Thousands of black teachers lost jobs

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

In the spring of 1953, with the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, Wendell Godwin, superintendent of schools in Topeka, sent letters to black elementary school teachers. Painfully polite, the letters couldn't mask the message: If segregation dies, you will lose your jobs.

"Our Board will proceed on the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ negro teachers next year for White children," he wrote.

A year later, the high court declared segregation unconstitutional. Over the next 20 years, thousands of black educators in Topeka and elsewhere lost their jobs. Researchers say the firings decimated the black teaching force and educational tradition, helping set the stage for decades of poor performance by black students.

It's a little-known and unintended consequence of the ruling, but observers say the nation is still paying the price. "By and large, this culture of black teaching died with Brown ," says Vanessa Siddle Walker of Emory University, author of Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South.

In 1954, about 82,000 black teachers were responsible for teaching 2 million black children. In the 11 years immediately following Brown, more than 38,000 black teachers and administrators in 17 Southern and border states lost their jobs.

In Arkansas, for instance, virtually no black educators were hired in desegregated districts from 1958 to 1968. In Texas, 5,000 "substandard" white teachers were employed, while certified black teachers "were told to go into other lines of work," says Carol Karpinski, an independent researcher and New York City educator.

Black principals fared even worse. By some estimates, 90% lost their jobs in 11 Southern states. Many were fired, and others retired. Still others lost their jobs for minor transgressions, such as failing to hold monthly fire drills. Those who stayed often were demoted to assistant principal or to coaching or teaching jobs. Others were offered clerical or even janitorial work.

In 1964, Florida had black principals in all 67 school districts. Ten years later, with integration underway and the black school-aged population growing, only 40 districts had black principals.

In North Carolina, the number of black principals dropped from 620 to 40 from 1967 to 1971.

Because school districts usually closed down all-black schools during desegregation, black educators were easier to fire, despite often having better credentials than their white peers.

National Education Association data from the period show that 85% of minority teachers had college degrees, compared with 75% of white teachers.

"It's not just that they were trained," Walker says. "They were well-trained." But their jobs were still imperiled, researchers say.

In June 1955, a group of white residents in Greenville, Miss., demanded that local school boards fire black teachers who were registered voters. That August, the Georgia State Board of Education adopted a resolution barring teachers from membership in the NAACP.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government power to stop the firings, but observers say enforcement was spotty. Teachers got little help from unions — in the mid-1950s, the American Teachers Association, an all-black union, was too weak, and the larger National Education Association "was controlled by prejudiced people," says Helen Pate-Bain, NEA's president from 1970-71.

Teachers' attitudes have changed since Pate-Bain first attended NEA's annual meeting in 1959. "The big conversation was against integration of schools. Teachers had to grow up as well."

By the mid-1960s, even integration supporters were worrying that black students weren't always being well-served in their new schools, that Brown could bring about "a wholesale destruction of the black educational tradition," says historian David Cecelski, author of Along Freedom Road : Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South.

"By that point, the Southern grass roots, African-Americans, were growing ambivalent about school integration in this very profound way," he says. "And not school integration per se, but the way in which Brown's legacy was being enacted. Many parents were regretting it."

Losing so many black teachers only helped sour more families on Brown.

"It took a chunk out of the black middle class," says Linda Tillman of Wayne State University.

Educators say the effects are still with us: From 1975 to 1985, the number of black students majoring in education dropped by 66%, says Mildred Hudson, chief executive officer of Recruiting New Teachers, a Massachusetts organization that helps train and retain teachers. "Those of us who would have been teachers stopped majoring in education."

In 2000, 84% of teachers were white, while only 61% of students were white. Blacks make up about 17% of public school students but fewer than 8% of teachers; in 2000, 38% of public schools had not a single teacher of color.

The NAACP anticipated some job losses. In 1955, it created a "Department of Teacher Information and Security." At the time, a U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department attorney observed, "In a war, there must be some casualties, and perhaps the black teachers will be the casualties in the fight for equal education of black students."

J.K. Haynes, head of the Black Louisiana Education Association, put it more bluntly: "In any great social change, someone is likely to lose his job." Brown vs. Board of Education