Mosi Secret

At the Academy, Secret will continue work on his book “Teaching Them: The 1960s Experiment to Desegregate the Boarding Schools of the South.” (forthcoming with Little, Brown), about an experiment to integrate elite private schools of the South. Starting in the late 1960s, a handful of white Southern philanthropists quietly worked to change their region’s racist character. Their idea was to recruit and pay for 140 talented black and brown boys and girls to integrate into all-white Southern boarding schools, which were then havens for white families fleeing court-ordered integration. The strategy was novel: Could they make the children of white Southern elites – whom the philanthropists assumed were the South’s future politicians, bankers, and industrialists – less bigoted by exposing them to black scholarship students? For ten years, the Stouffer Foundation, founded by Anne Cannon Forsythe and based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, attempted to fashion a social science study of the results.

Until Secret heard about the project, in 2015, the students’ stories and fates had not been recorded. The philanthropic group that initiated the exchange had remained silent, fearing that publicity would undo their work. In his book, Secret reconstructs a narrative history of this experiment, tracing the arc of the students’ lives and examining the era’s promise to desegregate American schools and professions. “In Berlin,” he writes, “the questions that will be on my mind – like the feasibility of integration as a social ideal – may be on German minds too, as the country seeks to absorb so many immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.” Secret has also developed an interactive multimedia website about the Stouffer Foundation’s push for interracial understanding, featuring the oral histories and profiles of all 140 students as well as the oral histories and reflections of their white peers about their experiences with racial diversity.