IU Media Relations School of Education BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- When
Suzanne Eckes taught high school French in the Mississippi Delta
region of the United States, white students and African American
students attended separate schools located roughly a mile apart.
This type of segregation was different from other types of
segregation she had witnessed, because white families were
paying tuition for their children to attend a school that did
not offer greater educational opportunity than the public
school. When Eckes, now an assistant professor of educational
leadership and policy studies at Indiana University Bloomington,
thinks back to those years, she has only to look to the
mid-1990s, decades after the revolutionary Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka Supreme Court ruling that effectively set
the country on the road to racial desegregation. During the
course of this cultural journey, defiant white parents
established private "academies" throughout the Mississippi Delta
region to avoid desegregating their scho