Speaker 1: Pushkin back. In season two of Revisionist History, we did
Speaker 1: a four part series on civil rights, and the first
Speaker 1: episode of that series was called Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment.
Speaker 1: It's still one of my favorite Revisionist episodes of all time.
Speaker 1: It was about Brown versus Board of Education, the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four Supreme Court case that desegregated America's schools and
Speaker 1: is still today maybe the most famous of all Supreme
Speaker 1: Court cases. And our episode was about what happened after
Speaker 1: the Brown decision came down, the heartbreaking consequence that no
Speaker 1: one anticipated and everyone seems to have forgotten. Anyway, it ran,
Speaker 1: and about a week later, I got a call on
Speaker 1: my cell from restricted number. And normally I would never
Speaker 1: pick up a call from a restricted number, but for
Speaker 1: some reason I did, and a voice on the other
Speaker 1: end of the line said, mister Gladwell, hold for the President.
Speaker 1: My first thought was President of what? And my second
Speaker 1: thought was, wow, this is quite the elaborate spam call.
Speaker 1: And I was just about to hang up when I
Speaker 1: hear Malcolm Barack Obama, just listen to your episode on
Speaker 1: the Brown Case. I loved it. My wedding and the
Speaker 1: birth of my two children are clearly the first, second,
Speaker 1: and third most memorable moments of my life, but this
Speaker 1: is a very strong number four. I mean, come on, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: Barack Obama. Anyway, fast forward a couple years and Barack
Speaker 1: Obama's team approached me about doing a project with the
Speaker 1: President about reconstruction that tumultuous window after the Civil War
Speaker 1: that you kind of have to understand if you are
Speaker 1: to understand the story of race and civil rights in America.
Speaker 1: That project launches next week. It's called Reconstruction the Unfinished Promise.
Speaker 1: I know I'm biased, but it's really good, and we're
Speaker 1: going to bring you a preview of it in this
Speaker 1: feed next week. But for today, let's go back to
Speaker 1: where this all began and play for you Miss Buchanan's
Speaker 1: Period of Adjustment, one of my favorite episodes ever and
Speaker 1: apparently some other people's favorite episode as well. On the
Speaker 1: campus of the University of Michigan, there's a gorgeous building
Speaker 1: called the Racam Auditorium, built in the nineteen thirties in
Speaker 1: the Classical Renaissance style, and in January of two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, on one of those cold Michigan days, a
Speaker 1: woman takes the stage in front of a big crowd.
Speaker 1: She's in her sixties. Her name is 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,
Speaker 2: the home of the Wolverines. Is that right? And I
Speaker 2: heard you had a game last night. You only lost
Speaker 2: 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 Nasau 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 ethemism 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 Yeah.
Speaker 3: 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 Leo le Brand.
Speaker 1: Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later he
Speaker 1: was a pastor. This is lee Ola Brown from an
Speaker 1: interview she gave in nineteen ninety one to the Kansas
Speaker 1: State Historical Society.
Speaker 4: My husband Oliver Brown. He was a heavyweight fighter. He
Speaker 4: used to fight 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: caled 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
Speaker 1: Sumner just four blocks on the Browns, Linda's playmates from
Speaker 1: the neighborhood all went there. So one day, as instructed
Speaker 1: by the NAACP, Oliver Brown took his daughter by the
Speaker 1: hand and walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary.
Speaker 4: As Linda said, when they got over there, and that
Speaker 4: building looks so bigger, being a little kid going upstairs.
Speaker 4: And then when they got ready to talk, they had
Speaker 4: her sit on the outside of the office was talking
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 4: She said, you could hear the Vossors kinda getting a
Speaker 4: little loud. And he said, well, it wasn't him, it
Speaker 4: was the school board. That was a policy of the
Speaker 4: school board. He couldn't do nothing about it, you know,
Speaker 4: So he couldn't, no way could he could not enroll
Speaker 4: Landon in that school without their approval.
Speaker 1: All the black families got the same answer, your child
Speaker 1: is not welcome, So the local NAACP chapter sued the
Speaker 1: school board. Oliver Brown's name was put first, Brown versus
Speaker 1: to peak a Board of Education. It was bundled with
Speaker 1: a number of other desegregation cases from all around the country.
Speaker 1: More than two hundred plaintiffs in all, went all the
Speaker 1: way to the Supreme Court, and on May seventeenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, in one of the most famously decisions in
Speaker 1: American history, the Court ruled in Oliver Brown's favor. The
Speaker 1: practice of educating black and white school children separately was
Speaker 1: ruled unconstitutional.
Speaker 3: It was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language,
Speaker 3: which should set for rest, once and for all the
Speaker 3: problem as to whether or not a second class citizenship
Speaker 3: segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of
Speaker 3: 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 Leola 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 4: I went to Monroe School here Intopeka from grade one
Speaker 4: 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 4: Oh it's wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful. And
Speaker 4: had it not been through this boging, you know, school
Speaker 4: and going so far to school, we've possibly never wit of,
Speaker 4: 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 Liola is adamant, Oh, no,
Speaker 1: that never came up. We were getting a quality education
Speaker 1: at Monroe.
Speaker 5: We didn't have any.
Speaker 4: Bane to pick with our schools. For his education, Misiness
Speaker 4: ignored the teachers because they were qualified and they need
Speaker 4: 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 quality of education at Monroe, the all black school.
Speaker 1: They just thought that the Topeka school Board shouldn't be
Speaker 1: telling 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 at 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 Inferiorleola 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 to 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 she 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 6: If you go even back to an Antebellum period, you
Speaker 6: would see planners who would talk about how they have
Speaker 6: no sense of family. Now, of course, these are the
Speaker 6: very people who are selling people's families at the auction block.
Speaker 6: They're destroying families, but they were justified in their minds
Speaker 6: by saying they have no sense of families.
Speaker 1: Another historian, Charles Pain, 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. Pain 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 a
Speaker 1: way of life and social equality, language that constructed race
Speaker 1: in interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to pretend
Speaker 1: that racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So what
Speaker 1: does the U. S. Supreme Court do? In nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: In the Brown decision. It buys into the Southern way
Speaker 1: of thinking about race. Leo le Brown and the other
Speaker 1: plaintiffs say, we have a structural problem. We don't have
Speaker 1: the power to send Linda to the school down the street.
Speaker 1: The court says, no, no, no, it's a psychological problem.
Speaker 1: Little Linda has been damaged in her heart. That may
Speaker 1: seem like a small distinction. Believe me, it's not. We're
Speaker 1: still dealing with the consequences. This is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a tangent, but I think it helps to explain
Speaker 1: why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic. It's about a
Speaker 1: wonderful bit of research done by two political scientists at
Speaker 1: Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jason Grissom and Christopher Reading. Grissom
Speaker 1: and Redding start with a well known fact White students
Speaker 1: are far more likely to be in gifted in Talented
Speaker 1: programs than black students. If your kid is in a
Speaker 1: gifted in Talented program, you've probably observed this. Where are
Speaker 1: the black kids, right? I might say, well, that's simply
Speaker 1: a reflection of the fact that white kids, for whatever reasons,
Speaker 1: have higher test scores on average and black kids. So
Speaker 1: Grissom and Reading look at a large national sample of
Speaker 1: elementary school kids and say, let's equalize for test scores.
Speaker 7: In other words, let's compare two students, one black and
Speaker 7: one white, but they both are very high achieving. This
Speaker 7: is Grisom, would that difference in probability that they are
Speaker 7: identified by the system as gifted? Would that persist? And
Speaker 7: the answer is that it does. In fact, it's still
Speaker 7: the case that even when you look at two students
Speaker 7: who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school,
Speaker 7: a white student and a black student, that white student
Speaker 7: is still more than two times as likely to be
Speaker 7: receiving gifted services as that black student is gifted.
Speaker 1: Programs are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the brightest
Speaker 1: children are given a chance to shine. Grisom's saying, that's
Speaker 1: not the way things work in practice.
Speaker 7: And you can go a little further, because you can
Speaker 7: throw other things into the equation that aren't just achievement.
Speaker 7: You can look at differences in income, the data have,
Speaker 7: how healthy the parents says that child is. We know
Speaker 7: what age that child entered kindergarten. You know, on average,
Speaker 7: white students and black students enter kindergarten at different ages.
Speaker 7: Because of the phenomenon of red shirting, white parents are
Speaker 7: more likely to hold their kids back at the start
Speaker 7: of schooling than black students are. That doesn't explain the
Speaker 7: 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 7: In the overwhelming majority of school districts in the United States,
Speaker 7: the way that a kid ever gets to be identified
Speaker 7: as gifted is if someone in the school, usually a
Speaker 7: classroom teacher, has to look at that kid and say,
Speaker 7: 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 7: For a black student, the world looks different. So if
Speaker 7: I'm a black student and I have a black classroom teacher,
Speaker 7: the probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in the next
Speaker 7: year it looks very much like the probability for a
Speaker 7: white student. But if I am a Black student and
Speaker 7: I have a white classroom teacher, my probability of being
Speaker 7: identified as gifted is substantially lower.
Speaker 1: How much lower?
Speaker 7: Okay, So for very high achieving black students, the probability
Speaker 7: of being assigned to gifted services under a white teacher
Speaker 7: is about half the probability as an observably similar black
Speaker 7: 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 Leo La Brown again about
Speaker 1: why she liked her elementary school Monroe so much.
Speaker 4: I loved it. I loved it the teachers who were fantastic.
Speaker 4: We got a fantastic education there. It wasn't any say
Speaker 4: this case wasn't based on that, because we had fantastic
Speaker 4: teachers and we learned, We learned a lot. They were
Speaker 4: good to us, more like an extended family like mothers
Speaker 4: and so forth, because they took an interest in you,
Speaker 4: 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 5: They made one serious mistake which I will have to
Speaker 5: 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 5: They made students do the integration. They should have had
Speaker 5: teachers verse, and they didn't do that at every one
Speaker 5: of those white schools, at every one of the black schools,
Speaker 5: If they were going to sign white children to the
Speaker 5: black school they should have had white teachers. If they
Speaker 5: were gonna sign black children into the white schools, they
Speaker 5: should have had some black teachers there. Now, the first
Speaker 5: people that should have been integrated should have been teaches.
Speaker 5: An administration just first. But they didn't do that. They
Speaker 5: 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 5: Young people didn't not know. Business moved first to have
Speaker 5: borne the brunt oh the segregation process, and it did
Speaker 5: something to the Elstons. It did something to them. It
Speaker 5: made them hay, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
Speaker 5: Far me and most of the students that had moved
Speaker 5: from the black schools into the white situation, we as
Speaker 5: teachers had been there to nurture, there, to help them along,
Speaker 5: to recognize that difficulties, to work with them when they
Speaker 5: moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know, they didn't not.
Speaker 5: The teachers were fridled in.
Speaker 1: The Brown Decision was all about children. The signature memories
Speaker 1: of the Brown era are all about black children being
Speaker 1: escorted into previously all white schools. We should have been
Speaker 1: talking about teachers. About three and a half hours dew
Speaker 1: east of Topeka on I seventy, there is a little
Speaker 1: town called Moberley. Moberly is in the area of Missouri
Speaker 1: called Little Dixie because it was settled by mirgrants from
Speaker 1: the South before the Civil War. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of slave owning in Little Dixie compared with the rest
Speaker 1: of Missouri, a lot of racial hostility in that part
Speaker 1: of the state. And I don't think you can understand
Speaker 1: what happened after the Brown Decision without first understanding what
Speaker 1: happened in Moberley. In the early nineteen fifties, Moberley had
Speaker 1: a school system employing around one hundred teachers across its schools.
Speaker 1: One of those schools was black. It was called Lincoln.
Speaker 1: Lincoln had eleven teachers. The year after the Brown decision,
Speaker 1: Mobilely integrates. They do that by closing the one black school, Lincoln,
Speaker 1: combussing all the black students there to white schools. After
Speaker 1: closing Lincoln, the Mobile School system then says, wait, if
Speaker 1: we combine all the students in Mobilely into one school system,
Speaker 1: we don't think we need as many teachers as we
Speaker 1: had before. So they say, let's evaluate all the teachers
Speaker 1: from the two newly combined systems, keep the best ones,
Speaker 1: let the mediocre ones go. I think you can see
Speaker 1: what's coming. They decide to fire every one of the
Speaker 1: eleven black teachers who used to work at Lincoln. So
Speaker 1: the black teachers sue and they lose. They appeal, they
Speaker 1: lose again. In nineteen fifty nine, they asked the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court to consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no,
Speaker 1: Brown is the great victory, Moberly is the great defeat,
Speaker 1: and they're connected. Let me give you a flavor of
Speaker 1: the case. The black teachers say, you can't possibly say
Speaker 1: that we were the absolute worst of all the teachers
Speaker 1: in the combined system. We've been evaluated for years by
Speaker 1: our superintendent and have been given high marks. The white
Speaker 1: school board counters with, sure, but you are being compared
Speaker 1: to other black teachers. You need to be compared to
Speaker 1: white teachers. So the black teachers say, yeah, but we
Speaker 1: stack up really well against white teachers. And by the way,
Speaker 1: this was not a stretch. Virtually every profession except teaching
Speaker 1: was closed to educated African Americans in those years. If
Speaker 1: you were smart and liked learning in that era, you
Speaker 1: became a teacher. The court then says, so what I'm
Speaker 1: quoting Human capabilities cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula.
Speaker 1: Intangible factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry, and adaptible
Speaker 1: vitally affect the work of any teacher. I think there's
Speaker 1: one intangible factor missing in that list, don't you what
Speaker 1: could it be? Dispose? It begins with an r. Forgive
Speaker 1: me for going on and on about this one obscure case,
Speaker 1: but you have to get the flavor of it. The
Speaker 1: plaintiffs say, wait, one of us is a superstar graduate degrees,
Speaker 1: qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is mary Alla Timminy.
Speaker 1: And the white superintendent agrees she's a star, But he says,
Speaker 1: I'm still not hiring her because, and when quoting here
Speaker 1: from the judge's decision, because she gave the impression that
Speaker 1: she considered herself superior to other teachers and was resentful
Speaker 1: towards authority. Resentful towards authority, you think she just got fired.
Speaker 1: The judge simply can't get mary Ella Timony out of
Speaker 1: his head. Quoting again, it is unfortunate when teachers have
Speaker 1: an attitude such as this teacher has, And I do
Speaker 1: not mean to say that such attitude is limited to
Speaker 1: any race or color, but when it does exist, it
Speaker 1: vitally affects the teaching ability of the individual. She's apity,
Speaker 1: an apity negro. Of course, they don't want to keep
Speaker 1: her because they understand the same thing that Leola Brown understands,
Speaker 1: and all the many academics who have studied what actually
Speaker 1: happens to black kids in the classroom understand, which is
Speaker 1: that educational equality is a function of who holds the
Speaker 1: power in the classroom. So MOBILEI misery gets rid of
Speaker 1: its Black teachers, and by the way, so does almost
Speaker 1: everybody else. Across the entire South. Black teachers just get
Speaker 1: fired left and right. It wasn't something done secretly, It
Speaker 1: was done right out in the open. There was something
Speaker 1: like eighty two thousand African American teachers in the South
Speaker 1: before the Brown decision. Within a decade, as the decision
Speaker 1: was slowly implemented across the country, about half have been fired.
Speaker 8: What surprises me is the kind of historical amnesia there
Speaker 8: is surrounding that issue that many many people today who
Speaker 8: are searching for black teachers have no understanding of the
Speaker 8: 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 8: What role did teachers did black women play in the
Speaker 8: South relative to children? They were nurse maids, they were housekeepers,
Speaker 8: they were domestics. That's the role they played. You know,
Speaker 8: every Southerner I meet a lot of stuff, they say,
Speaker 8: I had a black somebody who took care of them.
Speaker 8: But that's a mother. You know, that's a little different position.
Speaker 8: 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 um, quoting there 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 teams teachers and topeaka Kansas.
Speaker 1: Of course, Topeka made a show of it. They assigned
Speaker 1: a black teacher to a halftime position at the formerly
Speaker 1: all white Randolph School, and then the principal, a man
Speaker 1: named Stanley Stalter, had the task of calling up white
Speaker 1: parents to see if they objected to this one halftime
Speaker 1: black teacher, and of course they did.
Speaker 9: Some were adamant. Nope, some of them had a very
Speaker 9: peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black
Speaker 9: teacher's room.
Speaker 1: That's the principal Stalter interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society.
Speaker 9: Another one said, my child is now twelve years of
Speaker 9: age and it's beginning her manstrual period, and this is
Speaker 9: not the time of her life to be put in
Speaker 9: here with a black teacher, a male that one.
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 all.
Speaker 2: Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment
Speaker 2: next year in schools for Negro children, it is not
Speaker 2: possible at this time to offer you employment for next year.
Speaker 2: If the court should rule that segregation in the elementary
Speaker 2: grades is unconstitutional, our board will proceed on the assumption
Speaker 2: that the majority of people in Topeka will not want
Speaker 2: 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. Topeak a Board of Education. This is the
Speaker 1: little girl Oliver Brown tried and failed to enroll at
Speaker 1: Sumner elementary school. She was invited to Michigan to speak
Speaker 1: in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: decision and what does Linda Brown Thompson.
Speaker 9: Do.
Speaker 1: In the middle of her talk, she interrupts her eyewitness
Speaker 1: account to remind her audience who bore the cost of integration,
Speaker 1: not white people, black people.
Speaker 2: I think I understand that all of you must be
Speaker 2: under considerable strength, 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 yours, Wende Godwin, Superintendent
Speaker 2: of Schools.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Siomara 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 Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell