Editor's Newsletter

Responding to the brief of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Court stated that segregated schools stamp a badge of inferiority in the hearts and minds of black kids and retard their education.

The psychological effect of school segregation implies that black children need integration to learn correctly. As the legal scholar Derek Bell put it, the Brown decision “hinged black people’s rights upon being situated next to white people.”

Implementing Brown eventually led to busing. In the Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg County decision in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the question of how districts should comply with their obligation to begin immediately operating unitary school districts in residential segregation. The answer was busing.

Since the leading view is that de facto segregated schools cannot be equal, cross-town integration is an objective, and busing is the means to accomplish that. This usually meant that black kids would be bused across town to the so-called white schools.

In 1973, as the NAACP was pursuing busing in cities across the country, the Atlanta chapter developed a different approach. They agreed to a deal with local white leaders that rejected large-scale busing in exchange for African American administrative control of the school system.

For some of us, that was a good deal. Blacks, looking out for their interests, could arrange for the equitable distribution of the available resources. Therefore, they could serve all black children in the district comparable to white children.

However, the national NAACP was very displeased with this Atlanta deal. In response, they removed the local NAACP president, who led this Atlanta compromise.

The response of the national NAACP to the Atlanta plan is the logical result of the belief — and policy — that if a school received their representative portion of the resources but happened to be all black — because of residential segregation — it was inherently unequal. That is a problematic viewpoint and policy.

It took over a decade for many states to start the integration process. However, when it did start, there were some negative consequences. Some of these consequences resulted from the Brown conclusion that black schools were “inherently unequal.”

Many black schools were closed, and thousands of black teachers were fired. I do not call these consequences “unforeseen” because Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund did realize that many teachers would lose their jobs. So, they solicited funds from foundations for lawsuits to defend these teachers before the Brown case went to the Court.

In 1954, there were about 82,000 black teachers in the United States. By 1964, nearly half, more than 38,000 black teachers, had been fired by white school leaders. Please note that this was not necessarily the result of the poor qualifications of the black teachers.

Before Brown, the average years of college for black teachers in Alabama exceeded that of white teachers. That was logical as the places blacks in the South could apply their education were severely limited in number.

As Leslie Fenwick, the dean emerita and a professor at the Howard University School of Education, put it, “Black teachers with superior credentials were purged from the system, and by and large in the 17 states [that had segregated school systems], were replaced by white teachers who had fewer academic credentials, lower levers of professional licensure—no licensure in some cases.” In 2022, she published a book about the displacement of black educators, titled Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership.

The bottom line: as W.E.B. DuBois put it in 1935, “Negro children need neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.”