impact of brown vs board of education on society

“Not having these models of intellectual authority and leadership in schools is detrimental to children,” Fenwick said. According to the most recent federal data, about 7 percent of public school teachers, and 11 percent of public school principals, are black. Now, no state has anywhere close to those percentages of black teachers or principals, she said. Prior to Brown, in the 17 states that had segregated school systems, 35 to 50 percent of the teaching force was black, said Fenwick, who has researched the displacement of black educators for her upcoming book, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: Public Policy and the Near Decimation of Black Educational Leadership After Brown. “It is the unfinished promise of Brown that we have not integrated our faculty and school leadership.” “We decimated the black principal and teacher pipeline, and we’ve never rectified that,” said Leslie Fenwick, the dean emeritus and a professor at the Howard University School of Education. Today, many scholars say the persistent lack of black teachers in the profession can be traced to the aftermath of the Brown decision. He was given a windowless room in the attic as an office-where he turned in his resignation, humiliated. Eventually, the principal lost all his students and was transferred to the superintendent’s building. Once the school district began to integrate, administrators transferred half of the principal’s students and half his teachers and docked $3,000 from his salary. In the book The Lost Education of Horace Tate, author Vanessa Siddle Walker tells the story of a black man in north Georgia who had been a principal for 14 years. The courts sided with the district, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Seven of the dismissed black teachers sued the school district, claiming they lost their jobs because of their race. Some of the white teachers in the district who kept their jobs had fewer classroom experience or college credits than the black teachers who were dismissed, according to court documents. Shortly after the Brown decision, the Moberly, Mo., school district closed a segregated black school, which led to the dismissal of 11 certified black teachers, including at least one who had a Ph.D. “It is necessary for me to notify you now that your services will not be needed for next year.” “he majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ Negro teachers next year for white children,” Godwin wrote. Board of Education of Topeka, teacher Darla Buchanan received a letter from the Topeka, Kan., superintendent, Wendell Godwin.

For instance, in 1953, one year before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v.

Impact of brown vs board of education on society