Southwest Georgia Academy is a K–12 private school in Damascus, Georgia. It was established in January 1970[1] as a segregation academy;[2] the property formerly housed Damascus High School.[3] The founding headmaster was W.T. Henry.[4] According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 266 of 272 students, or 97.8% of the student body were white as of 2018,[5] while 49% of the population of the county was white.[6]
Leary is consequently a profoundly segregated town. Nine hundred and sixty-one people live in the hamlet. About seven hundred are black, and the rest are white. The whites live in several dozen neat brick and frame houses in the southwestern end of town. They live on paved streets with sidewalks, and their children attend private schools in Albany, Damascus, or Shellman. In 1970 when the Calhoun County schools consolidated, several of Leary's more prosperous whites pooled their money, bought a yellow Bluebird school bus, lettered it "Southwest Georgia Academy", and now, at great expense, trundle their boys and girls off in it every morning for the long ride necessary to assure that they will not attend classes with blacks.
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