The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown: An Overview and Analysis

Author:

Fultz Michael

Abstract

In 1951 three brief commentaries in the Journal of Negro Education drew public attention to the potentially tenuous job security of African-American educators in the South, Black professionals whose employment status was being called into question as southern educational institutions faced the prospect of desegregation. The specific incident which occasioned these commentaries was a December 1950 vote by the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville to close the segregated, all-Black Louisville Municipal College, which it had administered since that college was founded in 1931, and to integrate the two institutions' student bodies. Fourteen African-American faculty and staff at Louisville Municipal College were informed that, despite tenure or contract status, they would be given two months' severance pay and summarily dismissed. With United States Supreme Court legal precedents from the 1938 Gaines case through the 1950 Sweatt and McLauren decisions already dramatically affecting the policy context of southern higher education, and with what would become known as the “Brown Decision” looming on the horizon, what might be the consequences for all Black educators throughout the South—if the high court overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers urged?

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

History,Education

Reference93 articles.

1. On rates of college training, see Ashmore Harry S. The Negro and the Schools, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 158. See also, Hooker Displacement of Black Teachers in the Eleven Southern States, 14; Long Herman H. “On the Emergence of New Hope and Challenge in the Current Revolution,” in Second National NEA-PR&R Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Education,” 13; AFSC et al., The Status of School Desegregation in the South, 1970, 87.

2. AFSC et al., The Status of School Desegregation in the South, 1970, 75, 78–80; National Education Association, Report of NEA Task Force III, School Desegregation: Louisiana and Mississippi, 5, 8–14; Hearings Before the Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity of the U.S. Senate, 4942–4943; Hooker Displacement of Black Teachers in the Eleven Southern States, 4. James, “Another Vanishing American: The Black Principal,” 20. Both the AFSC and Louisiana and Mississippi reports provided vivid examples of demotions former Black principals endured. The context of the times clearly demanded an exasperated sense of humor: some Black principals were becoming “assistant to the superintendent in charge of light bulbs and erasers,” one observer remarked, while Rims Barber, a representative of the Delta Ministry, observed that in Mississippi, “co-principal is short for colored principal.”

3. Congress American Jewish Assault Upon Freedom of Association: A Study of the Southern Attack on the NAACP (New York: American Jewish Congress, 1957), 16; Southern School News, 2:2 (August 1955): 4; ibid, 2:3 (September 1955): 16; “Teacher Problems,” NAACP Press Releases, dated July 12, 1955, July 15, 1955, August 18, 1955, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Collection, Manuscript Division, IIc427, Library of Congress; “School Desegregation,” Crisis 62:7 (August-September, 1955): 430; Gandy Willard “Implications of Integration for the Southern Teacher,” Journal of Negro Education, 31:2 (Spring 1962): 195. Printed on back of teachers’ annual contracts, the oath had to be renewed annually.

4. Cox Oliver C. “Vested Interests Involved in the Integration of Schools for Negroes,” Journal of Negro Education 20: 1 (Winter 1951): 112–114. See also, Cox Oliver C. “Negro Teachers: Martyrs to Integration?,” The Nation, Vol. 176 (April 25, 1953): 347–348.

5. James "Another Vanishing American: The Black Principal," 20. On Black colleges as "academic disaster areas," see Jencks Christopher and Reisman David "The American Negro College," Harvard Educational Review 37: 1, (Winter 1967): 3-60

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