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The story
The school was founded as a segregation academy in response to the court ordered integration of public schools. In 1967 civil rights activist Lee Shelton claimed that the Ku Klux Klan was raising funds to establish Cape Fear Academy as a private school for white students.
Overt racial discrimination by the school administration eventually faded. The first black student to graduate was in 1984. One other black student had attended, but had left the school without graduating after experiencing bullying and racism.
In 2005, the student body voted to change the school's athletics team name from The Rebels to The Hurricanes.
In 2021, Cape Fear Academy was sued by a student who alleged that CFA expelled her after she protested the school's failure to take action after she was sexually assaulted and then harassed by three male students, in violation of Title IX. The school argued that, since it never accepted federal funding, it was not subject to any federal non-discrimination laws. In June 2022, Judge James C. Dever ruled that since CFA had recently begun to accept loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, the school was obliged to comply with federal civil rights laws.
The lawsuit led to renewed media attention concerning Cape Fear Academy's history of racial and gender discrimination. It was alleged that racial and gender-based discrimination and harassment remained prevalent at the school.
In 2023, the school announced an anonymous donor had established a $5 million scholarship fund for students of color.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cape Fear Academy, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4