Noliwe Rooks published an article in the New York Times about the lessons that Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith Teachers is about schools, segregation, our past and our present. The Senator gained a certain notoriety by joking about “a public hanging,” which in Mississippi means a lynching. Sadly, her open racism did not prevent her re-election.

Professor Rooks is a historian. She understands that the past is always with us.

She writes:

Racist violence, segregation and voter suppression are not shared historical jokes. They are our present. Unless we change course, they will define our future. Ms. Hyde-Smith claims not to have realized there was anything wrong with what she said. She has steadfastly refused to apologize. Perhaps most important, since her comments came to light, she has yet to publicly engage in conversation with constituents of hers for whom hanging is not a joke and voting is a hard-fought, continually challenged right. During the campaign, she did not acknowledge there was even a dialogue worth having. Perhaps this is because for much of her life she has been hearing only one side of an argument and doesn’t know or care that there is a larger conversation to be had. If this is the case, it may have something to do with where Ms. Hyde-Smith went to school and where she chose to send her daughter to school.

Segregation academies were privately owned and run but largely financed by tax dollars, at least initially. As happened in other Southern states in the decades following the Brown decision, lawmakers in Mississippi authorized the use of vouchers to allow parents to pay for a percentage of the tuition at these schools. The practice was found unconstitutional in 1970 and, once various appeals were exhausted, banned in 1971. Up until that point, this money allowed white parents to receive up to $240 dollars per year. In Mississippi, depending on the school and the tuition charged there, that amount covered between 50 percent and 90 percent of the total tuition cost. By 1969, of the 49 schools receiving state-provided tuition vouchers in Mississippi, 48 were white-only segregation academies.

Professor Rooks makes the important point that segregation is pervasive. She reminds us that the segregation academies were the first examples of “school choice.”

Despite lots of winking, every one in the South is well aware why school choice was created. Nothing has changed.

For the first time in memory, we have a Secretary of Education and an administration prepared to abandon even a pretense of supporting school integration.

And Mississippi has a Senator who is a true believer in the Confederacy.

Segregation and school choice go together like a horse and carriage.

Noliwe Rooks (@nrookie) is the director of American studies at Cornell and the author, most recently, of “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.”