Gentry High School (Mississippi)

Gentry High School is a public secondary school located in Indianola, Mississippi, part of Sunflower County. Located at 801 B.B. King Road, the school is currently a part of the Sunflower County Consolidated School District and was formerly a part of the Indianola School District.

Historically the town of Indianola maintained separate high schools for its black and white students, with African-American students from one part of town enrolled at Gentry High School and white students enrolled elsewhere. In April 1969 the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the desegregation plan adopted by the Indianola Municipal Separate School District to be unconstitutional. The town's de facto segregation, banned by the 1954 landmark United States Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, was finally addressed, with the white high school converted to a junior high school while Gentry High School was integrated.

So-called "white flight" followed, with an overwhelming percentage of the white students of Indianola enrolled at Indianola Academy, a segregation academy which as a private school was not subject to federally mandated desegregation.

A great degree of segregation has largely continued over the subsequent decades. As of 1996 nearly 90% of Indianola's public school students were of African-American ethnic heritage. Meanwhile, Indianola Academy's student body, which numbered between 500 and 1,000 students over the school's first three decades of existence, included a total of only 4 or 5 black students during that entire interval.

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