WASHINGTON — A decade after the Supreme Court struck down segregated schooling in 1954, the president of a neighborhood association here wrote a letter urging leaders of local private schools to stop granting scholarships to further the cause of integration, asserting that it was “unwholesome and unwise to have a student body so miscegenated.”
One of the founders of Georgetown Day School, which had been integrated for 20 years at that point and whose population was one-fourth Black, wrote back.
Edith Nash, one of the school’s founders, noted that not only had it “always had more white applicants for scholarship assistance than Negro,” but “a thoroughly mixed enrollment is our aim,” according to the letter, parts of which were published in The Washington Post that year.
“If you feel this population is ‘miscegenated,’” she added, “that’s your problem.”
Nearly 60 years later, the first integrated school in Washington still firmly embraces the mission of its founders. Georgetown Day came under a national microscope this week in the escalating culture war over antiracism teaching in schools.
The war spilled into the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, who has served on Georgetown Day’s board of trustees since 2019.
The elite private school became a target of Republican senators, who portrayed it as the poster child for critical race theory, an academic term that conservatives have co-opted to challenge efforts to teach children about racism and inequality.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, took aim at Georgetown Day in her opening remarks at Judge Jackson’s hearing on Monday. The school had hosted a “woke kindergarten” program, Ms. Blackburn asserted, and it had taught 5-year-olds that they can choose their gender and “pushes an anti-racist education program for white families.”
Ms. Blackburn told Judge Jackson that her “public endorsement of…