Ben Baxter is a Tuscaloosa dweller, a Dothan native, an experienced engineer, and a regular contributor for personal finance and career development topics. He's also a frequent voice on race and faith.

Whether we are in school right now or were in school twenty years ago, we all have our favorite teachers and principals. Those great men and women helped shape the people we are today. But what if those teachers and principals weren't around? What if they lost their jobs before we ever made connections with them?

(by Old School on Flickr)

That's what happened to most black teachers in the south in the aftermath of the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools as part of the Brown v. Board of Education case that proved separate schools to be fundamentally unequal.

While the result of the case was a victory for civil rights, there were unintended consequences--namely, mass layoffs for black teachers and administrators.

No one ever mentions layoffs when we're taught about desegregation, but that was a very real situation that affected thousands of families.

During the year of the Brown decision, 82,000 black teachers oversaw teaching 2 million black children. Over the next decade, more than 38,000 black teachers and administrators were let go. Black principals fared even worse as 90 percent of them lost their jobs too.

While states were mandated to desegregate schools, they weren't required to keep black teachers. So when most of the all-black schools were shut down, nearly half of black teachers were fired in the process.

This was a grave injustice to students as many black teachers of that era were as qualified or more qualified than white teachers. According to data cited by the USA Today, 85 percent of minority teachers during desegregation had college degrees while only 75 percent of white teachers had college degrees.

Not only did the teaching profession lose many great teachers, but the mass layoffs sent an economic ripple throughout the black community. Just imagine if half of black teachers were laid off today.

Per the Alabama Education Association, even a brand new teacher with only a bachelor's degree will earn $38,342 during the 2017-18 school year. If half of the roughly 9,000 black Alabama public school teachers lost their jobs today for simply being black, then $173 million (at a minimum) would be stripped from the black community this year alone. This doesn't even begin to include lost future income and retirement benefits.

If firing half of black teachers would have huge ramifications today, then certainly, ramifications would be even greater 60 years ago with fewer alternative career options for black professionals.

So when we think of the sacrifices blacks faced in the Jim Crow era, let us no longer forget the sacrifices--financial or otherwise--that black teachers made for the sack of providing all children with a quality education. We owe those men and women a tremendous debt of gratitude.