The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration

Abstract

Beginning with Vanessa Siddle Walker's 1996 history of a high school in Caswell County, North Carolina, a stream of studies have documented African American schools that were forced to close or lost their identities when desegregation engulfed the South. The dominant tone of those works is elegiac; far from celebrating the departure of segregated schools, they lament their loss. Once stigmatized as symbols of Jim Crow and engines of educational failure, the black schools of the era before Brown v. Board of Education (1954) are now portrayed as proud institutions that provided black communities with cohesion and leadership. Their teachers, it is argued, inspired and motivated generations of African American children. Virtually absent from this literature is the central assertion of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) brief in Brown-which was accepted by the Supreme Court and central to its judgment-that segregated schools generated feelings of inferiority in the children who attended them. 1

Black Superintendents on Educating Black Students in Separate and Unequal Contexts

“…Like other Black educators who reflect fondly upon their all-Black schooling experiences (Bell 2004;Fairclough 2004;Foster 1997;Morris 2008), the memories of superintendents in this study represented the ''common themes and characteristics'' identified by Walker (2000) in her review of research on segregated schools. While it may have been plausible to organize this study according to the same categories of (1) exemplary teachers, (2) curriculum and extracurricular activities, (3) parental support, and (4) leadership of the school principal, I present the data in this article according to key constituencies these superintendents perceived as critical to the historical and contemporary schooling of Black children: (1) The Black Community, (2) The Black Parent, (3) The Black Teacher, and (4) The Black Student.…”

“…All respondents valued the role of the Black teacher and expressed regret for the loss of what they perceived to be an extremely important variable in the education and achievement of Black students. As Fairclough (2004) observed in his article entitled, The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration, ''The notion that integration destroyed something uniquely valuable to African Americans in the South has been powerfully influenced by memories of and about black teachers'' (p. 2).…”

“…These connections and characteristics are what made the schools ''valued'' (Walker 2000). In his historical study of Black teachers in the segregated South, Fairclough (2004) found that '' [Black] Teachers, pupils, and parents formed an organic community that treated schooling as a collective responsibility''. [Schools] were ''places where order prevailed, where teachers commanded respect, and where parents supported the teachers' ' (p. 3).…”

Before they were Diamonds: The Intergenerational Migration of Kentucky's Coal Camp Blacks

“…Scholarship on school desegregation primarily focuses on the Brown vs. Board and its legacies (Allen, 2009;Bell, 2004), the socioeconomic effects of the landmark decision on black and white children and professionals (Fairclough, 2004), and the context of segregated and desegregated schools before and after Brown (V. S. Walker, 1996;Wolff, 1963). Throughout this vast literature, however, there is one group whose voices have been largely left out of the analysis: the African American children of integration-that generation of black children who experienced the process of school desegregation during the 1950s, 60s, and even 70s.…”

White Educator Perceptions Regarding School Integration: Implication for Multicultural Education

“…Furthermore, he argues that there seems to be a limited understanding of the complex relationship between school and identity and that this complexity applies both to the apartheid and postapartheid period. Fairclough (2004) also argues that teachers in white schools don't seem to have a fundamental understanding of the life worlds of black learners. According to him, the well known Brown vs Booard of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 also laid the foundation for integration in American schools.…”