Speaker 1: Bushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's
Speaker 1: a gorgeous building called the Raca Auditorium, built in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties in the Classical Renaissance style. And in January
Speaker 1: of two thousand and four, on one of those cold
Speaker 1: Michigan days, a woman takes the stage in front of
Speaker 1: a big crowd. She's in her sixties. Her name is
Speaker 1: missus Thompson.
Speaker 2: Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be with you
Speaker 2: this evening here on the campus of the University of Michigan, the.
Speaker 3: Home of the Wolverines.
Speaker 2: Is that right? And I heard you had a game
Speaker 2: last night you only lost it by two points. Huh.
Speaker 1: She tells a funny story about how she was once
Speaker 1: invited to speak at NASAU and thought she was going
Speaker 1: to the Bahamas, only to discover that it was NASA County,
Speaker 1: Long Island. She talks a little bit about her childhood
Speaker 1: and her family. Then right in the middle of her talk,
Speaker 1: she starts reading a notice of termination sent many years
Speaker 1: ago to a teacher named Darla Buchanan.
Speaker 2: Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment
Speaker 2: next year, it is necessary for me to notify you
Speaker 2: now that your services will not be needed for next year.
Speaker 1: The students in the auditorium are wrapped. This is not
Speaker 1: what they expected. But Missus Thompson goes on and reads
Speaker 1: all the way to the end.
Speaker 2: I think I understand that all of you must be
Speaker 2: under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an
Speaker 2: inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.
Speaker 1: This period of adjustment, remember that line. It's a nice
Speaker 1: bit of condescension and understatement. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. This episode is about that euphemism in the
Speaker 1: letter read by Missus Thompson. This period of adjustment. Not
Speaker 1: that long ago. Americans set out to do something revolutionary
Speaker 1: to change the world. But we botched it, and we
Speaker 1: didn't want to admit that fact. So we swept the
Speaker 1: whole episode under the rug and wrote letters to everyone
Speaker 1: concerned to try and absolve ourselves of the whole business.
Speaker 2: I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
Speaker 2: be the best for everyone concern.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan, was written by
Speaker 1: the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas,
Speaker 1: a medium sized city in the upper right hand corner
Speaker 1: of the state. Like a lot of cities and towns
Speaker 1: in the United States, particularly those in the South, Topeka
Speaker 1: had segregated public elementary schools. In the Jim Crow era,
Speaker 1: White children went to neighborhood schools. Black children went to
Speaker 1: a separate system of schools scattered around the city with
Speaker 1: their own black teachers and black principles. In the years
Speaker 1: after the Second World War, the leading civil rights group
Speaker 1: of the day, the NAACP, decided to start challenging segregation.
Speaker 1: Topeka was one of their test cases. They found thirteen
Speaker 1: black families and asked them to go down to their
Speaker 1: neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children. One
Speaker 1: of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leola Brown.
Speaker 1: Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later he
Speaker 1: was a pastor. This is Leola Brown from an interview
Speaker 1: she gave in nineteen ninety one to the Kansas State
Speaker 1: Historical Society.
Speaker 6: My husband Oliver Brown. He was a heavyweight fighter. He
Speaker 6: used to bit golden gloves.
Speaker 1: The Browns had a seven year old named Linda. The
Speaker 1: black elementary school she was supposed to go to was
Speaker 1: cal Monroe. To get there, she had to walk seven blocks,
Speaker 1: often in freezing weather, and cross a busy road, then
Speaker 1: get on a bus. The local white elementary school was Sumner,
Speaker 1: just four blocks on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the
Speaker 1: neighborhood all went there. So one day, as instructed by
Speaker 1: the NAACP, Oliver Brown took his daughter by the hand
Speaker 1: and walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary.
Speaker 6: As Linda said, when they got over there and that
Speaker 6: building looked so big, there being a little kid going upstairs.
Speaker 6: And then when they got ready to talk, they had
Speaker 6: her sit on the outside of the office. Dad went
Speaker 6: in was tungue to the principal.
Speaker 1: You could imagine how uncomfortable the conversation was. Oliver Brown
Speaker 1: was not supposed to be there, and the principal would
Speaker 1: have had no idea what to say to him other
Speaker 1: than I'm sorry, this is the way it is in Topeka.
Speaker 1: With little Linda waiting out in the hall, if she.
Speaker 6: Said, you could hear the voters kinda get a little loud,
Speaker 6: and he said, well, it wasn't him, it was the
Speaker 6: school board. That was a policy of the school board.
Speaker 6: You couldn't do nothing about it, you know. So he
Speaker 6: couldn't no way, he could not enroll Landon and that
Speaker 6: school without.
Speaker 1: Their preval All the black families got the same answer,
Speaker 1: your child is not welcome. So the local NAACP chapter
Speaker 1: sued the school board. Oliver Brown's name was put first,
Speaker 1: Brown versus to peak a Board of Education. It was
Speaker 1: bundled with a number of other desegregation cases from all
Speaker 1: around the country. More than two hundred plaintiffs in all,
Speaker 1: went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on
Speaker 1: May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in one of the most
Speaker 1: famous legal decisions in American history, the Court ruled in
Speaker 1: Oliver Brown's favor. The practice of educating black and white
Speaker 1: school children separately was ruled unconstantal.
Speaker 5: It was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language,
Speaker 5: which should set for rest, once and for all the
Speaker 5: problem as to whether or not a second class citizenship
Speaker 5: segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of
Speaker 5: the country.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you were taught about the Brown decision in
Speaker 1: school or have watched a documentary on it. It's a milestone,
Speaker 1: but at the same time it's a strange case. You
Speaker 1: could fill an auditorium with all the scholars who have
Speaker 1: a quarrel with Brown. I mean, just go back and
Speaker 1: read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor
Speaker 1: of Oliver and Liola Brown and the families of Topeka,
Speaker 1: but the court actually says something entirely different from what
Speaker 1: the black people of Topeka were saying.
Speaker 6: I went to Monroe School. You're Intopeka from grade one
Speaker 6: through eight.
Speaker 1: Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State
Speaker 1: Historical Society. On several occasions, Liola is asked about Monroe,
Speaker 1: the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola
Speaker 1: grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well,
Speaker 1: and Leola Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.
Speaker 6: Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful.
Speaker 6: And had it not been through this walking, you know,
Speaker 6: school and going to a part of school were possibly
Speaker 6: never wady. You know, that's what we did.
Speaker 1: Later in the interview the issue comes up again. The
Speaker 1: interviewer asked Leola specifically, you didn't want your daughter to
Speaker 1: go to the white school because the white school was
Speaker 1: better than the black school. And Leola is adamant. Oh No,
Speaker 1: that never came up. We were getting a quality education
Speaker 1: at Monroe.
Speaker 4: We didn't have any.
Speaker 6: Going to pick with our schools for as education was
Speaker 6: sponsor and no the teachers, because they were qualified and
Speaker 6: they did what they were supposed to do.
Speaker 1: For Leola and Oliver Brown, the lawsuit was a matter
Speaker 1: of principle. They didn't think there was anything wrong with
Speaker 1: the qual education at Monroe, the all black school. They
Speaker 1: just thought that the Tapeka school Board shouldn't be telling
Speaker 1: them where they could or couldn't send Linda to school,
Speaker 1: particularly if the only reason the school board could come
Speaker 1: up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now, listen
Speaker 1: to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the Brown decision.
Speaker 1: They agreed that the Browns ought to be able to
Speaker 1: send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different. I'm
Speaker 1: quoting segregation of white and colored children in public schools
Speaker 1: has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The Court's
Speaker 1: conclusion was that segregation was de facto unequal. That simply
Speaker 1: the act of educating black children separately from white children
Speaker 1: caused harm, serious harm. The court goes on, segregation with
Speaker 1: the sanction of law has a tendency to retard the
Speaker 1: educational and mental development of Negro children. This was light
Speaker 1: years away from Leola Brown's position. Leola Brown said that
Speaker 1: black run schools like Monroe were good schools, but as
Speaker 1: a matter of principle, she ought to be able to
Speaker 1: enroll into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe is
Speaker 1: not a good school at all. It can't be a
Speaker 1: good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola Brown said,
Speaker 1: we're fine, We just want some control over our lives.
Speaker 1: The Court said, you're not fine at all. Your educational
Speaker 1: and mental development has been retarded by your inferior schooling. Now,
Speaker 1: the court could have said something much more straightforward, how
Speaker 1: about this. Schools are where people make the connections that
Speaker 1: allow them to get ahead in the world. You cannot
Speaker 1: lock black people out of the place where social power
Speaker 1: and opportunity reside. That argument would have done the job right,
Speaker 1: but the court doesn't say that. In order to condemn
Speaker 1: the discrimination of Brown's face, the court instead makes the
Speaker 1: case that black people are psychologically crippled. The historian Darryl
Speaker 1: Scott wrote a brilliant book a while back called Contempt
Speaker 1: and Pity, in which he points out that there's been
Speaker 1: a long history behind this talk of psychological damage. It
Speaker 1: goes back to the days of slavery. It's always been
Speaker 1: incredibly useful for white people to explain the problems of
Speaker 1: black people as the result of something personal internal. It
Speaker 1: makes their problems their fault.
Speaker 7: If you go even back to an Antebellum period, you
Speaker 7: would see planners who would talk about how they have
Speaker 7: no sense of family. Now, of course, these are the
Speaker 7: very people who are selling people's families at the auction block, right.
Speaker 7: You know, they're destroying families, but they were justify it
Speaker 7: in their minds by saying they have no sense of families.
Speaker 1: Another historian, Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in
Speaker 1: his essay The Whole United States Is Southern, which you
Speaker 1: should read, by the way, if you ever want to
Speaker 1: be grabbed by the lapels. Paine argues that in the
Speaker 1: decades after the Civil War, Southern whites attempt to sell
Speaker 1: the rest of America on this way of thinking about race.
Speaker 1: They've basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political
Speaker 1: and economic force. But they want quoting pain to frame
Speaker 1: the issue in a language of separation. Customs are way
Speaker 1: of life and social equality, language that constructed race in
Speaker 1: interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to pretend racial
Speaker 1: conflict is just a psychological problem. So what does the U. S.
Speaker 1: Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty four in the Brown decision?
Speaker 1: It buys into the Southern way of thinking about race.
Speaker 1: Leo Le Brown and the other plaintiffs say, we have
Speaker 1: a structural problem. We don't have the power to send
Speaker 1: Linda to the school down the street. The court says, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's a psychological problem. Little Linda has been damaged in
Speaker 1: her heart. That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me,
Speaker 1: it's not. We're still dealing with the consequences. This is
Speaker 1: a little bit of a tangent, but I think it
Speaker 1: helps to explain why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic.
Speaker 1: It's about a wonderful bit of research done by two
Speaker 1: political scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jason Grissom and
Speaker 1: Christopher Reading. Grissom and Reading start with a well known
Speaker 1: fact white students are far more likely to be in
Speaker 1: gifted and talented programs than black students. If your kid
Speaker 1: isn't a gifted in towented program, you've probably observed this.
Speaker 1: We're the black kids right now. You might say, well,
Speaker 1: that's simply a reflection of the fact that white kids,
Speaker 1: for whatever reasons, have higher test scores on average than
Speaker 1: black kids. So Grissom and Reading look at a large
Speaker 1: national sample of elementary school kids and let's equalize for
Speaker 1: test course.
Speaker 8: In other words, let's compare two students, one black and
Speaker 8: one white, but they both are very high achieving.
Speaker 1: This is grisome.
Speaker 8: Would that difference in probability that they are identified by
Speaker 8: the system as gifted? Would that persist? And the answer
Speaker 8: is that it does. In fact, you know, it's still
Speaker 8: the case that even when you look at two students
Speaker 8: who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school,
Speaker 8: a white student and a black student, that white student
Speaker 8: is still more than two times as likely to be
Speaker 8: receiving gifted services as that black student is.
Speaker 1: Gifted. Programs are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the
Speaker 1: brightest children are given a chance to shine. Grisom's saying
Speaker 1: that's not the way things work in practice.
Speaker 8: And you can go a little further because you can
Speaker 8: throw other things into the equation that aren't just achievement.
Speaker 8: You can look at differences in income, the data have,
Speaker 8: how healthy the parent says that child is. We know
Speaker 8: what age that child entered kindergarten. You know, on average,
Speaker 8: white students and black students enter kinder garden at different ages.
Speaker 8: Because of the phenomenon of red shirting, white parents are
Speaker 8: more likely to hold their kids back at the start
Speaker 8: of schooling than black students are. That doesn't explain the
Speaker 8: gifted gap.
Speaker 1: In other words, you match up bright black kids with
Speaker 1: equally bright white kids, then you make sure the two
Speaker 1: groups are similar in age, class and the health of
Speaker 1: their parents, and you still find that the white kids
Speaker 1: are far more likely to be admitted to gifted and
Speaker 1: talented programs. Kind of a puzzle, right. Finally, Grissom and
Speaker 1: Reddings say, look, in many cases, teachers play a big
Speaker 1: role in which students get into gifted programs. They encourage them,
Speaker 1: they recommend them. So they think maybe the answer here
Speaker 1: lies with not who the child is, but who the
Speaker 1: child's teacher is.
Speaker 8: In the overwhelming majority of school districts in the United States,
Speaker 8: the way that a kid ever gets to be identified
Speaker 8: as gifted is if someone in the school, usually a
Speaker 8: classroom teacher, has to look at that kid and say,
Speaker 8: I think this kid might be gifted.
Speaker 1: So Grissom does something really simple. He looks at the
Speaker 1: race of the teacher, and what he finds is that
Speaker 1: for white kids, there's no effect. It doesn't matter, but
Speaker 1: not for black students.
Speaker 8: For a black student, the world looks different. So if
Speaker 8: I am a black student and I have a black
Speaker 8: classroom teacher, the probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in
Speaker 8: the next year it looks very much like the probability
Speaker 8: for a white student. But if I am a Black
Speaker 8: student and I have a white classroom teacher, my probability
Speaker 8: of being identified as gifted is substantially lower.
Speaker 7: How much lower?
Speaker 8: Okay, So for very high achieving black students, the probability
Speaker 8: of being assigned to gifted services under a white teacher
Speaker 8: is about half the probability as an observably similar black
Speaker 8: student taught by a black teacher.
Speaker 1: If you're black, having a black teacher makes a difference,
Speaker 1: and not just for getting into gifted programs. Having a
Speaker 1: black teacher raises the test scores of black students, It
Speaker 1: changes the way black students behave, and it dramatically decreases
Speaker 1: the chances a black male student would be suspended. A
Speaker 1: group of social scientists recently went over the records of
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand black students in North Carolina over a
Speaker 1: five year period. They found that having even one black
Speaker 1: teacher between the third and fifth grade reduced the chance
Speaker 1: that an African American boy would later drop out of
Speaker 1: high school by how much? By thirty nine percent one
Speaker 1: black teacher. Now, does this mean that white teachers are
Speaker 1: diabolical racists trying to hold down black students. No, this
Speaker 1: isn't conscious discrimination. The point is that teachers have power,
Speaker 1: the gatekeepers. They control the classroom. They decide who gets
Speaker 1: recommended for prizes like gifted programs and who doesn't. They
Speaker 1: decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing their
Speaker 1: attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by ignoring
Speaker 1: another or sending him more often to the principal's office.
Speaker 1: Teachers can discourage. Listen to Leola Brown again about why
Speaker 1: she liked her elementary school Monroe so much.
Speaker 6: I loved it.
Speaker 4: I loved it.
Speaker 6: The teachers who were fantastic. We got a fantastic education there.
Speaker 6: It wasn't, as you say, this case wasn't based on that,
Speaker 6: because we had fantastic teachers and we learned. We learned
Speaker 6: a lot, and they were good to us, more like
Speaker 6: an extended family like mothers and so forth. Because they
Speaker 6: took an interest in you, you know, and.
Speaker 1: They took an interest in you. That's what all the
Speaker 1: research on blacks and whites and gifted programs comes down to.
Speaker 1: You need to have someone who takes an interest in
Speaker 1: you if you want education to work and be fair.
Speaker 9: They made one serious mistake which I will have to
Speaker 9: hold them responsible for.
Speaker 1: I came across another archive of interviews from the Brown
Speaker 1: era Duke Universities behind the Veil Oral History Project. The
Speaker 1: interview you're hearing is from Richmond, Virginia. It's with an
Speaker 1: African American teacher named Celestine Porter, and she says that
Speaker 1: once you grant this idea that a teacher is a
Speaker 1: gatekeeper and that a child needs someone to take an
Speaker 1: interest in them, then that means integration should have been
Speaker 1: pursued very differently.
Speaker 9: They made students do the integration. They should have had
Speaker 9: teachers first, and they didn't do that at every one
Speaker 9: of those white schools, at every one of the black schools.
Speaker 9: If they were going to sign white children into the
Speaker 9: black school they should have had white teachers. If they
Speaker 9: were gonna send black children unto the white schools, they
Speaker 9: should have had some black teachers there. Now, the first
Speaker 9: people that should have been integrated should have been teacher
Speaker 9: and administrations first.
Speaker 4: But they didn't do that.
Speaker 9: They moved the children.
Speaker 1: She's absolutely right. Read the Brown Decision for yourself. The
Speaker 1: court goes on and on about kids, but they have
Speaker 1: virtually nothing to say about teachers. The word teacher comes
Speaker 1: up once in the main text and a few times
Speaker 1: in the footnotes. That's it. How on earth can you
Speaker 1: undertake the greatest transformation of public education in American history
Speaker 1: and barely mentioned teachers.
Speaker 9: Young people did not know business moved first to have
Speaker 9: borne the brunt oh the segregation process, and it did
Speaker 9: something to the Elstons. It did something to them, It
Speaker 9: made them hay, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
Speaker 9: Farm Me and most of the students that had moved
Speaker 9: from the black schools into the white situation. We as
Speaker 9: teachers had been there to nurture there to help them along,
Speaker 9: to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they
Speaker 9: moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't
Speaker 9: know teachers.
Speaker 1: The teachers were afraid of them. The Brown Decision was
Speaker 1: all about children. The signature memories of the Brown era
Speaker 1: are all about black children being escorted into previously all
Speaker 1: white schools. We should have been talking about teachers. About
Speaker 1: three and a half hours deue east of Topeka on
Speaker 1: I seventy, there is a little town called Moberly. Moberly
Speaker 1: is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie because
Speaker 1: it was settled by margrants from the South before the
Speaker 1: Civil War. There was a lot of slave owning in
Speaker 1: Little Dixie compared with the rest of Missouri, a lot
Speaker 1: of racial hostility in that part of the state. And
Speaker 1: I don't think you can understand what happened after the
Speaker 1: Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Moberly. In
Speaker 1: the early nineteen fifties, Moberley had a school system employing
Speaker 1: around one hundred teachers across eight schools. One of those
Speaker 1: schools was black. It was called Lincoln. Lincoln had eleven teachers.
Speaker 1: The year after the Brown decision. Moberley integrates. They do
Speaker 1: that by closing the one black school, Lincoln. I'm busting
Speaker 1: all the black students there to white schools. After closing Lincoln,
Speaker 1: the Mobiley school system then says, wait, if we combine
Speaker 1: all the students in Mobile into one school system, we
Speaker 1: don't think we need as many teachers as we had before.
Speaker 1: So they say, let's evaluate all the teachers from the
Speaker 1: two newly combined systems. Keep the best ones, let the
Speaker 1: mediocre ones go. I think you can see what's coming.
Speaker 1: They decide to fire every one of the eleven black
Speaker 1: teachers who used to work at Lincoln. So the black
Speaker 1: teachers sue and they lose. They appeal, they lose again.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty nine, they asked the Supreme Court to
Speaker 1: consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no, Brown is
Speaker 1: the great victory, Moberly is the great defeat, and they're connected.
Speaker 1: Let me give you a flavor of the case. The
Speaker 1: black teachers say, you can't possibly say that we were
Speaker 1: the absolute worst of all teachers in the combined system.
Speaker 1: We've been evaluated for years by our superintendent and have
Speaker 1: been given high marks. The white school board counters with sure,
Speaker 1: but you are being compared to other black teachers. You
Speaker 1: need to be compared to white teachers. So the black
Speaker 1: teachers say, yeah, but we stack up really well against
Speaker 1: white teachers. And by the way, this was not a stretch.
Speaker 1: Virtually every profession except teaching was closed to educated African
Speaker 1: Americans in those years. If you were smart and liked
Speaker 1: learning in that era, you became a teacher. The court
Speaker 1: then says, so what I'm quoting human capabilities cannot be
Speaker 1: reduced to a mathematical formula. Intangible factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry,
Speaker 1: and adaptability vitally affect the work of any teacher. I
Speaker 1: think there's one intangible factor missing in that list, don't
Speaker 1: you what could it be? Dispose? It begins with an r.
Speaker 1: Forgive me for going on and on about this one
Speaker 1: obscure case, but you have to get the flavor of it.
Speaker 1: The plaintiffs say, wait, one of miss is a superstar
Speaker 1: graduate degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is
Speaker 1: mary Ala Timminy. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star,
Speaker 1: but he says, I'm still not hiring her because and
Speaker 1: when quoting here from the judge's decision because she gave
Speaker 1: the impression that she considered herself superior to other teachers
Speaker 1: and was resentful towards authority. Resentful towards authority, You think
Speaker 1: she just got fired. The judge simply can't get mary
Speaker 1: Ella Timony out of his head. I'm quoting again. It
Speaker 1: is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this
Speaker 1: teacher has. And I do not mean to say that
Speaker 1: such attitude is limited to any race or color, but
Speaker 1: when it does it exist, it vitally affects the teaching
Speaker 1: ability of the individual. She's upity, an appity negro. Of course,
Speaker 1: they don't want to keep her because they understand the
Speaker 1: same thing that Leola Brown understands, and all the many
Speaker 1: academics who have studied what actually happens to black kids
Speaker 1: in the classroom understand, which is that educational equality is
Speaker 1: a function of who holds the power in the classroom.
Speaker 1: So mobili misery gets rid of its black teachers, and
Speaker 1: by the way, so does almost everybody else across the
Speaker 1: entire South. Black teachers just get fired left and right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't something done secretly, it was done right out
Speaker 1: in the open. There was something like eighty two thousand
Speaker 1: African American teachers in the South before the Brown Decision.
Speaker 1: Within a decade, as the decision was slowly implemented across
Speaker 1: the country, about half have been fired.
Speaker 3: What surprises me is the kind of historical amnesia there
Speaker 3: is surrounding that issue that many many people today who
Speaker 3: are searching for black teachers have no understanding of the
Speaker 3: fact that many of them lost their jobs.
Speaker 1: One of the few scholars who has paid any attention
Speaker 1: to what happened is Michelle Foster, an education professor at
Speaker 1: the University of Louisville. Twenty years ago, Foster tracked as
Speaker 1: many black teachers from that era as she could find.
Speaker 3: What role did teachers did black women play in the
Speaker 3: South relative to children? They were nurse maids, they were housekeepers,
Speaker 3: they were domestics. That's the role they played. You know,
Speaker 3: every Southern or I meet a lot of stuff they said,
Speaker 3: I had a black somebody who took care of them.
Speaker 3: But that's a motherl You know, that's a little different position.
Speaker 3: When you're a teacher. You're evaluating, you're judging.
Speaker 1: Even those who got to keep their jobs told one
Speaker 1: story after another of humiliation. It was too much. One
Speaker 1: of the teachers Foster interviewed went for a meeting with
Speaker 1: the superintendent with all of the other black teachers who
Speaker 1: were being kept on. I'm quoting. They were fifteen of us,
Speaker 1: and not a single one of them in there as
Speaker 1: dark as I am. Not one that ought to tell
Speaker 1: you something. By the way, the remaining black teachers couldn't
Speaker 1: use the teacher's bathroom. They had to use the children's bathroom.
Speaker 1: To this day, the ranks of black teachers in the
Speaker 1: United States have not recovered from the humiliations and mass
Speaker 1: firings of the nineteen fifties and sixties. As a percentage,
Speaker 1: there are far fewer black teachers than there are black students.
Speaker 1: And when you think back to studies on how important
Speaker 1: black teachers are for the performance of black students, that's
Speaker 1: a tragedy. Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, one classroom after
Speaker 1: another was purged of its black teachers and topeaka Kansas,
Speaker 1: of course, Topeka made a show of it. They assigned
Speaker 1: a black teacher to a half time position at the
Speaker 1: formerly all white Randolph School. Principal, a man named Stanley Stalter,
Speaker 1: had the task of calling up white parents to see
Speaker 1: if they objected to this one halftime black teacher, and
Speaker 1: of course they did.
Speaker 4: Some were adamant. Nope, some of them had a very
Speaker 4: peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black
Speaker 4: teacher's room.
Speaker 1: That's the principal stalter interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society.
Speaker 4: Another one said, my child is now twelve years of age,
Speaker 4: and it is beginning her mantrual period, and this is
Speaker 4: not the time of her life to be put in
Speaker 4: here with a black teacher, a male. Hey, that one
Speaker 4: topped everything.
Speaker 1: There's a limit to how many times a school board
Speaker 1: is going to try and talk white tax paying parents
Speaker 1: out of their fear of placing a menstruating adolescent in
Speaker 1: class with a black teacher. Far easier just not to
Speaker 1: hire any black teachers at.
Speaker 2: All, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about
Speaker 2: enrollment next year in schools for Negro children, it is
Speaker 2: not possible at this time to offer you employment for
Speaker 2: next year. If the court should rule that segregation in
Speaker 2: the elementary grades is unconstitutional, our board will proceed on
Speaker 2: the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will
Speaker 2: not want to employ Negro teachers. Next year for white children.
Speaker 1: I said at the beginning. The woman reading that letter
Speaker 1: at the conference of the University of Michigan was a
Speaker 1: Missus Thompson. That's her married name. Her first name is Linda.
Speaker 1: Her maiden name is Brown, Linda Brown, the Brown of
Speaker 1: Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. This is a little girl,
Speaker 1: Oliver Brown tried and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School.
Speaker 1: She was invited to Michigan to speak in celebration of
Speaker 1: the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. And what
Speaker 1: does Linda Brown Thompson do. In the middle of her talk,
Speaker 1: she interrupts her eyewitness account to remind her audience who
Speaker 1: bore the cost of integration, not white people, black people.
Speaker 2: I think I understand that all of you must be
Speaker 2: under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an
Speaker 2: inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.
Speaker 2: I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
Speaker 2: be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendel Godwin,
Speaker 2: Superintendent of Schools.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Sillmarra Martinez White. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
Speaker 1: music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.