a Better Bubble™
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With a conspicuous presence this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a bestselling new memoir, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is celebrated as an ascending leader — someone who won over a decidedly purple state in 2018 by promoting commonsense solutions to issues affecting millions of people.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi effusively praised the governor at the Michigan delegation breakfast on Wednesday morning, saying: “She has been remarkable. Every time I hear her speak, I think sharp. Sharp in her message. Sharp in her effectiveness.”
But time is running out in Whitmer’s second and final term as governor to follow through on some key campaign promises.
Whitmer vowed as a candidate to “fix the damn roads,” bring transparency to state government, fight for a $15 minimum wage, repeal the emergency manager law and get a handle on companies that extract and sell large quantities of Michigan groundwater.
Six years later, those populist pledges are partially or entirely unfulfilled.
Advocates and even some allies are waiting for Whitmer to take up the causes she campaigned on during a critical period, when Democrats still have firm control over how the state is run. “Obviously, I would welcome the governor’s support,” said House Majority Floor Leader Abraham Aiyash, a Democrat who is working to replace the emergency manager law that has been so controversial in the state.
But it’s not clear if that support will come during a busy election season; nor is it clear what Whitmer will focus on once she leaves Chicago.
Whitmer’s office didn’t provide a response to questions from ProPublica for this story.
She’s heralded by some political observers for navigating both a divided state government and a pandemic in her first term, while still making progress on many priorities. When her gas tax proposal for road repairs fell flat, for example, she turned to bonds to help with immediate needs.
Heightened expectations from her supporters came in 2022 when Democrats won the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature for the first time in about 40 years. With a projected $9.2 billion budget surplus to boot, Whitmer and her party were virtually without obstacles for whatever they wanted to do.
Her supporters point to successes since then. She and the Legislature were able to codify abortion rights; repeal the “right-to-work” law that allowed workers in unionized jobs to opt out of union dues and fees; enact policies aimed at preventing gun violence; pass juvenile justice reforms; expand the earned income tax credit; and provide free breakfast and lunch to all public schoolchildren.
“Whitmer has overcome obstacles to keep many of her campaign promises. But there are more promises to keep,” Mark Brewer, former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said in an email.
Figuring out how to fund ongoing road improvements, for example, fell off the radar. “Now she has a Democratic House and Senate, and still nothing’s getting done,” said Eric Lupher, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonpartisan policy organization that has studied road funding.
Whitmer has also not publicly advocated for pending bills that would open up the records of the governor’s office and the Legislature. And, to date, the minimum wage is just $10.33. A recent ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court puts the state on a path toward a higher wage, including for tipped workers, but business groups are pressuring lawmakers in the capital to intervene and Whitmer has been quiet about whether or not she supports a compromise.
“Her last two years have just been so consumed by the pent-up priorities of 40 years for Democrats that a lot of those like first-term promises took a back seat,” said Susan Demas, editor in chief of Michigan Advance and a longtime political columnist.
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks said in an email that “we anticipate having a productive second half of the year and conversations about the fall agenda are ongoing.”
Demas sees a talented leader in Whitmer, one with a future on the national stage — in part because she governs as a pragmatist. And that same pragmatism helps explain Whitmer’s shifting agenda, she said.
“Making State Government More Open” Whitmer delivers her State of the State address in January 2023. (Al Goldis/AP)From misbehavior by legislators to the Flint water crisis, scandals revealed the cost of secrecy. Whitmer said she was committed to “making state government more open, transparent and accountable to Michigan taxpayers,” according to her 2018 Sunshine Plan.
Expanding the Freedom of Information Act was a key part of the strategy. Michigan is the rare state where both the governor’s office and Legislature are exempt from open records law.
In the plan Whitmer laid out while running for governor, she pledged that even if the Legislature didn’t act on the need for transparency, she’d voluntarily “extend FOIA to the lieutenant governor and governor’s offices. Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on.”
She has yet to do so. And to some, the governor’s promises of transparency contrast with reports about her administration’s use of nondisclosure agreements with lawmakers regarding economic development deals and a memo asking to review record requests sent to other departments that include one or more communications with the executive office.
“To me, that is just an unforced error, the height of hypocrisy,” said Abby Mitch, executive director of Michigan Rising Action, a right-leaning watchdog group.
Whitmer has defended the use of confidentiality agreements for economic development projects, according to Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news service, saying there is “a lot of proprietary information” shared as states compete for these investments.
Regarding the memo, Bridge reported that Whitmer’s spokesperson described the policy as a way to increase efficiency and said that the governor’s office never approves or denies the release of public records.
Sen. Ed McBroom, a Republican, and Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat, have been trying to expand FOIA for nearly a decade, dating back to when they served as representatives during the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, who served from 2011 through 2018. Their latest bills passed the Senate for the first time in June.
If signed into law this year, the bills would take effect on Jan. 1, 2027, the day the next governor takes office, and retroactive requests could be excluded, according to an analyst with the Senate Fiscal Agency.
Lawmakers needed a start date that allows time to build capacity and protocols to meet new requirements, Moss said. McBroom noted that since there aren’t currently record retention rules, retroactive requests would “just be causing a lot of work to get a paper back that says there isn't anything to show you.”
After years of negotiation with diverse stakeholders, including the governor’s office, Moss said, “we feel we got it right.”
Lisa McGraw, the public affairs manager of the Michigan Press Association, said the bills aren’t perfect, but they’d be a huge step forward. Local government officials are subject to FOIA, she pointed out, as is the attorney general and secretary of state. “I don’t know why we don’t put the governor and the Legislature to the same level of accountability and transparency,” she said.
It’s now up to the House to take up the issue, and to do so during a crowded campaign season. “We’re down to the wire,” McGraw said.
Whitmer could accelerate the process and set an example by giving the go-ahead to pass the measure opening up her own office first, McBroom said. But he understands why she wants to take the leap together. “It’s always very difficult to unilaterally disarm in the political world,” he said.
“Fix the Damn Roads” Whitmer fills a pothole during a campaign event in 2018. (Paul Sancya/AP)Dangerously deteriorating roads are a perennial complaint of Michiganders. Leaders from both parties have struggled to maintain them. Pavement quality ranks 40th nationally and 10th in an 11-state peer group, according to the Citizens Research Council.
In 2019, after Whitmer’s proposal of a 45-cent gas tax increase died before the GOP-led Legislature, the governor opted for $3.5 billion in state bonds. That was later supplemented by Michigan’s cut of federal infrastructure money.
The result: State spending on road and bridge programs nearly doubled between 2015 and 2023, according to a recent CRC report. But with rising construction costs over that period, the purchasing power of Michigan’s road agencies only increased by about 50%. And the spending relies on short-term funds that will soon dry up. State officials have still not established a sufficient and sustainable revenue stream for roads.
Bonds are “pulling revenues from the future to pay for the fixes now,” said Lupher, CRC’s president.
Former Gov. John Engler, a Republican, made a similar move in the 1990s, Lupher said, and the state “paid the price in the years that followed” — literally. Paying the principal and interest left less money for upkeep, which then deteriorated the value of the investment, he said.
Subpar roads contribute to Michigan’s long-running struggle to retain and grow its population, according to a report last December from an advisory council appointed by Whitmer. “Instead of being an asset to Michigan residents, visitors and businesses,” the council said, “the current inadequate maintenance and funding of our roads, highways and bridges is a liability.”
The year Whitmer was elected, the Michigan section of the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the state’s roads a D- in its report card. Last year, it gave a D. The report said that within 10 years, without further action, the proportion of paved roads in poor condition will increase from 33% to 48%.
Even with the new state and federal investments, Michigan’s funding gap is $3.9 billion per year, according to researchers commissioned by an industry group to study the issue. Michigan’s complex and decentralized funding system also likely leads to inefficient spending. “The only thing more broken and busted than Michigan’s roads,” the CRC said in a 2022 report, “is the funding system that we’re using to try to fix them.”
Whitmer has indicated that she no longer supports a gas tax increase, according to news reports. But she and Democratic leaders have yet to develop another funding source.
“Once the Legislature said no to a gas tax increase and she introduced the bond idea,” Lupher said, “they washed their hands of it. So definitely, the next governor, two governors from now, is going to have to figure it out. But for this one: problem avoided.”
“Return Power Back to Local Governments” Supporters at a Whitmer campaign event in Lansing, the capital, in 2018 as she was running for her first term. She is now in her second and final term. (Cory Morse/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)Whitmer’s Sunshine Plan also promised to repeal Michigan’s emergency manager law, which gives state-appointed administrators unusual authority over distressed cities and school districts. Under Snyder, Whitmer’s predecessor, managers were dispatched to Detroit ahead of its bankruptcy and to Flint during a period that overlapped with a cataclysmic water crisis. Their takeover powers — which essentially replace local representative decision-making — are widely seen as contributing to the catastrophe in Flint.
“I fought against the ill-conceived Emergency Manager law when it was pushed through the Legislature — not once but twice — during the early days of Governor Snyder’s administration,” Whitmer said in the 2018 plan. “I will return power back to local governments and will provide meaningful investment, support and assistance to partner with local elected officials.”
Part of the controversy is that, in 2012, voters rejected lawmakers’ initial effort to expand the power of emergency managers in a statewide referendum. The following month, the Republican Legislature passed a similar version of the law — this time with an appropriation attached, making it immune from future referendums.
The Whitmer administration has never appointed an emergency manager, but the law remains active. Brewer, the former head of the Michigan Democratic Party, said in an email that one of the promises he’s looking to see Whitmer fulfill is “repealing the anti-democratic emergency manager law which led to the poisoning of Flint.” To date, though, efforts to do so have stalled.
A statement previously provided to ProPublica from Whitmer’s press secretary said that the governor will “work closely with the legislature if they take up legislation reforming the state’s emergency manager law.”
Some legislators have said that repealing the law must come alongside a new policy for the state to respond to struggling cities and schools. Aiyash, the House majority floor leader, told ProPublica that he’s collaborating with another lawmaker to propose such legislation this fall.
“It’s not like this is a hypothetical,” Aiyash said. “We saw what emergency management did to these communities and know that it can happen again at any moment. So we have to make sure that they’re not going to give folks the opportunity to utilize this archaic, punitive law anymore.”
Whitmer, as a candidate, centered Flint in her campaign — and not only in her opposition to the emergency manager law. She also criticized the state for allowing a bottled water company to dramatically increase how much groundwater it extracts in exchange for nominal fees while there were residents who struggled “to pay past-due bills for undrinkable water,” as her campaign’s water plan put it.
In her plan, Whitmer said her administration would “control the siphoning of water for water bottling,” but there’s been little change, as ProPublica reported this year.
“Focus on Raising Wages” Whitmer speaks during a campaign rally at Michigan State University in 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)Whitmer made a $15 minimum wage part of her platform in 2018, phased in over three years, and promoted the Fight for $15 cause, which has since rebranded as Fight for a Union.
“To build an economy that works for everyone, we need to focus on raising wages for all working families,” she said in her campaign’s jobs plan.
Then things got complicated.
At the time, Michigan seemed headed for ballot initiatives where voters would decide whether to increase the minimum wage, phase out the lower wage for tipped workers and require employers to provide paid sick leave. But the Legislature, then led by Republicans, kept it off the ballot by adopting the petitions as law — and then, after the election, promptly watering them down. It increased the minimum wage by a smaller amount, retained the tipped wage and scaled back what is required for paid leave.
This summer, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that this “adopt-and-amend” tactic is unconstitutional. The court instructed the state to phase in the provisions in the original laws, with adjustments for inflation. The state has yet to determine what the increases would look like over time. The Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association projected that the minimum wage would reach $13.50 by 2028.
While organizations representing workers are celebrating, business groups are pushing back.
The MRLA said on its website that it’s working with Lansing leaders on a legislative solution to offset the ruling’s impact on the hospitality industry. “This is an existential, all-hands-on-deck moment for our industry,” the MRLA notice said.
Justin Winslow, MRLA’s president and CEO, told ProPublica that his group has heard nothing from the governor since the ruling, which he interprets as a positive: “She’s going to let the Legislature do what it needs to do to correct this.” He said he’s encouraged by quotes in the Detroit Free Press in 2022, where, he said, the governor “stressed the need for a compromise.”
Some Democratic legislators have also been quiet on potential modifications to the laws.
Justin Onwenu, a point person in Michigan for the nonprofit One Fair Wage until recently, said that given their strong track record, he expects Whitmer and the Democratic-led Legislature “to continue to have the backs of workers.”
Whitmer has not publicly stated if she supports or opposes any change to the laws.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
In 1964, Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey was among the first Black students to desegregate public schools in Macon, Georgia. Sixty years later, her 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zo’e Johnson, attends a private school that opened as white families fled desegregation. Researchers call schools like these “segregation academies.”
“So what touched you most about Grandma’s story?” asked Alyse Bailey, Zo’e’s great-aunt, as they sat at Cookie’s dining room table this year. Zo’e paused for a moment. “How she took people’s comments and racial things,” she said. “It didn’t stop her from what she wanted to do in life.”
Cookie still carries hurtful experiences from the year she desegregated a white high school. One instance happened during an English class. “This girl asked me if I had a tail,” Cookie recalled. She turned to the girl and demanded to know if she could see a tail.
“I’m a human being,” Cookie said.
Cookie hoped that her work desegregating schools would lead to more equal educational opportunities for future generations. Yet, when Zo’e began to have problems at her local public middle school, her family searched for options. Almost all were schools that remain largely segregated.
The family chose First Presbyterian Day, a predominantly white school known for its strong academics and Christian worldview. With the help of a state voucher-like tuition grant, Cookie has paid for Zo’e’s seventh grade year at the school. But she’s not sure she can continue to afford it.
Watch this 12-minute documentary to learn more about the challenge the family now faces.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
The spry 76-year-old woman finds her spot at the dining room table, prepared to discuss a problem her family has confronted, in one form or another, for half a century. Back when Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey was a teenager in 1964, she was among the first Black students to desegregate public schools here in Macon, Georgia. She endured the snubs and sacrifices with hope that future generations would know an equality that she had not.
All these years later, that equality remains elusive. Cookie’s hope now centers on the child across the table.
Her 13-year-old great-granddaughter, Zo’e Johnson, doesn’t say much at first. Last year, when she was in sixth grade, Zo’e struggled at the public middle school, which she felt was “chaotic.” Her family canvassed their options for another school in Macon, most of them still largely segregated by race. They chose First Presbyterian Day School, known for its rigorous academics and Christian worldview. It also has a strong tennis program, a draw for a family of tennis standouts.
But FPD isn’t just any private school. It was among the hundreds that opened during desegregation as white children fled the arrival of Black students. Black students like Cookie.
Researchers call these private schools “segregation academies.” Macon was — and is — especially saturated with them. Using archival research and an analysis of federal data, ProPublica identified five that still operate in the city. They include the three largest private schools in town. For generations, they have siphoned off swaths of white families who invested their more plentiful resources in college-sized tuition, fees and fundraisers. Today, most of Macon’s public schools are nearly all Black — and, because of the city’s persistent wealth gap, they grapple with concentrations of poverty.
At the dining room table on this March day, Zo’e’s family is torn over whether to keep her at FPD for another school year — whether they can afford it and whether the cost makes sense.
All of the schools founded as segregation academies in Macon, a majority-Black city, remain vastly white. FPD, with 11% Black enrollment as of the 2021-22 school year, has the highest proportion of Black students among them. Tuition at these schools can be insurmountable to many Black families. In Macon, the estimated median income of Black households is about half that of white ones.
Zo’e’s family makes it work largely because FPD helped them apply to get almost half of the roughly $17,000 seventh-grade tuition paid through a state voucher-style program — and because Cookie has been able to pay the difference. That’s about $900 a month.
But she isn’t sure she can keep paying. She recently cut her work hours as a medical laboratory supervisor with hopes of retiring in the next few years. At the table, her tone unusually subdued, she notes she’s had COVID-19 twice. Her memory sometimes falters.
“I’m older,” she says. “I’m getting old.”
Zo’e’s mother, Ashley Alexander, is a single parent who works part time and cannot foot the extra bill. She and Zo’e live with Cookie and her husband, a retiree who once worked as an attorney.
Ashley takes a seat between Zo’e and Cookie. “I feel like you get the better opportunity at the Caucasian school. The education is better,” Ashley says. “It’s just so expensive. We’ve been looking for some alternatives.”
But Zo’e doesn’t want to leave FPD. She likes the Christian emphasis. And she appreciates the structure and the calm, both important to a family that’s deeply protective of her.
Zo’e and her great-grandmother, Samaria “Cookie” Mitcham Bailey, after a game of tennis. A love of the sport runs deep in the family. Zo’e in her bedroom. Among the things that she likes about FPD is its tennis team. Her old school doesn’t have one.When Zo’e was 6, her father was shot and killed a mile away from this house. A mural of his face stretches across a nearby building, where she sometimes goes to take pictures and to pray. Her father had supported sending his now-adult son, who plays in the NFL, to another private school in town. It’s one reason Zo’e thinks he would be proud of her succeeding at FPD.
She also has made good friends — Black and white. She likes the challenging academics, the orderly classes and, especially, its tennis team. Her old school doesn’t have one.
At the table, Zo’e speaks up: “I love FPD.”
Watch a Short Documentary This 12-minute documentary examines one family’s struggles with Georgia’s segregated schools.Once sleepy, depressed even, downtown Macon is enjoying a rebirth in this city that is home to almost 157,000 people. Mercer University, Cookie’s alma mater, brings collegiate vibrance. Several grand churches, Catholic schools and a hospital add to the bustle, along with the gleaming Tubman African American Museum. In a first-floor exhibit, Cookie’s high school graduation photograph hangs on a long wall that pays tribute to students’ work desegregating Macon’s public schools.
Just beyond the downtown streets lined with coffee shops and restaurants, and the circles of poverty that surround them, Cookie’s brick home sits in a mostly white middle-class neighborhood. She has lived in this house for three decades, trodding its handsome wood floors and adorning it with family photographs.
A few weeks before the dining table discussion, she arrives home wearing a green tracksuit from Florida A&M University, where one of her three daughters played tennis. Cookie just left a tennis tournament. In a tight match, Zo’e beat a fellow FPD player who had bested her several times before. The other player smacked her racket on the court, then kicked it. Cookie was thrilled. She and her husband met playing tennis, and they have multiple collegiate tennis players in their family.
Ashley and Zo’e walk in later with diminished enthusiasm. Zo’e lost her final match, and she’s exhausted and grumpy. She heads to her bedroom where a brown teddy bear awaits along with a poster labeled “Vision Board.” She decorated it with words like “Forgive” and “College” and “God Only.”
“She did good!” Cookie calls down the hall.
Zo’e first dabbled in tennis when she was 6, around the time of her father’s murder. On the court, she could live in the moment, thinking only of the match at hand. It provided relief and focus, especially when anxiety crept in.
She keeps with her a newspaper clipping about her father’s death at 39. To some who read news coverage of his killing, he was a gang leader who spent time in prison. But she and many in the community knew the man who wanted his children and others in the neighborhood to dodge the traps of life — traps she’d begun to encounter at the public middle school.
After Zo’e enrolled at FPD, Ashley began driving her each morning in the opposite direction of the public middle school, which sits a mile away past a strip mall anchored by a Family Dollar.
Instead, they cruised for 15 minutes toward the leafy neighborhoods to the city’s north. At a stretch of white ranch fencing, they turned and drove over gentle hills and then veered onto the main drive into FPD’s campus. Red flags emblazoned with its crest hang on street lamps that line the road as it passes brick buildings, an athletic center, expansive ball fields and a tennis complex along its 248-acre campus.
Although she felt strange there at first, Zo’e made good friends and came to like FPD.Zo’e isn’t the first in her family to attend private school. Her older half-brother on her father’s side who plays football went to Stratford, a similarly elite school in town that also was founded as a segregation academy. And a cousin who coaches her in tennis and is now playing on a scholarship at Tuskegee University went to FPD his junior and senior years. He had a mostly good experience, a big reason Cookie took a chance on the school.
Even so, Zo’e felt strange arriving on campus. At her old school, almost 90% of her classmates were Black. Classes were in one building, all near one another. FPD looked like a small college bustling with white students. She worried about what they would think of her.
Yet, she felt welcomed. Most of the kids seemed nice. And they weren’t all white. About 1 in 10 was Black.
She didn’t know it, but after George Floyd was killed in 2020, the head of school had issued a letter warning: “I will not allow racism or a lack of respect of any kind towards anyone.”
As Zo’e settled in with a diverse new group of friends, academics proved her toughest adjustment. So she focused on learning study skills and discipline — and set out to prove herself on the tennis court, which only made Cookie prouder.
Zo’e has lived with Cookie most of her life. She calls her great-grandmother sweet nicknames like Precious. “You are the cookie to my monster!” Zo’e wrote in Cookie’s birthday card.
Much as she respects Cookie, the history of school segregation wasn’t at the forefront of her daily concerns as she assimilated at FPD. But she did notice that she hadn’t seen a single Black teacher at the school. The only Black staff members she saw worked as janitors or in the cafeteria.
Cookie’s own journey into the world of white education began in 1964 with an announcement over the loudspeaker at her all-Black high school. The voice sought volunteers to transfer to a school for white girls. Cookie raised her hand.
Her mother, Annie Mae Mitcham, had grown up in a rural outpost called Cat Ridge. As a child in the 1930s and 1940s, Annie Mae walked from her segregated all-Black school with its hand-me-down books to go clean the white kids’ classrooms. She and her husband, who had a third-grade education, raised their 10 children to focus on school achievement.
Cookie holds a photograph of her nine siblings and parents. Scholastic achievement was at the heart of their upbringing.By volunteering to enroll at the white school, Cookie wanted to see if she was as smart as everyone said she was. She also wanted to know what advantages the white kids were getting — and that Black students ought to have, too. She enrolled her senior year.
When she arrived at the white high school, Cookie didn’t suffer the violence that many Black children who desegregated schools across the South did. But there was one day in English class that still, 60 years later, hurts.
A white girl turned to ask: “Do you have a tail?”
At her old high school, Cookie was an A student. She’d been in the marching band and the concert band. She’d played piano and was a stellar singer. Yet this white girl was comparing her to a monkey? It cut deeply enough to scar.
Something similar happened to Zo’e a semester into her own experience at a mostly white school. She came home from school one day upset. She told Cookie and her mother that she had found a friend, who is Black, crying in a hallway saying that a white boy had just called her a “monkey.”
A month later at the dining room table, the family revisits the monkey comment. Zo’e says she has since heard the boy who said it was suspended. Her mother points out that one student’s comment doesn’t define a school.
“Let’s not make too big an issue of it,” Ashley says. But for Cookie, it rips open the old wound from English class. She grows furious. “They’re still calling Black folks monkeys!”
At the white high school, Cookie’s teachers and most students had treated her well enough. The headmistress did not. The guidance counselor was the worst, with her pursed lips, pearls and horn-rimmed glasses. When Cookie told the counselor she wanted to apply at Mercer University, the woman replied with a sneer and an insult.
“Go to your own school,” the woman said. In other words, a college for Black students.
Cookie stormed from the office and marched to Mercer with a friend. She enrolled on her own and ultimately graduated, among the first Black students to do so from the private university. Yet, even by then, only a smattering of Black students had been admitted to Macon’s white public schools. White Maconites were battling full integration at every turn, especially in the courts.
First image: Cookie looks through her 1966-67 yearbook from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. She was among the first Black students to graduate from the private university. Second image: Cookie’s graduation regalia from Mercer.More quietly, they were also busy forging another kind of resistance: They were organizing new private schools for their white children.
Macon sits 90 miles south of Atlanta in Georgia’s stretch of the Black Belt, a sickle-shaped swath of rich soil across the Southeast that once fueled cotton plantation riches. To preserve their control after emancipation, Georgia’s white leaders segregated every facet of life, including the classroom. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court upended that when the justices ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that state-mandated public school segregation is unconstitutional.
White residents responded with staunch resistance.
“Klan Urges State-Wide Private School System,” a Macon Telegraph headline announced in January 1960. Two months later, the newspaper reported that a local attorney was leading the charge to create an alternative to the county school system that served Macon. He planned a closed-door meeting with dozens of “persons interested in establishing a private school in case the public schools of Bibb County are closed by the desegregation crisis.”
That fall, Stratford Academy opened. Its leaders chose the name “because of the association of the name with Robert E. Lee and Shakespeare,” officials said at the time. The school — still among the city’s largest and most prestigious academies — was “besieged with applications.”
As white residents fought integration, Sylvia McGee was growing up in the segregated city. She had started her education at an all-Black public elementary school in Macon just a few years after the Brown ruling. She was about to start middle school in 1963 when Black parents sued the local school board in what became Bibb County’s key desegregation lawsuit. The case slogged on for almost seven years.
Finally, in February 1970, an appeals court forced local schools to desegregate — within days. McGee was a high school senior. Whites had fought integration for so long after the Brown decision that she had gone through her entire public school education during that resistance.
That fall, five private schools, including FPD, opened in Macon, doubling the number in town.
Their leaders rarely said publicly that the schools opened to preserve all-white education. Instead, they nodded to “quality” and “Christian” education.
Yet in fall 1970, leaders of the Southern network of the Presbyterian Church urged members to keep their children in public schools. In a statement, they called enforced racial segregation “contrary to the will of God” and warned against undermining public education by establishing and supporting private academies “whose deliberate purpose or practical effect is to maintain racial isolation.”
And even back then, some Southern newspapers called the new private schools “segregation academies.”
An article from The Macon Telegraph in January 1960. Two months later, the newspaper reported that a local attorney was leading the charge to create an alternative to the county school system that served Macon. (Newspapers.com)“Only the very gullible could deny that race was a factor,” Andrew Manis, a local resident and history professor, wrote in his book “Macon Black and White.”
But FPD’s current spokesperson denied the school was founded as a segregation academy. She told ProPublica it “was established based on the desire of Macon families to provide their children with a strong education, grounded in biblical principles.” The school has a tuition assistance program and a nondiscrimination policy, she added. She did not answer additional questions.
Indeed, in 1975, several years after it opened, FPD’s headmaster likewise told a newspaper reporter that the school had a nondiscrimination policy. FPD was willing to admit a Black student, he said, “but we’ve never had one to apply.”
To Black residents like McGee, that felt disingenuous. “The climate and the culture of the time said you don’t apply to FPD,” she said. Black parents would have feared for their children’s safety at the academies. Private schools also had to adopt such policies or risk losing their tax-exempt status.
McGee graduated in 1970 with the final class before full desegregation. Because so many white students had fled to private schools, by fall 1973, the Bibb County public school system was predominantly Black for the first time.
McGee, who became a social worker and ultimately acting superintendent until 2011, watched the district’s infrastructure crumble. Gone were many of the white parents who had money to pour into PTA fundraisers and time to fill volunteer needs.
In the early 2000s, decades after they opened, FPD, Stratford and most of the other academies in Macon reported that about 1% to 2% of their students were Black each year.
Even in recent years, Black children have made up only about 6% of most academies’ students — in a county that is 57% Black.
“It holds everybody back,” McGee said. “I think people miss that point.”
One morning in May, with the end of seventh grade approaching, Zo’e arrives on FPD’s campus and heads to a hallway of art classrooms. It stretches quiet, the walls lined with impressive student artwork, classes not yet starting for the day. Several students sit on the hall floor, backs against the wall, engrossed in the papers or cellphones in front of them.
For weeks, Zo’e had been living in a tortuous state of uncertainty about whether she would return to FPD in the fall. She tried hard not to complain. She didn’t want to put extra financial pressure on Cookie, who is about to turn 77, or her mom, who has enough on her plate.
Ashley was doing her best to try to make things work for Zo’e. She was in the running for a full-time job at the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office that would give them more of a financial cushion — and enable her to pay FPD’s tuition.
Now, this morning, Zo’e is about to burst with joy. She spots a friend in the hallway and hurries over, stifling her smile. When they get close enough, she whispers, “You know how I told you if my mom doesn’t get the job, I’m not going to be able to stay?”
Her friend looks pensive. Zo’e wrings her hands in front of her.
“She got the job!”
Zo’e with classmates during lunchtime at FPD. She isn’t the first in her family to attend private school. Her older half-brother on her father’s side went to one in town and a cousin went to FPD his junior and senior years.Her friend lets out a high-pitched squeal of joy, then glances down the hall.
Zo’e adds, “So I’m gonna be able to stay.”
But as the next few weeks pass, her hope fades. Delays creep in. Ashley’s starting date gets pushed back.
The multiple generations of women in Cookie’s family are quick to debate the bigger reasons why public schools struggle, including Miller Fine Arts Magnet Middle School, the one Zo’e went to.
“There’s a reason why the teachers at Miller are stressed out,” Cookie’s youngest daughter, Alyse Bailey, said after joining her family at the dining room table back in March. “There’s a reason why the kids are not acting how they’re supposed to act. What are those reasons? What are the root causes?”
“They’re a product of the environment,” Ashley responded.
“Right, but then, why?” Alyse asked. “It’s like you got to constantly be asking, why?”
Black children lack resources, Alyse argued, because of the wealth gap stemming from slavery and Jim Crow. “The more you go back, the more you see where it is rooted in systemic injustice.”
To many local families, Miller is the best option among public middle schools. While it functions as a regular neighborhood school, Miller also draws students from across the district who attend its fine arts magnet component. It often tops the district’s six middle schools on the state’s standardized tests. Almost three-quarters of its eighth graders read on grade level or above compared with the district average of 62%. (Private schools don’t have to release such data.)
Schools like Miller will soon find it even harder to retain top students, particularly those with more resources.
Starting next year, private schools will skim another layer of students from the public schools. In April, as part of a nationwide Republican push, Georgia adopted a new program that, similar to the existing one, uses taxpayer dollars to fund private school tuition. At least 21,000 more students could receive up to $6,500 each. Last year, almost 22,000 students tapped into the current program. The average tuition grant was about $4,600.
While it functions as a regular neighborhood school, Miller also draws students from across the district who attend its fine arts magnet component.Supporters often tout these programs as means for students to escape low-performing public schools. But the reality is, the tuition grants don’t often cover even half of private school tuition bills, especially for college prep-style schools like FPD and Stratford. (Stratford was the only of the four other academies that responded to ProPublica. Its head of school noted it gives $1.5 million in financial assistance a year and is “contributing to moving middle Georgia and the Macon community toward a future that looks very different than the past.”)
But tuition assistance and voucher-style programs often don’t pay the whole bill. Families like Cookie’s must come up with the difference — and, if they can, decide if the financial hardship is worth it.
As they wrestle with this question, Zo’e’s family puts her on a waiting list for a charter school that performs well and, like many of the private schools, draws large numbers of white children. But 40 students are ahead of her.
By the time summer break arrives, Zo’e faces reality. Her mom almost certainly won’t start the new job in time to pay looming tuition bills. Zo’e will return to the public school her family felt had fallen short of her needs. And FPD will have one fewer Black student.
In late June, Cookie’s birthday approaches. When her oldest daughter arrives from Florida for a visit, they lay in bed watching tennis together. In dispirited tones, Cookie mentions that she cannot afford Zo’e’s tuition anymore.
But her daughter presses her to think beyond FPD’s benefits to what public school can provide, if Zo’e works hard and stays focused: “It’s nothing she can’t get somewhere else.”
Cookie concedes, “She can get it somewhere else.” Including Miller. She decides that the family must focus on reinforcing the academic and social self-discipline that Zo’e will need to succeed at Miller. They can help train her in tennis.
In the next room, Zo’e watches Disney Channel cartoons in her bedroom while making a poster for her mom, who shares a birthday with Cookie. She glues photographs onto it along with a message of love in sparkly lime green letters. Then she writes her mother a birthday note. “You’re not only a life-giver but you are a hard worker,” she writes. She thanks Ashley for so much love. “You were the one to step in when my father had to step out. You have been my best friend, a laughing buddy and a role model.”
Zo’e works on the floor below her vision board. It includes a cutout of a tiger’s eyes, intent and fixed. They remind her of focus. As she accepts the likelihood of returning to Miller, she becomes determined to take the discipline she learned at FPD with her. She also remembers that, at this time last year, she had wanted to stay at Miller.
A few weeks later, in mid-July, Ashley gets the formal job offer. She will become a sheriff’s deputy with a start date of July 29. She is overjoyed and relieved.
It comes too late to send Zo’e back to FPD. Public schools are about to begin the new year. So, the family firms up their plan for her. Zo’e will return to Miller for eighth grade to give Ashley time to save money for tuition. After that, when Zo’e begins high school, they plan to send her back to private school.
Zo’e will return to Miller for eighth grade to give her mother time to save money for tuition. After that, when Zo’e begins high school, her family plans to send her back to private school.Mollie Simon contributed research.
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