Mississippi Private School Association

Formed in 1968, the Mississippi Private School Association (MPSA) was a consortium of independent private schools located throughout Mississippi created to counter the imminent federal mandate to desegregate the state’s public schools. Known today as the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools, the association today exists to accredit and govern athletic competition for member private schools.

The creation of the MPSA is generally credited to segregationist William J. Simmons. Simmons edited The Citizens’ Council, the official publication of the Citizens’ Council, and was active in promoting southern segregationist policies. While Simmons was the consensus leader who initiated the association, he was not the only man listed in the original meeting minutes who had strong ties to the Citizens’ Council. Collectively, the founding leadership of the Mississippi Private School Association used individual experience and extensive networking via the Citizens’ Council—along with the white community’s desire to maintain white-only schools—to create a coalition of quickly formed but well-resourced private schools. Scholar Kenneth T. Andrews called the establishment of all-white academies in Mississippi “a countermovement strategy that flowed out of the prior history of organized white resistance to the civil rights movement.” The political and social clout of the MPSA visionaries afforded them the ability to create a large, powerful organization almost instantly during a pivotal moment in American educational history and the civil rights movement.

Those who founded the MPSA utilized their networks and experiences as influential members of the Citizens’ Council to quickly buttress the organization by opening schools in local churches, vacant office buildings, and old factories. In the fall of 1964, there were nine private day schools in Mississippi that were not affiliated with either the military or the Catholic Church, but by 1972 the MPSA had an enrollment of 30,515 students spread across more than 110 schools in four states, with additional member schools in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

At the time of the association’s formation, most Mississippi leaders believed that forcible integration of their segregated schools was fast approaching, and they organized the association of private schools to allow white Mississippians to control local public education. The founders were convinced that establishing schools with robust interscholastic and extracurricular offerings was essential to convincing white families to move their children out of local public schools and into MPSA schools. There was a pervasive fear among the founding members of the MPSA executive board that if a well-rounded educational experience was not offered at these new schools, public schools were doomed to integrate. By providing an ostensibly legitimate, fully accredited alternative that was comparable in resources, including a full slate of extracurricular activities, the charter leaders of the MPSA were able to cast a vision for a new type of K–12 education that drastically mitigated the federal attempt to desegregate education in the United States.

The first on-the-record evidence that the association was founded primarily to keep Mississippi education racially separate came in an MPSA executive board meeting on 23 January 1971. The minutes of that meeting, recorded by none other than association secretary William J. Simmons, read, “[I]t was decided that these schools remain members of the MPSA until such a time as they accept a Negro student or faculty member. At that time, they will be asked to resign from the MPSA if they not done so voluntarily.” Strict racial segregation was the modus operandi until the 1980s, and in 1987 the first Black student played for a boys MPSA high school sports team. The first MPSA football game involving a team comprised entirely of Black students did not happen until the year 2000.

In 2009 the association changed its name to the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools, and ten years later the name shifted again to its current iteration, the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools. Today the association has more than 120 affiliated schools, many of which are integrated.