Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [16]
Southern state governments did what they could for the cause, offering tuition grants—what Republicans now call vouchers—so that poor white students could continue to be educated in an environment free of dark pigmentation. When a federal court found such grants unconstitutional in 1969, the seg academies sought out tax-deductible donations to subsidize low-income whites. For example, one Holmes County academy sent out fundraising letters that warned:
Unless we receive substantial contributions to our Scholarship Fund there will be many, many students, whose minds and bodies are just as pure as those of any of their classmates and playmates . . . who for financial reasons alone, will be forced into one of the intolerable and repugnant “other schools.”18
In 1969, black parents in Holmes County filed a lawsuit demanding that the IRS deny tax exemptions to the three seg academies in the county. The courts ruled that using federal tax funds to finance private schools for purposes of segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the IRS began withholding tax exemptions from openly segregated schools. Nonetheless, seg academies easily skirted the new rules by adopting officially nondiscriminatory admissions policies while still practicing de facto segregation, and private all-white schools continued to proliferate in the South.
The first seg academies were exact replicas of the secular public schools they had replaced, but over time, most of the academies adopted Christian affiliations, such as Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian Academy, which the Lynchburg News described as “a private school for white students.”19 A 1973 Wall Street Journal article documented the emergence of this new variety of seg academy. “These days, Christian schools and segregation academies are almost synonymous,” said a coordinator of the education task force of the Southern Regional Council.20
Thus, when the IRS proposed strengthening the tax exemption rules in 1978 to force the seg academies to actively recruit minority students and teachers, many Southern Christians reacted with fury and alarm at the dual threat to white privilege and Christian education. As a result, the IRS proposal played right into the hands of a young conservative strategist with big plans.
Kicking the Sleeping Dog
In 1962, nineteen-year-old Paul Weyrich, a radio journalist and devout Catholic from Racine, Wisconsin, called on the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party to denounce a Supreme Court ruling that banned prayer in public schools. But the chairman refused to get involved, insisting, “Our businesspeople would think it was strange that we are getting involved in a religious issue.”
“That was the moment,” Weyrich explained in an interview, “that I said to myself, ‘By golly, this is just off the track. I’m going to see to it that one day the party will listen to these kinds of issues.’ And that really became my mission in life.”21
Soon after, Weyrich went to work for Republican politicians in Washington where he continued to struggle to persuade the party to embrace socially conservative causes like outlawing abortion, ending busing, and supporting school prayer. In 1973, Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that would revolutionize conservative political scholarship by discarding the scholarship. The following year, Weyrich left Heritage Foundation because the board of directors wouldn’t put enough emphasis on social issues.22 That’s like leaving the Roman Catholic Church because the pope won’t put enough emphasis on religious issues (which, incidentally, Weyrich also did, joining the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1968).
After leaving Heritage, Weyrich focused on the political potential of the growing fundamentalist and evangelical churches, but he was stymied in his effort to mobilize them. The fundamentalist and evangelical communities were accustomed to keeping their