When I read and watch contemporary news accounts of (mainly white) parents objecting to the teaching of Black history and a more truthful accounting of American history threatening to burn books and physically intimidating school board members, I think about resistance to the Brown legal decision. What’s more, many of the beliefs and levers that were used to eliminate Black principals and teacher leadership after Brown are still in effect today.
Today, the nation, not to mention our public education system, is still living with the fallout: traumatized Black school children roughly $1-2 billion in salary losses and the largest orchestrated brain drain ever experienced in the U.S. Though some litigants prevailed winning back pay and reinstatement, most never got their jobs back. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the FBI and Congress to investigate and remedy the illegal and discriminatory treatment of Black principals and teachers. After Brown, the NAACP litigated thousands of cases on behalf of displaced Black educators and pressured the Nixon administration, the U.S. They were among the 100,000 exceptionally credentialed Black principals and teachers illegally purged from desegregating schools in the wake of Brown.Īs early as 1952, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall knew that Black educators’ jobs would be threatened given the racist strictures and customs of the Southern and border states. But we don’t know about Pressley Giles, Mary Preyer, Virgil Coleman and Jewel Butler. We know about Linda Brown and Ruby Bridges. Or we may recall the tumult of busing in the South - Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia… and even much further north of the Mason-Dixon Line in South Boston, too.īut there is plenty that we have not been taught about Brown, which turns 68 today, or how it continues to impact us. Marshals past a wall splattered with tomatoes and a racial slur. We may remember the famed Norman Rockwell painting featuring 6-year-old Ruby Bridges escorted by U.S. We may think about Linda Brown, the plaintiff in Brown, a little girl forced to walk miles to a segregated Black school instead of attending the white school down the block.
Board of Education decision in one of three ways. Today, most Americans think about the segregation-shattering 1954 Brown v. A former Harvard University Visiting Scholar, she also serves as Dean in Residence at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).
She is dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education where she is a tenured professor of education policy. Fenwick, PhD, is author of Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2022).
0 kommentar(er)
