christmas. They’d be using them in their new private schools in January.

I’m certain the all-white academy experience left its mark on me. It did on the others, too. If Hyde-Smith’s and Bryant’s records include episodes of racist antagonism — and they do — they came out of high schools founded on exactly that. Race plays into the works of Mississippi novelists who come out of the academies as well, either by confronting white supremacy or sometimes by simply producing work in which their whiteness comes through. Sometimes both.

My academy was a scrambled egg-yellow steel building in a cotton field near the Mississippi town of Greenwood. My parents and those of my eighth-grade friends plucked us from our public school ahead of the town’s approaching black-enrollment increase. For the record, my friends and I hated Pillow Academy. Not because we were racially enlightened — I won’t insult you with a cover-up story — but because the school was surprisingly big and chaotic. We were unhappy at being deposited into the raw new building outside the city limits with enrollment drawn from five or so counties, racial views aside. Our oak-shaded, blond-brick Greenwood public school had been familiar and better equipped with features like a cafeteria and a feeling of belonging. Everyone in that era in the South, black and white, all 11 million of us who were school age, has a story on how their schooling transformed. In that way, we did have a shared experience — the only common interracial one for those of us in the academies.

Back then, I felt bad about my new school’s obvious purpose. I silently fretted I’d be asked, point-blank, by someone who was black what school I attended. I cringed at the insult my answer represented. I needn’t have worried over a conversation so unlikely; despite living in the Mississippi Delta — an area with the highest proportion of black residents of any region of the country — I surreally never actually knew one black teen in my town of 23,000. That was an immediate byproduct of academy schooling, which limited my stock of life experiences to draw from as an adult.

At the outpost in the Delta field, our 1970s high school years were average in some ways: the Jackson Five and Gladys Knight as a soundtrack (interestingly, Motown was the top choice, white rockers second tier), shag haircuts and repeated reads of the Sonny Corleone sex scene in The Godfather paperback. Before long, the new academy developed real school trappings like a Photography Club and Valentine Dance to go along with the school’s bedrock racist principle. We were quiet about the white-supremacist purpose. It didn’t need to be articulated; it was sidestepped by the euphemistic, loaded explanation that Pillow had been established for “a quality education.”

Even so, the weekend vandalism in town shouted in loud paint. In Just Trying to Have School, a new history of Mississippi school desegregation in that era, Mary Carol Miller remembers Pillow Academy boys coming to integrated Greenwood High on weekends, painting N— TECH on the parking lot pavement. In turn, Greenwood High students sneaked onto the Pillow grounds to scrawl REDNECK TECH, she said.

What we learned in Pillow history class was distorted, but so was the public-school curriculum then too: Enslaved people had enjoyed good treatment and Reconstruction — the brief years when black Mississippians held office and voted in substantial numbers — was an era of white suffering like the Civil War itself. None of us heard a word about the lynching of Emmett Till in our hometown’s backyard, although the visiting Chicago teen’s death had drawn international coverage in 1955 and launched the civil-rights movement. When I finally heard about the Till case — I was 25, living 260 miles away, and it was the 1980s — I recognized the last names of classmates I’d known whose parents and grandparents had been in law enforcement or led the winning defense of Till’s murderers. The murderers eventually confessed for Look magazine after their acquittal. Bryant’s Store, the site where Till allegedly flirted with the owner, was nine miles from my former public school.

Here’s the aftermath of academy bona fides, I think: I want to gauge how the thinking bred in such a culture — growing up inside a white society that invested huge energy and money into the segregation academy’s creation — lingers inside our heads still, even if switched to silent. We were conscientiously and misguidedly furnished an unbending white universe. I wonder how the region — and all of us with the seg academy imprint — would have been different if an alternative had happened and the public decision had been to invest fully in staying in the public schools and making them work? Instead, I’m uncertain I can ever completely disconnect the old framework inside deep places in my head. The point of our rigid academy schooling and parallel existence was to keep us blind to all beyond it. This blocks you from knowing what you don’t know. Minds that result from an immersion like that are like the baffled fish in the parable: when asked how’s the water, the fish asks, “What’s water?” The fish can’t grasp the singularity of its surroundings, which, in my case, were comprehensively white case.

A 1971 research paper released by the Southern Regional Council on segregation academies said as much: