““In Georgia, beating back a 1949 challenge from black parents to equalize the schools, Governor Herman Talmadge had already proposed a constitutional amendment that would authorize the state legislature to scrap the public school system altogether and “channel state funds into tuition grants for [white] students attending private schools.” In other words, while threatening to scuttle public education and provide state-funded tuition for whites to attend segregated private academies, Talmadge, who had vowed, “as long as I am Governor, … Negroes will not be admitted to white schools,” never contemplated any educational alternatives for the 321,255 African American children in the state in 1950.””
