Zoë Burkholder
Speaking to a packed audience in Montclair, New Jersey in 1957, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall asked, “Can you name two counties in New Jersey where there is a mixed faculty and student body in every public school?” As lead counsel for Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall was certain of the answer: no. There was not a single community that could boast a fully integrated system with racially mixed students and faculty in every school—even in the supposedly liberal North. “The North,” Marshall continued, “cannot afford to look down on the South and the South cannot afford segregation” (Leader Cites Race Problems, 1957, p. 41).
While the Brown ruling represented a monumental victory, Marshall knew the struggle for equal and fully integrated public schools had only just begun. He acknowledged that the struggle against school segregation was a national problem. For Marshall, meaningful school desegregation meant Black students and teachers in every school nationwide, setting a bar for educational equality we are still fighting to secure today.
This essay builds on two of Marshall’s goals for meaningful school desegregation: school desegregation outside of the South and the challenge of Black teacher representation. Thanks to a wealth of new scholarship, we know that in the two decades after Brown (1954-1974), more than 38,000 Black teachers in the South and border states lost their jobs due to the closing of previously all Black schools, new testing and certification requirements, firing and non-rehiring of Black teachers, failure to replace Black teachers who retired, and demotion of Black school administrators. In a new study, Leslie T. Fenwick argues that this number has been grossly undercounted and that nearly 100,000 exceptionally credentialled Black teachers and principals were “systematically and illegally removed and replaced by less-qualified white educators” (Fenwick, 2022). Discriminatory practices during the peak of southern school desegregation created a sharp reduction in the diversity of the teaching force from which U.S. public schools have never fully recovered. But we are less certain about how this history unfolded outside of the southern context, which means we have only a partial understanding of how Brown impacted Black educators. This essay seeks to shed light on this question by investigating the history of Black teachers outside of the southern context after 1954.
Recently, scholars have confirmed what Black families have long known: Black teachers matter. Studying under a Black teacher can significantly improve a Black student’s attitudes about school, as well as their motivation and academic achievement (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002; Dixson, 2003). U.S. public schools today are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever, and about 14-15% of students identify as Black. Yet, the vast majority of teachers are white and the Black teaching force has declined since 2003-2004. In 2015-2016, the percentage of Black teachers declined to only 7% (down from 8% in 2003-2004) (de Brey et al, 2019).
In other words, today, Black teachers are underrepresented in U.S. public schools, the percentage of these teachers has declined in recent years, and the current political climate makes it unlikely this problem is going to be resolved without a meaningful, strategic intervention. To solve this problem, we need a clearer understanding of how school desegregation has affected Black teachers in public schools nationwide, which means we need to know what happened to Black teachers outside of those states that ran a dual system before 1954. Answering this question has the potential to reshape how we understand the legacy of Brown.
Many historians see Brown as a compromise—a positive force for good that included unintended “hidden costs,” especially for Black communities. Historian Vanessa Siddle Walker has a more complex interpretation of Brown’s legacy, highlighting the role of Black educators in the segregated South in terms of the three A’s—advocacy, aspiration, and access. For generations before Brown, Black educators in the segregated South worked hard to secure two of these three goals. They advocated for Black students through professional Black teaching associations, like the Georgia Teacher and Education Association did for the first half of the 20th century, which in turn fueled the growth of high-quality schools that supported Black students’ aspirations for full citizenship. School integration was supposed to secure the third “A”—access, by delivering access to the higher levels of funding and better facilities hoarded by whites.
However, according to Siddle Walker, the long, slow, contested process of court-ordered school desegregation in the South dismantled professional Black teaching associations, which stripped Black students of a powerful ally. In other words, when Black students finally won “access” to integrated schools in the 1960s and 1970s, they also lost the networks of Black educators that had sustained generations of “advocacy” and “aspiration.”
This essay builds on Siddle Walker’s framework to consider what happened to Black teachers outside of the southern context in the two decades after Brown. Did Black teachers in the rest of the country lose their jobs as school desegregation pushed North and West in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Did northern Black communities have to make a trade-off between advocacy and aspiration to secure equal access to public education? If not, what does this mean for the legacy of Brown and the history of school integration in the U.S. more broadly?
Last summer, I poured over hundreds of academic studies, school records, court cases, and primary historical sources to answer these vital questions. The research was complicated by the fact that northern school districts did not keep official records of students’ or teachers’ racial identities; however, I was able to piece together enough data to determine that school desegregation did not result in massive layoffs for Black teachers outside of the South and border states between 1954 and 1974. But many questions remained such as why not, how did this change over time, and what does it tell us about the underrepresentation of Black teachers outside of the South today?
Answering these questions forces us to grapple with the very different historical context for Black students in the North. Most people assume northern schools never segregated Black students, but this is not true. Despite state laws passed in the late 19th century, school segregation in the North, mid-West, and West increased through the first four decades of the 20th century alongside the growing size of Black communities. Whites responded by using illegal, racist school assignment policies to isolate Black students in particular schools. The result was some racial mixing in northern public schools, but also growing patterns of blatant school segregation (Douglas, 2005).
Most northern school administrators restricted Black teachers to working in all-Black classrooms or schools before the end of World War II in 1945. This created a dilemma for Black communities who urgently wanted more teaching positions—should they accept the expansion of illegal school segregation in order to secure more teaching jobs, or should they fight for school integration?
The question split Black northerners into two opposing camps as I show in my recent book, An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North. On one side, many Black families, teachers, and ministers were willing to accept the expansion of segregated classrooms and schools because it generated more of the stable, middle-class jobs Black communities needed. What is more, many Black families believed Black teachers were more nurturing, and therefore more likely to help Black students succeed. On the other side, the northern Black elite insisted integrated public facilities took precedence over teaching jobs. Black political power was growing, but it was not large enough in most communities to secure integrated public schools with a racially mixed faculty. As a result, school segregation ticked up between 1900 and 1940, but so too did the numbers of Black teachers outside of the South.
Importantly, few of these Black teachers had access to the kind of strong, well-established professional Black teaching associations that Siddle Walker documents in the South. However, there were numerous other Black civic, academic, and social organizations as well as Black churches that supported Black teachers, and Black families remained vocal advocates for Black educators (Woyshner, 2023). In this context, Black teachers and their allies advocated for the twin goals of professional equality for Black teachers and fair treatment for Black students. Many northern Black teachers, for example, quietly developed lessons on Black history and challenged the invisible barriers that restricted Black teachers to majority Black elementary schools.
This northern Black educational activism expanded alongside the growing civil rights movement after World War II. For example, in Chicago, Black elementary teacher Madeline Morgan persuaded the entire district to adopt a curriculum on Black history, which she wrote herself with the help of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Phi Delta Kappa sorority sisters, fellow Black Chicago Public School teachers, and Black librarians at the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library. In Montclair, New Jersey, a local chapter of the NAACP, with support of local “colored” branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), commissioned a civil rights audit that documented the acutely low level of Black teachers (only one), despite a high percentage of Black students in the district, and successfully petitioned the school board to hire more Black teachers (Burkholder, 2021; Hines, 2022).
These examples show how Black teachers outside of the southern context drew on Black clubs, churches, civil rights organizations, and civic associations to advocate for Black students, support Black aspirations for equality, and fight for equal access in the public schools. The context was in many ways much messier and more varied outside of the southern context—but the goals of equal education and full citizenship were the same.
Between 1945 and 1954, northern Black educators, their local allies, and national civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, fought for and won the right for Black teachers to work in racially mixed classrooms outside of the South, which significantly increased job opportunities for Black teachers. A postwar teacher shortage combined with less racist teacher placement policies improved Black teachers’ employment opportunities into the 1950s.
At first, the Brown ruling in 1954 had a very modest impact on northern schools, as most had already adopted supposedly “colorblind” school assignment and teacher placement policies. The assumption was that a colorblind teacher hiring process would be advantageous to Black candidates, and so the goal of school integration took precedence over the goal of hiring more Black teachers. After 1954, the number of Black teachers continued to rise, yet remained notably small. As late as 1966, only 15% of Black teachers in the U.S. worked outside of the South and border states that ran dual systems before 1954.
By this point, it was clear that the so-called colorblind teacher hiring policies in the North discriminated against Black teachers. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights blamed bureaucratic teacher certification and placement policies for this deficit. In Chicago, for instance, a new teacher could only work in schools with vacancies. Since teachers with seniority got preference, it meant new teachers—both Black and white—typically found openings only in majority Black schools as “the ‘popular’ schools with fewer openings are generally in the white areas.” However, White teachers transferred out of majority Black schools in Chicago at a much higher rate than Black teachers. Investigators concluded it was most likely that Black teachers’ retention related to “distance of the school from the teacher’s residence, fear of rejection in white schools, dedication to the teaching of underprivileged Negro children, and sheer inertia” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1962).
Frustrated by the dire state of educational inequality for Black students in the late 1960s, northern Black communities once again prioritized hiring more Black teachers as an essential feature of educational reform. Citing the Black Power movement, they insisted that Black teachers would serve as role models, provide appropriate discipline and high standards, and nurture and affirm Black students’ racial identities. As Robert Kelley, a Black teacher in Stamford, Connecticut detailed, “There is a very, very great disparity in the proportion of minority teachers in the system… and as a result the minority kids who go there have no role models” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1977b, p. 30).
In response to these new demands, northern school desegregation plans included affirmative action to diversify the teaching force. Portland, Oregon more than doubled the percentage of Black faculty from 2.7% in 1968 to 6.7% in 1975. The school board of Tempe, Arizona voted unanimously to implement an affirmative action program to increase the numbers of “minorities” (Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American) on the faculty. The city of Stamford, Connecticut initiated an “extensive minority recruitment program” that included recruitment efforts in New York City and in southern Black colleges, which resulted in a modest increase in the number of Black teachers from 65 in 1971 to 76 in 1975. A 1977 school desegregation order in Los Angeles recommended, “The district should combine staff and student integration planning to coordinate racial and ethnic reassignments of both teachers and students,” and suggested affirmative action to hire more Black and Hispanic teachers (Burkholder, 2024).
For the most part, northern cities saw a meaningful increase in the gross numbers and percentages of Black educators in the 1970s. Many districts adopted school desegregation orders that moved Black teachers into majority white schools and vice versa, a process that was sometimes unpopular, but that nevertheless increased Black teacher representation throughout the district.
Unfortunately, even in northern communities with a large and politically active Black population, this small increase in Black teachers was not enough. In Minneapolis, for example, school leaders added 188 new Black teachers between 1968 and 1975, but they could not keep pace with the growing numbers of Black students in the district, which increased from 8% in 1968 to 14% in 1975. This meant the likelihood a Black student would have a Black teacher actually declined, despite an increase in the number of Black teachers (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1977a, p. 11).
As this complex history of northern school desegregation shows, a long history of racial discrimination in northern public schools meant that Black teachers were catastrophically underrepresented in the region by 1954, and that efforts to remedy the problem during the era of school desegregation in the late 1960s and 1970s were not enough to make up for this disparity.
Siddle Walker’s focus on the three “A’s of integration” – advocacy, aspiration, and access – highlights the powerful, yet hidden, ways that Black teachers supported their communities in the Jim Crow South until the era of school desegregation destroyed these networks of Black educators. Most northern states did not have these professional Black teacher associations. Instead, Black communities relied on parent teacher associations, churches, school groups, civic associations, and civil rights organizations to advance the goals of advocacy, aspiration, and access for Black students. Unlike in the South, these northern networks of Black educational advocacy were not dismantled after 1954. They continued to support equitable hiring and placement practices for Black teachers that increased their numbers before, during, and after the Brown ruling. Thanks to Black political pressure, northern school desegregation plans included efforts to recruit, place, and promote more Black teachers and, as a result, the number of Black teachers increased.
The successful Black educational advocacy that unfolded during the height of school desegregation outside of the South reveals how citizens can work together to support Black teaching, hiring, placement, and promotion as an essential component of contemporary school integration. It also provides a cautionary tale of the limitations of community-based reform, and emphasizes the importance of strong legal frameworks to support fully desegregated, racially mixed schools of students and teachers. As Thurgood Marshall cautioned in 1957, school desegregation is not complete until we find racially mixed students and faculty in all schools, in every school district nationwide. Until then, the struggle for educational equality continues.
Zoë Burkholder (burkholderz@montclair.edu) is Professor of Educational Foundations and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project at Montclair State University.
References
Zoë Burkholder, “The Impact of Brown v. Board of Education on Black Teachers Outside of the South, 1934 – 1974.” Forthcoming report for the National Coalition on School Diversity, May 2024.
Zoë Burkholder, An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, “A Womanist Experience of Caring: Understanding the Pedagogy of Exemplary Black Women Teachers,” Urban Review, 34, no. 1 (2002): 71-86.
Cristobal de Brey, et al, Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2018 (NCES 2019-038), p. 10. US Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Educational Statistics, 2019. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/.
Adrienne D. Dixson, “’Let’s Do This’: Black Women Teachers’ Politics and Pedagogy,” Urban Education, 38, no. 2 (2003): 217-36.
Jack Dougherty, That’s When We Were Marching for Jobs: Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of Northern Carolina Press, 2004).
Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865-1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
“Leader Cites Race Problems North, South,” Montclair Times, Dec. 19, 1957, p. 41.
Leslie T. Fenwick, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2022).
Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).
June A. Gordon, The Color of Teaching (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000).
Michael Hines, A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022).
Vanessa Siddle Walker, The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2018).
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009).
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “School Desegregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1977a.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “School Desegregation in Stamford, Connecticut,” US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1977b.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Civil Rights USA: Public Schools North and West, 1962,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1962.
Christine Woyshner, “Civic Education in Informal Settings: Black Voluntary Associations as Schools for Democracy, 1898-1959,” Theory and Research in Social Education. 2023. DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2023.2277438.
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