How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education

This paper traces the origins of today`s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the ``school choice`` enterprise for libertarians was not then - and is not now--to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources. Based on extensive original archival research, this paper shows how Friedman`s case for vouchers to promote ``educational freedom`` buttressed the case of Southern advocates of the policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. His approach - supported by many other Mont Pelerin Society members and leading libertarians of the day --taught white supremacists a more sophisticated, and for more than a decade, court-proof way to preserve Jim Crow. All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.