Thread by @Mike_Hixenbaugh

My book "They Came for the Schools" is out today.
It tries to make sense of America's school board wars by showing how & why that fight exploded in one Texas suburb.

To really understand the anti-DEI backlash, I needed to uncover a much longer history.

Here's what I found🧵

First, some context: In 2021, Southlake, Texas, became a poster child — or cautionary tale — of the right’s new war on “woke.” The strategy pioneered there would be copied in towns across the nation — quietly shaping what untold numbers of children learn. chalkbeat.org/2024/05/10/the…

You’ve probably heard about some of this. The Southlake story went international after an admin, attempting to comply with new restrictions, told teachers to present both sides of the Holocaust. (The book reveals what happened *after* we broke that story) nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s…

@ahylton26 & I first delved into this story in our podcast, “Southlake.” You can hear Chapter 1 of my book in that feed today.

To fully understand why this fight exploded in Southlake and towns like it, I needed to go all the way back to the beginning. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

White settlers began arriving in the mid-1800s to the slice of North Texas that would one day become Southlake, wooed by land grants, rolling prairie and thick timber forest that had once been occupied by members of the Comanches, Kiowa, and Wichita tribes.

In 1919, white men voted to raise their property taxes to build a school and named it after B. E. Carroll, Tarrant County’s superintendent of public instruction—a country educator and elected official who, seemingly unbeknownst to residents today, was backed by the Ku Klux Klan.

A year later, a freed slave and wealthy rancher named Bob Jones built a school of his own to educate his grandchildren and other Black and mixed-race students who were not welcome at Carroll. Jones’ legacy is celebrated in Southlake today. stephaniedrenka.com/bob-jones-his-…

The schoolhouse named for Carroll became a central gathering place. Residents could on occasion pay 25¢ to see white actors put on blackface and perform old-time Negro minstrels at the school, with proceeds going to the PTA. (I’ve never heard this history discussed in Southlake.)

On September 22, 1956 — amid a rush of suburban development following Brown v Board — a few dozen people came to the Carroll schoolhouse for a different reason: to prevent change from coming to their rural, overwhelmingly white community.

By a vote of 30–24, the town of Southlake was incorporated, not as part of a grand vision to become a top-class suburb, but to prevent a rush of new development. As the town’s first mayor, Gail Eubanks told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, they "incorporated for protection.”

For the next half-century, that word—“ protection”—would define the governing philosophy of Southlake and suburban communities like it across America. Years later, it would be enshrined in the Carroll school district’s official motto: “Protect the Tradition.”

The town’s early leaders adopted rules to protect against growing too quickly, including zoning policies requiring new homes to be built on at least one acre of land, and prohibiting the construction of apartments and other multifamily housing.

In an era when cities could no longer explicitly keep residents out based on their race, the debate in places like Southlake was framed around a coded set of phrases. Residents said they were determined to protect the town’s “rural atmosphere” from "crime" and “urban” problems.

(Pausing here to note that, as the town grew, that tradition of hosting minstrel shows to raise money for Carroll continued until at least the early 1960s. Here are two from 1960 and ’62 raising funds for the PTA and the baseball team.)

Opposition to affordable housing in the ensuing years became a litmus test for anyone seeking office in Southlake. The outrage would be so severe if the town ever voted to allow apartments, one zoning board member said in 1985, “we might as well just bring our own rope.”

What none of them acknowledged at the time—at least not publicly—was that, in America, income is often a proxy for race, and that by keeping Southlake wealthy, its leaders were, in effect, keeping it white.

That reality is reflected in Carroll yearbooks from the 1980s, filled with page after page of all-white faces. In one from 1983, photos show members of the school’s 4-H Club appearing to perform a skit while dressed in blackface—a tradition steeped in centuries of racism.

(At the time, a new niche field was emerging focused on the way race-neutral policies — like suburban zoning rules — perpetuate racism. It was called Critical Race Theory. But more than three decades would pass before most Americans became aware of that phrase.)

By the 1990s, wealthy Black families had begun moving to Southlake and other elite suburbs, in search of the same academic opportunities that drew white parents. The community began to change; some resisted.

Previewing the current fights over the role of Christianity in public schools, in 1992 a Carroll student sued the district over its tradition of praying at pep rallies. The lawsuit stirred a hornet’s nest of resentment and landed the town on the Today show. The student prevailed

For the most part, tensions over race simmered out of sight—until a Carroll Dragons football game in October 1996. That day, Carroll was playing Grapevine, a cross-town rival led by a pair of star Black athletes.

A white Carroll student held a sign in the stands that read: T.A.N.H.O. — short for “tear a n—— r’s head off.” School officials found the same acronym scrawled in shoe polish on three cars in the parking lot.

Several Black parents came forward after — in a preview of what would happen two decades later — to share accounts of racist insults their children had endured at Carroll. “There are a whole lot of things going on that aren’t as noticeable as a sign at a football game.”

"We have to start dealing with the diversity in our community," one school board member said in ’96. "We're located between two airports and we're attracting a more diverse population. We're not isolated anymore, and people need to understand that."

The district formed a committee. The school board promised changes. They brought in a guest speaker to talk about diversity. And then … everyone seemed to move on.

The next school year, in 1998, when @DMagazine ranked Carroll one of the five best high schools in the region, the principal credited the town’s traditional values for its success, calling his school—seemingly without a hint of self-awareness—“a throwback to the 1950s.”

@DMagazine Because at Southlake Carroll, he said, “doing the right thing is the popular thing to do.” The principal’s rosy description of an era when anti-Black racism was enshrined in Texas law went unchallenged in the magazine. dmagazine.com/publications/d…

@DMagazine Southlake and other suburbs continued to grow and diversify over the next decade, welcoming thousands Black, Latino and Asian-American families. Southlake’s football team became a powerhouse. Test scores soared. More families flocked to town.

@DMagazine That all culminated in this infamous story in D Magazine: Welcome to Perfect City, U.S.A.
dmagazine.com/publications/d…

@DMagazine A year later, some Black folks noticed local opposition to Barack Obama went beyond the typical left-right divide. In one incident, a Black Southlake resident reported to police that someone had come into his yard overnight and set his Obama sign on fire.

@DMagazine Later, when the newly elected president Obama gave a video address to the nation’s schoolchildren focused on the importance of education, Carroll leaders declined to play his remarks, bowing to pressure from parents who’d accused the president of trying to indoctrinate children.

@DMagazine It was the rise of the nation’s next president that really teed up the fights tearing through the nation's schools today.

@DMagazine In suburb after suburb between 2017 and 2019, school districts responded to local reports of racist incidents — many directly invoking President Trump — by hiring DEI consultants and proposing diversity plans, setting the stage for the nationwide backlash of 2020 and 2021.

@DMagazine For Southlake, it went like this: After a 2018 viral video of white Carroll students chanting the N-word, Black parents came forward. A committee was formed. This time, the issue didn’t fade from the spotlight. A diversity plan was proposed. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/v…

@DMagazine But rather than lead to changes, that plan ended up sparking a local backlash movement that has since rippled to suburbs in every corner of the country.

Southlake’s story became the story of America.

@DMagazine Southlake’s history mirrors lots of other suburbs that have become anti-DEI battlegrounds. It’s the story of places and schools initially designed for white folks that grew more diverse over time but never fully grappled with that history.

@DMagazine Today, the Carroll school district is at the center of a test over how far the federal government will go to enforce civil rights protections for Black & LGBTQ students after local voters rejected such interventions. This story broke last week: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s…

@DMagazine There’s so much more to that story.

I wrote this book for anyone living or teaching in a town where schools have become a target of anti-DEI activists and book bans and has wondered *why* it’s happening.

Pick up a copy and let me know what you think.

/END