Just in the last few months, a former aide to the governor of New York state and her husband were arrested for alleged illicit activities promoting the interests of China; a Chinese democracy activist was arrested and accused of spying for China; and a historian was convicted of being an agent for Beijing.

The three separate cases of former Albany functionary Linda Sun, dissident Yuanjun Tang and author Wang Shujun took place in New York alone. And they were not the first cases of alleged Chinese influence operations targeting immigrants from China in the Big Apple.

Those cases came to light as a detailed investigation by the Washington Post revealed that China’s diplomats and pro-Beijing diaspora were behind demonstrations in San Francisco that attacked opponents during President Xi Jinping’s visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit last November.

All bear the hallmarks of China’s “united front” influence operations conducted by government ministries, party operatives and local proxies – but in a veiled manner.

“United front work is a unique blend of influence and interference activities, as well as intelligence operations that the CCP uses to shape its political environment,” said the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in a report published last November.

What is the United Front Work Department?

Coordinating this overseas influence and interference work is Beijing’s shadowy United Front Work Department, or UFWD, set up in 1942, even before the Communists took over control of China.

Headed by Shi Taifeng, a Politburo member, it seeks to promote China’s political interests through an extensive network of organizations and individuals around the world, experts say.

It spares no effort trying to push Beijing’s view – and crush dissenting opinions – among people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, ethnic minorities such as Mongolians, Tibetans and Uyghurs as well as among religious groups.

How does the UFWD operate?

The United Front Work Department is engaged in a mixture of activities, from interfering in the Chinese diaspora and suppressing dissidents to gathering intelligence, encouraging investment in China and facilitating the transfer of technology, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, said in a report.

It uses quasi-official organizations and civil society groups based overseas to blur the line between official and private, giving China plausible deniability in many cases, witnesses told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which advises Congress on China.

It funds Confucius Institutes – Chinese-language study centers on university campuses around the world – many of which have been shut down in the United States. It also funds diplomats’ engagement with foreign elites and its police force’s perpetration of “transnational repression” – clamping down on dissidents or opponents outside China’s borders, the review commission said in a 2023 report based on expert testimony.

United front groups often have innocuous sounding names, like the Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification or the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Many appear to be ordinary overseas Chinese community organizations, and are found in business and even in multinational corporations.

Lurking behind or within them, though, are government or party agencies – very often China’s powerful intelligence, security and secret police agency.

“United front groups are used – very specifically – to hide the Ministry of State Security,” said Peter Mattis, head of the non-profit Jamestown Foundation. “This is why I like to think of the United Front Work Department as the tall grass that is sort of deliberately cultivated to hide snakes,” he told RFA.

What is the history of China‘s ’united front’ work?

Under the Moscow-led Comintern in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party adapted Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s concept of forming a “united front” – forging temporary alliances with friends and lesser enemies in order to defeat greater enemies.

After Mao Zedong’s Communists took power in 1949, united front work focused internally on co-opting Chinese capitalists and intellectuals, who were brought to heel and persecuted in the 1950s under Mao’s vicious ideological campaigns.

Xi Zhongxun, the father of current President Xi Jinping, played a key united front work role with top Tibetan Buddhist figures, trying to influence the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.

What role has Xi played?

While China denies meddling in the affairs of foreign nations, experts say that under President Xi, China’s overseas influence activities have become more aggressive and technologically sophisticated.

In 2017, Xi famously repeated Mao’s description of united front work as a “magic weapon” for the party’s success. But two years before that, he established a “leading small group” to coordinate top-level united front work and carried out a major expansion and reorganization of the UFWD.

“We will build a broad united front to forge great unity and solidarity, and we will encourage all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation to dedicate themselves to realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation,” Xi told the 20th Party Congress in 2022.

That congress saw Xi’s top ideological theorist, Wang Huning, who ranks fourth in the Politburo, appointed to lead the national-level united front system, the House Select Committee report said.

Xi has built up the power and capacity of the UFWD, which controls 11 subordinate government agencies, including the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the State Administration for Religious Affairs, according to Australia’s ASPI.

What are some examples of the UFWD’s efforts in the U.S.?

In New York, prosecutors say that Linda Sun and her husband, Christopher Hu, received millions of dollars in cash, event tickets and gourmet salted duck from the UFWD. In exchange, Sun tried to remove references to Taiwan in state communications, and obtained unauthorized letters from the governor’s office to help Chinese officials travel, prosecutors say.

In California during Xi’s visit in November, the Washington Post reported, the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals and directly interacted with aggressive actors who punched and kicked anti-Xi protesters and attacked them with flagpoles and chemical spray. U.S. stopovers by Taiwan leaders have drawn similar protests.

Who are the targets of united front work?

Sun and Hu represent a key demographic in the UFWD’s crosshairs: the Chinese diaspora. The activist Tang had access to the overseas Chinese dissident and pro-democracy community and its network of supporters.

United front pressure and harassment tactics – including threats against family in China – are deployed against diaspora members of China’s persecuted ethnic and religious minorities: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and members of the banned Falun Gong movement.

Citizens of Taiwan have for decades been pressured by united front efforts to support unification with the Communist-controlled mainland.

The recent imposition of draconian national security legislation in Hong Kong has made citizens and exiles who oppose those authoritarian steps in formerly free Chinese territory targets of united front pressure.

These targets are not alone and the list is growing, with Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand also grappling with Chinese influence campaigns that smack of united front work.

“There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work: all bureaus of the UFWD and all areas of united front work involve overseas activities,” the report from Australia’s ASPI said.

“This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else,” it said.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington told Radio Free Asia that the United Front’s domestic role is to “promote cooperation between the (Communist Party) and people who are not members of it.” Outreach to the diaspora “helps give full play to their role as a bridge linking China with the rest of the world,” the embassy spokesperson’s office said in an e-mailed statement.

“Its work is transparent, above-board and beyond reproach,” it said. “By making an issue out of China’s United Front work, some people are trying to discredit China’s political system and disrupt normal exchange and cooperation between China and the United States.”

Additional reporting by Jane Tang of RFA Investigative. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Paul Eckert for RFA.

This story contains a racial slur.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Join us for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “segregation academy” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.

Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on race, though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. “Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

Once, when they hadn’t worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed talking to Samantha. “I caught word that she said she missed me too,” she said.

Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13 students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered more, especially a theater program. “I definitely would have been a theater kid,” she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in Atlanta: “There’s so many different cultures, so many people to meet.”

Jazmyne’s grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused segregation, Jazmyne doesn’t think it’s the cause of the ongoing divisions.

“Nobody around here is really racist,” she said. “We just haven’t come together. We’ve been doing our own thing all the time.”

Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived, learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll called Hangman’s Hill.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father’s college classmates, spoke at commencement in 1954. The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and boycotts — landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to take over the property. They kept the school open for several more years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her father and his parishioners to tear down the school’s church.

She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.

The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman, Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become one of the first nine Black students to cross the county’s racial line that day.

Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building. She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They smacked her head with crutches.

One day in science class, a boy sneered: “Nigger, if you make more than me on the test, I’m gonna kill you.” When she did so, he hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the hallway.

She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden Academy. So did most of the students who’d come with her.

By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation academy movement.

In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to open a segregation academy, which Gov. George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open — and called on state lawmakers to help.

In 1965, the state’s legislature approved $3.75 million — worth about $36 million today — to fund tuition grants that paid for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.

Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which “enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history,” Suitts wrote in the journal Southern Spaces.

Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.

In March 1970, Camden’s local newspaper reported, “Promoters of additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in the arm this week.” The federal government had filed a plan for desegregating the local schools.

“The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill,” the article said.

Two weeks later, another headline reported: “Private School Plan Shaping Up.” The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.

Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people across the South argued their motives for embracing the new academies weren’t racist. Publicly, they cited “choice,” “freedom” and higher-quality (often Christian) education.

But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many academies opened hastily, often in people’s homes, churches or vacant buildings. Researchers who visited some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were “dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials, cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment.”

Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was “generally regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools in the area,” the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.

The nearby public school started the year with half the students it had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.

Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.

Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E. Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy’s former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew’s classroom was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with sunshine-yellow doors.

On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and condemned it, their home stood in that spot.

Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children — just as she once did on this campus.

Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black children made history and suffered terribly for it.

“It is really heartbreaking,” she said.

Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master’s thesis. Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.

Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of her house.

Sheffield didn’t go to either of them. Although she is white, her parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were Black.

She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the academies?

She decided to find out.

In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor’s degree, she landed a job teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden, 40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.

Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on Antioch Baptist Church, where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.

On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy’s building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees. Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff she saw were two custodians.

It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.

As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn’t they go to the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy’s Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.

Others figured Wilcox Academy’s academics were better. But it was hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don’t have to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.

To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn’t say it was because the students there are Black, “but that was the sense I got,” Sheffield said.

She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all of their friends were white. Their parents’ friends were white. And they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.

By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.

Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties, state records indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one researcher found.

Wilcox Academy’s principal did not respond to ProPublica’s multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy’s impact on local school segregation, why it doesn’t participate in the existing tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new program.

Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to race — the comfort of their own, discomfort with another — even if they didn’t recognize it as such.

She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master’s degree. (She’s now a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi studying segregation academies.)

In her master’s thesis, she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama, particularly “a tidal wave” of openings in 1970. That fall alone, 23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978, public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties — including Wilcox — was more than 90% Black.

“These segregation academies proved to be white resisters’ most successful tool of resistance,” Sheffield wrote.

In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another well, people often don’t. It’s been that way since white settlers arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so many enslaved laborers that the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.

Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They don’t often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.

Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He graduated from the public schools he now leads. “Will we ever know each other as people here?” he asked. “I’m not sure.”

He noted that it’s difficult to imagine how to create an integrated school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of history.

“We don’t trust one another because we are so separate,” he said.

Two years ago, some of the county’s mostly white large landowners got Alabama legislators to derail the county and school board’s request to bring a property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the elementary school Threadgill-Matthews’ nephew attends. Its aging structures have suffered two fires.

People who don’t send their children to public schools can lack a reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the public schools.

“If people are together, they will understand each other in more ways — and trust more,” Saulsberry said. “And we won’t continue to die as a county.”

But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is Black Belt Treasures, where employees coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson, who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become close friends with the white women who work there.

One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a public school’s art poster contest. Both were active with a local racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.

Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they said, wasn’t easy or simple.

One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send your kids to the public schools?

“It’s not as cut-and-dried,” she said.

The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the academy’s religious education was a key factor, along with its small class sizes and personal attention from teachers.

Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna herself. “You now have three and four generations of students that have gone to the school,” she said. “It’s become more about school pride or tradition.”

Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school. There’s almost always fundraising underway. The academy’s annual turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971. Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40 years.

Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other nonwhite students at the school. “We’re ready for coming together,” Law said. “How do we do that?”

Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County — though not in the public schools.

Alabama’s new school-choice program will be open to most of its students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under Alabama’s existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of students who have received the money in recent years have been Black. The new program, which will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four times as many students.

In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.

In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny implications of the new voucher opportunities.

Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many will white leaders accept?

Woods grew up in Camden’s public schools and describes the “broken bridge” between the two communities. He never imagined that he’d one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black teachers.

But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers outright racism.

“We are still set in those old-time ways,” he said. “But God has made it better, and it’s time to let it go.”

He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to feel valued at the academy. Woods said he’s told the staff, “We still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate them to get them there to the school.”

Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn’t expect many to apply regardless. “I’m not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will be if the Black child went there.”

Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district’s standardized test results could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide far more than test scores can capture.

His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools. Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders, brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.

His students also can get mental health care, special education services, bus services and free meals — which few area academies offer.

“We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side,” Saulsberry said.

Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter expects private schools to follow the college football playbook: “They’ll be out to recruit now.”

When Woods coaches the academy’s teams, the stands in the gymnasium fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families filled those seats.

Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents. “A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private school,” he said. “But they just couldn’t afford it.” Now, in cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70 years: How would “the white school” treat their children?

To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies, ProPublica adapted existing research using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey to identify K-12 schools that were founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90% white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due to desegregation — many Catholic schools, for example, met this criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data, from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in which each school was located.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research. Sergio Hernandez contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

Ambulances and other emergency vehicles are frequently grounded due to rising costs, said Than Than Soe, chairwoman of Yangon’s Right to Survive Social Assistance Association.

“The cost for fuel is around 60,000 kyat [$28.56] per day,” Than Than Soe told RFA. “We can fill our cars with only 20,000 kyat worth each time, and that should be enough for a trip.

“But sometimes we have to go to places that are quite far away, and we worry that our vehicle might not make it back home.”

Than Than Soe said her group does not ask for set amounts of donations for their help, which can run into costs of from 60,000 to 100,000 kyat per day. “Donors can give as much as they want, and so it’s very difficult for us to operate under this system,” she said.

Khin Maung Zin, secretary of the Myo U Lin Funeral Support Association, told RFA that his group can no longer travel long distances due to rising costs of fuel.

“There are situations where we are asked for free help but are not able to provide it. We just have to say we’re sorry and refuse the requests as our association is low on funds. And we are getting even fewer donations now,” he said.

“In the past, we received around 450,000 kyat [$214.23] per month, but now we don’t even get 200,000 [$95.21]. We even have to be thrifty in covering our office expenses.”

A round trip to Pathein, a city located around 190 km to the west of Yangon, used to cost only 60,000 kyat but now costs around 130,000, he added.

'Problems, inconvenience'

Also speaking to RFA, Chairman Neyin Gyan of the Happy Taxi Family Charitable Group said that none of Yangon’s more than 270 charity organizations have been able to function effectively since the Feb. 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar, and half of these have now shut down.

“And we have heard of similar situations with some charity groups in other places, some of which have been temporarily closed,” he said. “This is very unfortunate, because if a charity group in a township stops working, this will cause a lot of problems and inconvenience for that township’s residents.”

Charitable groups don’t want to stop their work, Neyin Gyan said.

“But with the rising costs of fuel and repairs, this has become too much for them. Even for a big group like ours, we now have some debts to settle, but we have managed to keep going.

“If we become too burdened by debt, we will have to stop,” he said.

Myint Kyaing, a resident of Yangon’s Dawbon township, said that poor and needy citizens suffer most when these groups are forced to close.

“People ask these charity groups for help because they have no money, and when the groups can’t help, it is the lower-level workers and the destitute who will suffer,” he said.

“There are many charity groups in this township, but where we could send out 10 cars in the past, we can now send out only three. We’re running our operations now with donations and support from the people who can afford it.”

Social assistance associations formerly provided 24-hour service to Myanmar residents before the coup, but junta authorities then imposed restrictions on travel outside township boundaries and said that ambulances operating without official registration would be seized.

However, charity groups have promised to endure the present crisis and serve the public as much as they can.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Richard Finney.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

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Private equity is seemingly inescapable. From housing to hospitals and fisheries to fast food, equity investors have acquired a host of businesses in recent decades. Private equity firms control more than $6 trillion in assets in the U.S. But what makes them different from any other type of investor putting their money into a business?

Private equity investors — typified by firms like Bain Capital, Apollo Global Management, TPG, KKR and Blackstone — are different from venture capitalists, who provide a cash infusion to small startups and hope they blossom into the next Facebook. Nor are they stock traders making split-second decisions to buy or sell shares in public companies. Rather, private equity funds aim to take control of a business for a relatively short time, restructure it and resell the company at a profit.

But as ProPublica and many others have shown, the ways in which private equity goes about this restructuring can raise a number of concerns, over such things as layoffs and furloughs for employees and degraded services for customers. Critics also worry that private equity firms weigh down acquired companies with substantial debt from the money borrowed to finance the purchase.

Private equity funds are pooled investments that are generally not open to small investors. Private equity firms invest the money they collect on behalf of the fund’s investors, usually by taking controlling stakes in companies. The private equity firm then works with company executives to make the businesses — called portfolio companies — more valuable so they can sell them later at a profit.

This is different from, say, an individual investor buying a share of Amazon stock for $135. Purchasing that share gives you an infinitesimal stake in the company and entitles you to any dividend the company may pay out, but your ownership stake isn’t large enough to affect the company’s decision-making and operations. Private equity funds, by contrast, are not publicly traded securities, and the amount they invest usually involves trying to take a controlling stake in companies.

Private equity funds are generally backed by investments from large institutional investors: pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and very wealthy individuals. Private equity firms manage these funds, using both investors’ contributions and borrowed money.

Like any business, private equity firms want to make money, generating returns for their investors. Fund managers typically spend time conducting extensive research on both companies and industries — called due diligence — before making an investment. They consider multiple factors when deciding to invest. Among them are whether a company operates in an industry that’s difficult for other competitors to enter, generates consistent profits (or can become profitable), provides a reliable cash flow so it can pay off debt, has a strong position or brand within its market, has an effective management team, isn’t likely to face disruptive change through technologies or regulation and may be underperforming relative to other companies in its industry.

As of September 2020, about one-third of North American private equity firms’ $6.5 trillion in assets were so-called “dry powder”: cash or highly liquid securities that could be quickly invested at the right opportunity. The growth of private equity and other forms of private investment has, experts say, resulted in fewer companies going public and many more staying private for longer.

Once private equity firms acquire a company, they encourage executives to make the company operate more efficiently before selling — or “exiting” — several years later, either through a sale to another investor or through an initial public offering.

“The number one factor private equity firms focus on now is the ability to grow the revenue of the company,” Steven Kaplan, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said in an email. Other considerations, Kaplan said, include reducing costs, refinancing existing debt and multiple arbitrage — the latter a term describing how private equity funds try to acquire firms trading below their intrinsic value.

Critics of private equity, notably U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, argue that private equity firms’ focus on turning a quick profit destroys long-term value and harms workers. But not everyone agrees. In some cases, particularly with distressed companies that can’t pay their debts, private equity firms are often willing to lend money to businesses when traditional lenders such as banks won’t. Defenders of private equity also note that their need for returns serves retirees — public pensions are responsible for about a third of investment into private equity funds. The median North American pension fund invests about 6% of its assets into private equity funds.

“To make money, you have to sell the company to someone,” Kaplan said. “If you have destroyed long-term value, you are going to have a hard time exiting. The critics essentially assume that buyers are stupid on a grand scale. That’s not a plausible assumption.”

In response to the criticism, some private equity firms have begun offering equity to workers of the companies they acquire under the belief that if the company does well, everyone — and not just management and the fund managers — should share in a company’s success.

“The problem is not private equity in general,” said Eileen Appelbaum, a critic of private equity and co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a progressive think tank. “The problem is private equity leveraged buyouts.”

Large private equity firms, she said, don’t ultimately create wealth, but tend to extract it from companies through the use of leverage and other means. When selling companies, private equity firms frequently sell them to other private equity firms, often without full transparency. “They maintain a myth of doing really well,” she said.

By contrast, smaller private equity firms that acquire a handful of smaller companies tend to do better at adding value because they tend to buy businesses that are more likely to need improvements. The acquiring firms can’t as easily use the same kinds of financial engineering, she said.

Even though private equity firms generally invest little of their own money into acquisitions, they typically receive both a small percentage of a company’s total assets (usually 2%) as a management fee and a 20% cut of resulting profit from a sale of the company, all of which the U.S. government taxes at a significant discount to the firm under a tax advantage called “carried interest.” Under this compensation scheme — called “two-and-twenty” — the private equity firm makes some money regardless of whether its portfolio companies are profitable.

Both Republicans and Democrats have called for the “carried interest” loophole to be closed. A bill backed by U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer aims to partially close the loophole by only allowing firms to take advantage of carried interest once they’ve owned a company for five years — two years longer than current law. Private equity firms argue that allowing fund managers to take pay as carried interest occurs only when the fund (and thus the companies) are profitable.

Private equity firms also market their funds as high-yield vehicles for institutional and wealthy investors, claiming the potential for returns higher than public stock indices like the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks. Additionally, private equity funds have a reputation for being less volatile than individual stocks, which can spike or crater based on something as minor as a tweet. The comparison isn’t perfectly fair, however: Investors in private equity funds must lock their money into a fund for many years and don’t start receiving distributions until later in the cycle, whereas retail investors with an S&P 500 mutual fund can buy and sell much more easily.

There are certainly private equity success stories in which distressed businesses are turned around and then eventually sold at a profit. But private equity has a reputation for aggressive cost management and saddling companies with heavy debt loads, which can result in neglect of vital but non-revenue-generating aspects of an investment and overconsolidation — acquiring multiple similar businesses, which reduces competition and can have far-reaching impacts on costs and labor.

The current version of private equity was born out of the leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s, in which cutthroat investors borrowed heavily to purchase companies and squeeze as much money as possible out of their purchases, usually by liquidating assets and looting pension funds.

The percentages of deals that have been financed with borrowed money have declined markedly over time. In the 1980s, according to Kaplan, deals were frequently consummated at 90% debt-to-enterprise value ratios, meaning nearly all of the money used for the acquisition was borrowed. If a company cost $100 million to acquire, the private equity fund would borrow $90 million and use $10 million of its own investors’ money — equity — to finance the purchase. In the 1990s, the typical ratio declined to closer to 70%. Nowadays, typical leverage ratios are in the 50% to 60% range.

Buying a company using debt is called a leveraged buyout. It’s similar to taking out a loan to buy a house and then renting it out to a tenant, with the cash flow from rent meant to pay down the landlord’s mortgage.

Why does private equity use so much debt? Generally, it amplifies a private equity fund’s expected returns on its investments, in part because the federal government allows interest payments on debt to be tax-deductible. Because it enhances returns, it also enhances the firm’s expected profit. The trade-off is that heavy leverage increases the risk that the firm will be unable to make its debt payments.

One of the more criticized aspects of leveraged buyouts is that the debt used to finance the acquisition doesn’t belong to the equity firm or fund. Rather, it belongs to the newly acquired company — and it can become an anchor that drags that business down.

The collapse of Toys R Us is a good example. Private equity giants including Bain Capital and KKR joined together in 2005 to purchase the flagging kids’ retail giant for $7.5 billion, even as the retail toy industry was contracting amid increased competition from Amazon and other online sellers. Though the once-popular chain’s revenues did not sink notably in the years that followed, the billions in debt related to the purchase continued to grow relative to the company’s revenue as its owners reinvested excess cash into the business to make it competitive with online retailers. Eventually, debt holders lost patience and decided that they could get more of their money back if Toys R Us closed up entirely than if it continued operations.

In 2020, ProPublica spotlighted a hospital chain run by a private equity firm that had repeatedly tried and failed to unload its health care business on new buyers. Employees at hospitals under this umbrella told us they were sometimes unable to purchase basic supplies like sponges and IV fluids, elevators broke down regularly, and ambulance drivers’ fuel cards were rejected at the pump. Yet the equity firm had already managed to squeeze out $400 million in dividends and fees for itself and investors.

By the time a potential buyer was found for that hospital chain in early 2021, its equity owners had saddled it with $1.3 billion in debt, while the firm and investors were set to walk away debt-free and having reaped a total of $645 million.

Between 2009 and 2016, the number of private equity deals involving health care businesses tripled, according to a PWC report. These investments weren’t just in hospital groups, but also in staffing companies, particularly for specialties like emergency room physicians and anesthesiologists.

TeamHealth is a major medical staffing company and the country’s top employer of emergency room doctors. It’s also owned by private equity giant Blackstone and has been the subject of multiple ProPublica investigations.

In 2019, ProPublica joined with MLK50 to report on numerous low-income patients at Memphis hospitals who had been sued by a TeamHealth subsidiary over unexpected medical debt from ER visits. Such large-scale lawsuits had not been normal practice before Blackstone acquired TeamHealth in 2017. TeamHealth at first defended the lawsuits, arguing that it only went after patients who had not attempted to pay. But after the news organizations asked more questions about the lawsuits, TeamHealth announced it would no longer pursue them.

A subsequent review of tax returns, lawsuit depositions and court documents exposed how TeamHealth, after the Blackstone acquisition, had been marking up patients’ bills to maximize its profit. Tax records for two of the company’s Texas affiliates showed that they inflated their bills by nearly eight times the actual cost of the services provided. While much of that markup was billed but never collected, all of the additional profit from the amount eventually paid went not to the doctors but to TeamHealth. The firm said in a statement that it was fighting for doctors against underpaying insurance companies: “We work hard to negotiate with insurance companies on behalf of patients even as they unilaterally cancel contracts and attempt to drive physician compensation downward.”

“These companies put a white coat on and cloak themselves in the goodwill we rightly have toward medical professionals, but in practice, they behave like almost any other private equity-backed firm: Their desire is to make profit,” said Zack Cooper, a Yale professor of health policy and economics, about this practice.

In April 2020, we reported on TeamHealth cutting back on ER doctors’ hours at a time when some hospitals were being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Staffers employed by other equity-owned firms also told us their hours were being reduced or asked to take voluntary furloughs. At the time, the firms said these changes were needed to make up for the revenue shortfalls as a result of non-COVID patients canceling elective procedures and avoiding the ER. The firms also noted that they had not cut hourly rates.

As the U.S. crawled out from the Great Recession, private equity firms took advantage of very low interest rates and the appetite of investors looking for seemingly stable places to stash their cash to venture into new fields like residential real estate. Amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis, private equity has quickly become a dominant player in the apartment rental business.

Some have likened the private equity cycle of acquire, restructure, resell, repeat to the practice known as house flipping, in which a buyer purchases a home, makes improvements, then quickly sells it at a profit. But as ProPublica reporting has demonstrated, the way private equity firms restructure the homes they purchase differs significantly from the changes a house flipper would make.

A house flipper’s target buyer is someone looking to purchase a home, and so the upgrades the investor makes are intended to make the property more appealing to the people who will be living in it: Getting rid of popcorn ceilings and plywood paneling, replacing the kitchen appliances, slapping on new coats of paint and improving the curb appeal. Conversely, equity firms are eventually hoping to sell their housing assets to property management firms or other investors. These buyers are much less interested in whether the flooring is real wood or laminate, so long as the units are filled and tenants are paying their bills.

And that’s what ProPublica heard when speaking to tenants at apartment buildings purchased in recent years by private equity investors. Renters at one San Francisco apartment building told us that after their management company was purchased by a large private equity fund in 2017, rents soared, trash collected in the hallways and on the rooftop deck, and the building’s dedicated security guard was forced to cover a second property as well, resulting in nonresidents entering the apartment complex without permission. One tenant described having to heat her bathwater on the stove because she couldn’t get anything but cold water from the tap.

Private equity is now the dominant form of financial backing among the 35 largest owners of multifamily buildings, our analysis of National Multifamily Housing Council data showed. In 2011, about a third of the apartment units held by the top owners were backed by private equity. A decade later, half of them were.

One way private equity firms try to generate greater returns is to acquire similar assets and operate them under the same umbrella, allowing firms to take advantage of economies of scale by sharing costs. That often means putting a greater burden on workers, whether it’s nurses having to make due with fewer vital supplies, apartment employees having to work at multiple buildings or fishing vessels seeing their earnings chiseled away by equity owners who have shifted the costs of doing business onto individual operators.

“Tell me how I can catch 50,000 pounds of fish yet I don’t know what my kids are going to have for dinner,” asked fisherman Jerry Leeman in a recent ProPublica-New Bedford Light investigation into how private equity has taken over the New Bedford, Massachusetts, fishing industry.

While Leeman and his crew are not struggling to catch fish, their deal with equity-owned Blue Harvest leaves them responsible for much of their working expenses. They’re charged for fuel, gear, leasing of fishing rights and maintenance on company-owned vessels. While some of the fish they catch typically sell for $2.28 per pound at auction, Leeman has netted only about 14 cents per pound. Each of his crew members earns about half that amount.

Their situation is a result of a race in recent years by investors to snatch up as much of the regional fishing industry as possible.

Backed by $600 million in funding from a private equity firm, which proclaimed an initial goal of “dominance” over the scallop industry, Blue Harvest has been acquiring vessels, fishing permits and processing facilities up and down the East Coast since 2015. It subsequently expanded into tuna, swordfish and groundfish — Leeman’s specialty.

“What we’re seeing is a fundamental transformation of the fishing industry,” said Seth Macinko, a former fisherman who’s now an associate professor of marine affairs at the University of Rhode Island. “Labor is getting squeezed and coastal communities are paying the price.”

Blue Harvest did not respond to questions from ProPublica, but said in an email that the firm’s focus was to advance its company strategy so employees “can be confident about their future.”

“I cannot tell you how many times I have listened to employees scared to the core for themselves and their families due to unsubstantiated rumors about our company,” Blue Harvest President Chip Wilson wrote in an email.

Private equity has gone through multiple eras. In the 1980s, private equity firms focused on breaking up companies through highly leveraged buyouts. Starting in the 2010s, they began to focus on making large operational improvements to their portfolio companies, and the 2020s are expected to largely be the same. Some critics argue that the largest private equity firms have become so large themselves that they have become the very thing that they aimed to disrupt in the 1980s: large corporate behemoths that were slow, inefficient and had disparate business units. The size of private equity funds themselves continues to grow.

If Joe Biden signs the Manchin-Schumer bill into law, carried interest will be less lucrative for private equity funds. But absent massive regulatory changes that would make it too costly to finance buyouts or would entirely remove the carried interest tax savings, private equity firms will continue to acquire companies, restructure their operations, improve efficiency and seek to generate market-beating returns for their investors. “Most deals are competitive these days,” said Kaplan, the University of Chicago professor. “As a result, you cannot earn a good return without improving the business.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Chris Morran and Daniel Petty.

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