Lawrence County Academy shut down in the late 1980s due to dwindling attendanceone of the now-defunct early schools that sprang up in response to integration. Among those that survived, though, was Brookhaven Academy, where Hyde-Smith chose to send her daughter, Anna-Michael. Many started recasting themselves as Christian academies, later admitting students of color; Council McCluer, for instance, became Hillcrest Academy.
Cole said Hyde-Smith should not get a pass for her attendance at a segregation academy, nor for later sending her daughter to one.
Socially, instinctively and intuitively, I know why these things happened, because its what we all lived through, Cole said. For the younger generation, though, this will be big news to them. Hell, it might even be big news to Cindys daughter. Thats the way it always was, and we were very much separate and unequal.
As of Friday night, the Hyde-Smith campaign was not prepared to comment on this story because it was too late for campaign communications director Melissa Scallan to speak to the senator, but this story will be updated if Hyde-Smith does decide to comment.
Even to this day, Brookhaven Academy, from which Hyde-Smiths daughter graduated in 2017, is almost all-white. In the 2015-2016 school year, Brookhaven Academy enrolled 386 white children, five Asian children, and just one black child, the National Center for Education Statistics shows. Thats despite the fact that Census statistics show Brookhaven is 55 percent black and 43 percent white, per 2016 Census estimates.
Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith once promoted a measure that praised a Confederate soldier's effort to "defend his homeland" and pushed a revisionist view of the Civil War.
Hyde-Smith, a Republican, faces Mike Espy, a Democratic former congressman and agriculture secretary, in Tuesday's runoff in Mississippi -- the final Senate race to be decided in 2018. The measure, which was unearthed by CNN's KFile during a review of Hyde-Smith's legislative history, is the latest in a series of issues that have surfaced during her campaign, many of which have evoked Mississippi's dark history of racism and slavery.
As a state senator in 2007, Hyde-Smith cosponsored a resolution that honored then-92-year-old Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, calling her "the last known living 'Real Daughter' of the Confederacy living in Mississippi." Pharr's father had been a Confederate soldier in Robert E. Lee's army in the Civil War.
The resolution refers to the Civil War as "The War Between the States." It says her father "fought to defend his homeland and contributed to the rebuilding of the country." It says that with "great pride," Mississippi lawmakers "join the Sons of Confederate Veterans" to honor Pharr.
The measure "rests on an odd combination of perpetuating both the Confederate legacy and the idea that this was not really in conflict with being a good citizen of the nation," said Nina Silber, the president of the Society of Civil War Historians and a Boston University history professor.
"I also think it's curious that this resolution -- which ostensibly is about honoring the 'daughter' -- really seems to be an excuse to glorify the Confederate cause," Silber said. ... News of the 2007 measure comes amid increased scrutiny of Hyde-Smith's past after a series of recordings surfaced that featured her making comments about attending a "public hanging" and suppressing the votes of students in the state.