12. New Laws Threatened Private Christian Schools
Brown v Board of Education was a 1954 Supreme Court case that changed the direction of the United States. Segregation had long been a legal institution, as long as the premise of “separate but equal” was upheld. Schools could be segregated as long as those that catered to African-American students had equal funding and could provide equal opportunities as those that catered to white students. In Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that separate could not be equal, given that the state of the African-American schools was deplorable. Schools had to integrate or risk losing funding.
In the American South, a stronghold of segregationist ideology, many white parents rushed to put their children into the private Christian schools that the fundamentalists had established following the Scopes Trial. Doing so would keep their white children from having to attend school with African-American children. The IRS recognized the segregated nature of the private Christian schools. Because they were not federally funded, they didn’t risk losing public funds. However, the IRS threatened to take away their tax-exempt status unless they could show that they were desegregating. For fundamentalists in exile, the liberal state was encroaching on their sacred, religious ground.