Faced with growing public pressure to end racial segregation in public schools, thousands of white parents in the early 1970s enrolled their children in private academies that sprang up across the South. Ellen Ann Fentress, a journalist and writer, was one of them. She is telling her story and urging other alumni of “seg academies” to come forward and give testimony about how attending an intentionally segregated school has shaped their lives as well as the social, political and economic fabric of the South. Fentress first told her story in June with an essay in the online publication the Bitter...