Before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Mississippi sponsored freedom of choice policies that effectively segregated schools.
The Red Clay region of Mississippi is a slice of the state, the middle third in the northern three-fifths.
Tradition played a part; many black children had been employed in agriculture, including the October–November cotton harvest season.
Hugh White visited Indianola in 1953, he stated that finding enough money to support the two separate school systems was the biggest financial problem of his administration.
The Virginia General Assembly, by contrast, implemented the Stanley Plan in 1956 and laws protecting segregation in 1958.
By then, Virginia's tuition grant program had been called illegal and tax exempted status for segregated schools would soon follow.
In 1969, a federal court found Mississippi's tuition grants supporting private schools—segregation academies for the most part—illegal in Coffey v. State Educational Finance Commission.
Later in 1969, the Supreme Court in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education rejected Mississippi's policy of "all deliberate speed', ordering instead "districts be operated on a unitary basis".
[7] All over the Red Clay region, parents started private schools for white children.
[8] Hodding Carter III described the Mississippi association as "the biggest, most tightly organized, the most powerful Citizens' Council of them all.