Glossy videos and photos on Briarcrest Christian School’s website highlight racially diverse groups of students laughing and playing.
Their marketing language promotes a “place of belonging,” within a firmly religious context.
Briarcrest, the private school behind these ads, enjoys a reputation for academic success in Shelby County, Tennessee — part of the cradle of the civil rights movement.
Nowhere on its website does the school explicitly mention its history as a “segregation academy,” one of the often-religious private schools founded between the 1940s and 1970s that forestalled racial integration in the South.
Instead, the school claims it was founded to benefit “all races” by providing Christian education.
As the Trump administration pivots away from efforts to integrate schools, both historians and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s archives cite Briarcrest as a conspicuous example of how private institutions, now poised to benefit from increased taxpayer support, once stymied desegregation.
An Emancipator investigation found that Briarcrest is one of 11 private schools accused of being founded as “segregation academies” that now receive state voucher money for the students attending them. Critics say Tennessee reroutes the money from public schools through its “Education Freedom Scholarship” program and have slammed it for its lack of transparency and because it allegedly “siphons hundreds of millions of tax dollars” from public schools, fueling inequity.
A number of public schools in nearby Memphis are closing, struggling from under-enrollment and decrepit buildings, in a trend echoed across the country. Critics say the money from vouchers funneled to private schools could help public ones.
As Trump retools the federal government to fund private and religious schooling, guts desegregation orders in the South, and weakens civil rights safeguards, these former segregation academies are positioned to benefit from the windfall.
The Emancipator reached out to Briarcrest and the other Tennessee schools for comment, but has not received a response.
Marketing materials aside, some historians and researchers say these schools have not provided evidence that their enrollment practices have significantly changed.
“If you look at all of these rankings of schools online, you see that [Briarcrest is] considered a very prestigious private school. But it still had its origins from the aims of segregation of schooling, and it hasn’t, by my measure, gotten away from those aims at all,” the historian Steve Suitts, author of Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement, told The Emancipator.
Across the South, a similar pattern holds.
The Emancipator estimates there were at least 359 confirmed segregation academies in the country. Many of them could still be active — though it is difficult to know whether they still practice segregationist attendance policies. Many are also eligible for taxpayer support through state voucher programs and a new federal tax incentive. That figure incorporates data from Stanford University research scholar Danielle Graves Williamson, whose work is considered among some scholars as one of the most detailed attempts to track these schools, as well as data from The Emancipator.
The actual number of former segregation academies that are still active is difficult to pin down. The available data largely excludes states known to have segregation academies, including Virginia and Texas — places where there is less available research on the topic.
As the federal government dismantles public education and launches a private school tax incentive, Republican-led states like Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee are reallocating tax dollars — including Black tax dollars — into vouchers. It means schools that once served as segregation academies now receive taxpayer support, even as some argue they continue to exclude Black students.
That will presumably include a direct federal incentive.
A shift in federal priorities
Former segregation schools may soon see increased support from the federal government, thanks to a federal tax credit program created under an incentive pushed through Congress in 2025.
The credits were passed as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a wide-reaching Republican overhaul. They mean that starting next year, in addition to state voucher money, dollars that would have been federally taxed could potentially benefit former segregation academies, even if they are not specifically approved for a state voucher program or exist in a state that doesn’t have one.
The money will flow through “scholarships” granted by officially recognized organizations. The rules of the program, recently released by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), have been criticized by researchers promoting racial and social equity for limiting states’ ability to control whether the scholarship-granting organizations “discriminate based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
States have to opt in to the program, and it appears that all the states noted as having segregation academies have chosen to do so. An initial estimate from the IRS suggested that 96% of students “will be eligible” for scholarships provided the states approve organizations to grant the scholarships.
The government projects that the pot of money will grow to $26 billion by 2030, larger than the federal money sent to the main program for boosting educational opportunity, despite the fact that the tax credit is expected to send support to wealthy families. It’s earned the moniker “Title 1 for Rich Kids” from the think tank The Brookings Institution.
The public comment period for the proposed rules is still open and has already drawn many concerns over the impact the program will have on racial and economic segregation.
“I do not want my tax money going to private schools that discriminate and exacerbate racial segregation,” wrote one commenter.
The additional taxpayer support for segregation schools comes as the Trump administration has worked to dismantle educational offices, including the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, largely ceasing key operations. The administration has turned offices meant to prevent discrimination in schools into a tool to promote its agenda against diversity, equity and inclusion.
Recently, the Department of Justice dropped 57 desegregation cases across the country that had been open for more than half a century.
The decision was framed as a boon to public schools.
“Now these local school districts can redirect taxpayer dollars back to benefitting students, instead of funding onerous and outdated consent decrees,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the department’s civil rights division, said in a prepared statement last month.
Despite the department’s claim that it “dismissed” these cases, civil rights lawyers note that some of the cases remain ongoing, even after the department washed its hands of them.
Private schools have fewer restrictions on how they deal with students, which has raised concerns over the potential of voucher schools to discriminate against students of color and vulnerable students, like those who have disabilities.
But while the Trump administration increases the pool of funding available to former segregation academies and promotes private choice, the IRS has proposed revoking tax-exempt status from antiracist private schools, such as schools that have admissions policies aimed at racially diversifying the student body or making access more equitable.
Many former segregation schools would, in large part, presumably not be impacted by that proposal, if codified, since it explicitly excludes religious schools.
It’s a stark reversal of the federal role.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Louisiana over its voucher program, arguing in case files that it interfered with federal desegregation orders.
The suit was dropped.
Impact on segregation
Some former segregation academies have changed their names or missions over time, Fred Jones Jr., senior director of public policy and advocacy for the Southern Education Foundation, told The Emancipator. The foundation, a longstanding civil rights organization which focuses on education in the South, is among the groups suing over Tennessee’s vouchers.
Because private schools are not required to publish demographic data, it is unclear precisely how many former segregation academies have worked to include Black and Brown students.
But critics of voucher programs suggest that the language of choice can serve as a convenient cloak.
“School vouchers are often framed as a tool for ‘choice’, but their origins tell a very different story — one rooted in efforts to resist integration and preserve racial segregation,” according to a note from the Southern Education Foundation.
Analysis from critics suggests that many of these schools remain “segregated in practice,” thanks in part to the leeway private schools have in enrollment criteria, accommodations and student expression.
“One of the dangers of private school voucher programs—alongside their well-demonstrated negative effects on students’ academic outcomes, civil rights violations, and destabilization of public school funding — is that they can exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation,” Halley Potter, director of PK-12 education policy and senior fellow for The Century Foundation, a think tank focused on inequality, wrote in an essay.
Another essay from that foundation argues that: “Data on private school enrollment also support a pattern of ‘white flight’ and ‘wealthy flight’ from the public sphere”.
Critics point to evidence that these options increase segregation, including a 2002 review of enrollment data that noted that “the strongest predictor of White private school enrollment is the proportion of Black students in the area.”
Started as a form of ‘resistance’
Ironically, former segregation academies — including Briarcrest — drew scrutiny from the federal tax agency decades ago for perpetuating racist practices after Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that made public school segregation illegal.
The decision caused a tidal wave of resistance. For example, in Prince Edward County, Virginia, officials closed the entire public school system, opening private “Whites-only” schools supported by tax dollars. The Supreme Court later ruled this illegal, sometimes noted as the end of the “Massive Resistance” era.
In the years following the historic desegregation decision, private schools propagated across the South, and as time wore on, their enrollment grew. Amid the broader headwinds of “White flight,” as families traded cities for suburbs, segregation schools provided another way to avoid White children coming into contact with Black children. They let families skirt public desegregation by funneling White students into private schools, which had more leeway in turning away students.
Overall, the impact of school segregation on White students wasn’t necessarily positive, either.
“White families may have sacrificed educational quality to maintain racial segregation,” according to an economic analysis in a working paper about the impact of these schools, which noted that in the long run, segregation academies led to worse economic outcomes for White students.
This complicates the notion that racial segregation was the result of families making the best choices for their students or was simply reflective of class segregation, Graves Williamson, one of the authors, told The Emancipator.
Regardless, in recent decades, as voucher programs have boomed, Tennessee’s still-active former segregation academies have received less attention than those in states like Mississippi or Georgia.
Nevertheless, Tennessee now ranks as the sixth most racially segregated state in the country, according to the Segregation Tracking Project, more than either of those states.
Until recently, at least one Tennessee public school district remained under federal court order to desegregate.
But in the 1980s, Tennessee also set a precedent that would later influence how these private schools could develop under new federal policies.
That’s because Briarcrest’s founder involved himself in a Supreme Court case that set back attempts to prevent public tax support from flowing to private schools that were openly racist.
From tax agency target to benefactor
At the time, many of the segregation schools were tax-exempt.
In response, the IRS “vacillated,” according to a civil rights group, denying tax-exempt status to the most openly racist segregation schools in the 1960s, but then returning it; eventually, after a lawsuit from Mississippi, they settled on having schools publish nondiscrimination policies.
But there was the question of whether the agency was doing enough to enforce its rules.
The tension boiled over in the mid-1970s when Black families launched a national lawsuit against the IRS for having lenient rules. The lawsuit alleged, in essence, that the government was subsidizing segregation by providing tax breaks to these schools.
W. Wayne Allen, founder of Briarcrest, was the sole party to step in, hoping to preserve the school’s tax-exempt status. The school argued that the parents did not have “standing” to make the argument, a legal hurdle to bringing a lawsuit to court. The case made it to the Supreme Court.
In 1984, Allen won.
The effect of the case was to quash Black families’ attempt to pressure the government into strict standards on private schools, and to preserve the school’s favorable tax status.
Notably, the court did not rule on the substance of whether Briarcrest reinforced segregation.
The school still calls attention to the case on its own website, the closest Briarcrest comes to discussing accusations that it contributed to school segregation.
Allen, the founder, denied that the school ever had segregationist intent.
In 1973, he told The New York Times that it was dynamics within the Black community that prevented students of color from enrolling in the school, rather than racism on the school’s part. Recounting a conversation with an unnamed “Black pastor friend,” Allen claimed that the man had said he would be accused of being an “Uncle Tom” if he opened a satellite school in his church connected to Allen. Per the Times, Allen replied: “I told him, ‘It’s too bad you folks are so segregationist.’”
A controversial new program
The recent rise of Tennessee’s “Education Freedom Accounts” was aided by a tranche of money from billionaire investor and Trump-supporter Jeffrey Yass. After Republican Governor Bill Lee failed to get his voucher program passed, Yass sent millions into the state to defeat anti-voucher candidates on both sides of the political aisle. In 2025, the program passed.
A pro-voucher political action committee, School Freedom Fund, largely funded by Yass’ money, became the biggest individual spend in state elections, according to Tennessee Lookout. To date, Yass has contributed $28.5 million to the fund, per financial disclosure documents. Yass is also a notable contributor backing Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee in the state’s current gubernatorial race.
This spring, the state legislature almost doubled the number of voucher slots to 35,000, enabling wealthier families to avail themselves of the program. There are 290 voucher-eligible private schools.
Under this program, Tennessee sends slightly more per-pupil funding to voucher schools than public schools.
Previous voucher programs in the state were more tightly targeted at low-income families in urban areas and students with disabilities. In contrast, early glimpses at the impact of this new statewide program note that it sends money to wealthy families.
A major criticism of Tennessee’s voucher programs — including the new statewide program — and the focus of lawsuits by civil rights groups including the Southern Education Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center, is that they program unconstitutionally “siphon” money from public schools, effectively sending extra assistance to families who would have sent their children to private school, or homeschooled them, without public money.
Opportunity, or harm?
In the South, private schools are still “domains of virtual segregation,” argued Suitts, the historian, to The Emancipator.
Many of these academies have maintained their historical exclusion, often enrolling less than 10% of the Black student population, according to Suitts, who scrutinized schools connected to segregation for his 2020 book.
But the federal government’s recent attempts to stimulate school “choice” and undo provisions for equal opportunity in education represent a stark reversal from when it stood up for racial desegregation, Suitts argued. Indeed, the context is reminiscent of the initial wave of support private schools got just after the Brown decision, he added.
Still, some Black families in the state support the new voucher program because they view it as giving their family options and keeping their children from “falling further behind.”
And for those who support vouchers, the most important question is how voucher programs will impact diversity among private school options moving forward.
If voucher programs make private schools more affordable, that should make private school enrollment more diverse as time wears on, argued Brian Fitzpatrick, national research manager at the right-leaning think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, on a call with The Emancipator.
School “choice” policies should be neutral, and examples of demonstrable discrimination should be legally challenged, Fitzpatrick said.
But religious-school admissions policies are not automatically evidence of racism, Fitzpatrick also argued. And, he said, it’s hard to imagine how a voucher policy could be crafted that would legitimately exclude schools that were once segregation academies.
Ultimately, Fitzpatrick argued that voucher programs will be successful if they boost meaningful access to private schools for dissatisfied students in areas with high concentrations of students of color.
Revising history
Some of these schools seem to be flourishing.
In 2019, Briarcrest announced a $5.3 million expansion of its elementary school campus.
The latest available tax disclosure documents show that the private school had more than $33 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending in 2025.
Unlike most of the other schools on The Emancipator’s list, Briarcrest does not appear to share its enrollment data with the Private School Universe Survey, a voluntary federal data collection effort that forms the basis for independent research into private school racial inequity.
But Briarcrest does have to publish a nondiscrimination policy in order to maintain its federal tax-exempt status.
Although Briarcrest does not appear to, some of the schools on The Emancipator’s list publish diversity statements. One even appears to have an antiracist reading list.
The school did not reply to multiple reach outs from The Emancipator about its demographics, accusations that it is a segregation academy, or how it handles inquiries about diversity from prospective parents.
Some of the Tennessee schools do share their data. Of those, there’s a range of student diversity. Brentwood had “about the same” racial diversity based on 2021-22 data — compared to “predominantly White” local public schools, per the most recent available federal survey data pulled through ProPublica’s Private School Demographics tool.
The majority of the schools, however, had “less racial diversity” than their local public schools, based on analysis from that tool, which relies upon the Simpson’s Diversity Index, a way of measuring community diversity.
What’s more, much of the data was a half-decade old, or more.
At Briarcrest, reviews on Greatschools.org suggest some divisiveness, with five-star ratings sitting alongside one-star ratings, though the school’s academics are rated highly.
One review from 2021 that claimed to be from an alumnus said that any student who does not “fit into their [homogeneous] southern, White, heterosexual, cisgendered, masculine model is othered and bullied by faculty and administration.” The review also said, “Briarcrest was founded on principles of white supremacy and segregation and yet still today they have not accomplished the work it takes to leave such a horrific past behind.”
Conversation about the significance of racial segregation in American schools has erupted in recent days, with some suggesting that the over-emphasis on segregation should not overtake metrics like school culture and instructional quality.
But for some, the former segregation academy’s refusal to confront their history is indicative of their continuing impact on education, which pushes a fair educational environment further away.
Despite receiving additional taxpayer support, these schools have not reckoned with their segregationist origins, according to Suitts, the historian.
“It’s much easier and much less painful, and probably more profitable, for folks to simply ignore the past, and ignore what in its origin may still be illustrating in its current operations. There’s just no gain, in their view, to doing that,” Suitts said.
