Strider Academy was a PK-12 school in

Tallahatchie County Tallahatchie County is a county in the U.S. state of Mississippi. At the 2020 census, the population was 12,715. Its county seats are Charleston and Sumner. Tallahatchie County is located in the Mississippi Delta region, divided by the Tall ...

Mississippi Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, which operated from 1971 until 2018. The school was established in 1971 as a segregation academy to allow white parents to avoid sending their children to racially integrated public schools. The school was sited on

Mississippi Highway 32 Mississippi Highway 32 (MS 32) is a state highway in northern Mississippi it runs from east to west for , serving the counties of Bolivar, Sunflower, Tallahatchie, Yalobusha, Calhoun, and Chickasaw. The publicly accessible portion of MS 32 is ...

, about west of

Charleston Charleston most commonly refers to: * Charleston, South Carolina * Charleston, West Virginia, the state capital * Charleston (dance) Charleston may also refer to: Places Australia * Charleston, South Australia Canada * Charleston, Newfoundlan ...

and about north of Tippo. The school ceased operations at the end of the 2017–18 school year.

History

Strider Academy was founded in 1971 as a segregation academy and was an accredited member of the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools. The school was said to be named after Clarence Strider, the

Sheriff who obstructed the investigation of the 1955 lynching of

Emmett Till Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery ...

in a successful attempt to acquit the murderers. The school campus suffered two fires in two weeks in August 1977. The main building and the field house were both destroyed. The

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...

was involved in the investigation. In 1989, Greenwood public schools trustee Jeff Milman of Tippo resigned after the NAACP protested his decision to enroll his children in Strider Academy instead of racially integrated public schools. Milman stated that his children wanted to attend Strider and that it was closer to his residence. In 1993, the school did not receive an increase in admissions from Greenwood parents; at the time white parents were concerned about a plan to put all students in the same middle school in Greenwood. By that year the school was air conditioned.
Clipping
from Newspapers.com. In 1999, it started an elementary school level daycare program. As of 2016, the school's students were 96% white, but Tallahatchie County was 54% black. Filings for the 2015–16 school year indicates that all seventy-two students at the school were white. In July 2018, the school announced it would not reopen for the following school year.

References

{{Education in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi Private K–12 schools in Mississippi Schools in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi Segregation academies in Mississippi Educational institutions established in 1971 1971 establishments in Mississippi Educational institutions disestablished in 2018 2018 disestablishments in Mississippi