June 29, 2017 • 30 mins
A landmark Supreme Court case. A civil rights revolution. Why has everyone forgotten what happened next?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's
a gorgeous building called the Raca Auditorium, built in the
nineteen thirties in the Classical Renaissance style. And in January
of two thousand and four, on one of those cold
Michigan days, a woman takes the stage in front of
a big crowd. She's in her sixties. Her name is
(00:37):
missus Thompson.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be with you
this evening here on the campus of the University of Michigan, the.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Home of the Wolverines.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Is that right? And I heard you had a game
last night you only lost it by two points. Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
She tells a funny story about how she was once
invited to speak at NASAU and thought she was going
to the Bahamas, only to discover that it was NASA County,
Long Island. She talks a little bit about her childhood
and her family. Then right in the middle of her talk,
she starts reading a notice of termination sent many years
ago to a teacher named Darla Buchanan.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment
next year, it is necessary for me to notify you
now that your services will not be needed for next year.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
The students in the auditorium are wrapped. This is not
what they expected. But Missus Thompson goes on and reads
all the way to the end.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I think I understand that all of you must be
under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an
inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
This period of adjustment, remember that line. It's a nice
bit of condescension and understatement. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked
and misunderstood. This episode is about that euphemism in the
(02:20):
letter read by Missus Thompson. This period of adjustment. Not
that long ago. Americans set out to do something revolutionary
to change the world. But we botched it, and we
didn't want to admit that fact. So we swept the
(02:41):
whole episode under the rug and wrote letters to everyone
concerned to try and absolve ourselves of the whole business.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
be the best for everyone concern.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan, was written by
the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas,
a medium sized city in the upper right hand corner
of the state. Like a lot of cities and towns
in the United States, particularly those in the South, Topeka
had segregated public elementary schools. In the Jim Crow era,
White children went to neighborhood schools. Black children went to
(03:29):
a separate system of schools scattered around the city with
their own black teachers and black principles. In the years
after the Second World War, the leading civil rights group
of the day, the NAACP, decided to start challenging segregation.
Topeka was one of their test cases. They found thirteen
black families and asked them to go down to their
(03:50):
neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children. One
of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leola Brown.
Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later he
was a pastor. This is Leola Brown from an interview
she gave in nineteen ninety one to the Kansas State
Historical Society.
Speaker 6 (04:09):
My husband Oliver Brown. He was a heavyweight fighter. He
used to bit golden gloves.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
The Browns had a seven year old named Linda. The
black elementary school she was supposed to go to was
cal Monroe. To get there, she had to walk seven blocks,
often in freezing weather, and cross a busy road, then
get on a bus. The local white elementary school was Sumner,
just four blocks on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the
(04:36):
neighborhood all went there. So one day, as instructed by
the NAACP, Oliver Brown took his daughter by the hand
and walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary.
Speaker 6 (04:47):
As Linda said, when they got over there and that
building looked so big, there being a little kid going upstairs.
And then when they got ready to talk, they had
her sit on the outside of the office. Dad went
in was tungue to the principal.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
You could imagine how uncomfortable the conversation was. Oliver Brown
was not supposed to be there, and the principal would
have had no idea what to say to him other
than I'm sorry, this is the way it is in Topeka.
With little Linda waiting out in the hall, if she.
Speaker 6 (05:14):
Said, you could hear the voters kinda get a little loud,
and he said, well, it wasn't him, it was the
school board. That was a policy of the school board.
You couldn't do nothing about it, you know. So he
couldn't no way, he could not enroll Landon and that
school without.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Their preval All the black families got the same answer,
your child is not welcome. So the local NAACP chapter
sued the school board. Oliver Brown's name was put first,
Brown versus to peak a Board of Education. It was
bundled with a number of other desegregation cases from all
around the country. More than two hundred plaintiffs in all,
(05:51):
went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on
May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in one of the most
famous legal decisions in American history, the Court ruled in
Oliver Brown's favor. The practice of educating black and white
school children separately was ruled unconstantal.
Speaker 5 (06:11):
It was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language,
which should set for rest, once and for all the
problem as to whether or not a second class citizenship
segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of
the country.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I'm guessing you were taught about the Brown decision in
school or have watched a documentary on it. It's a milestone,
but at the same time it's a strange case. You
could fill an auditorium with all the scholars who have
a quarrel with Brown. I mean, just go back and
read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor
of Oliver and Liola Brown and the families of Topeka,
(06:52):
but the court actually says something entirely different from what
the black people of Topeka were saying.
Speaker 6 (06:58):
I went to Monroe School. You're Intopeka from grade one
through eight.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State
Historical Society. On several occasions, Liola is asked about Monroe,
the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola
grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well,
and Leola Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.
Speaker 6 (07:21):
Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful.
And had it not been through this walking, you know,
school and going to a part of school were possibly
never wady. You know, that's what we did.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Later in the interview the issue comes up again. The
interviewer asked Leola specifically, you didn't want your daughter to
go to the white school because the white school was
better than the black school. And Leola is adamant. Oh No,
that never came up. We were getting a quality education
at Monroe.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
We didn't have any.
Speaker 6 (07:55):
Going to pick with our schools for as education was
sponsor and no the teachers, because they were qualified and
they did what they were supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
For Leola and Oliver Brown, the lawsuit was a matter
of principle. They didn't think there was anything wrong with
the qual education at Monroe, the all black school. They
just thought that the Tapeka school Board shouldn't be telling
them where they could or couldn't send Linda to school,
particularly if the only reason the school board could come
up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now, listen
(08:27):
to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the Brown decision.
They agreed that the Browns ought to be able to
send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different. I'm
quoting segregation of white and colored children in public schools
has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The Court's
(08:48):
conclusion was that segregation was de facto unequal. That simply
the act of educating black children separately from white children
caused harm, serious harm. The court goes on, segregation with
the sanction of law has a tendency to retard the
educational and mental development of Negro children. This was light
(09:10):
years away from Leola Brown's position. Leola Brown said that
black run schools like Monroe were good schools, but as
a matter of principle, she ought to be able to
enroll into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe is
not a good school at all. It can't be a
good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola Brown said,
(09:34):
we're fine, We just want some control over our lives.
The Court said, you're not fine at all. Your educational
and mental development has been retarded by your inferior schooling. Now,
the court could have said something much more straightforward, how
(09:56):
about this. Schools are where people make the connections that
allow them to get ahead in the world. You cannot
lock black people out of the place where social power
and opportunity reside. That argument would have done the job right,
but the court doesn't say that. In order to condemn
the discrimination of Brown's face, the court instead makes the
case that black people are psychologically crippled. The historian Darryl
(10:22):
Scott wrote a brilliant book a while back called Contempt
and Pity, in which he points out that there's been
a long history behind this talk of psychological damage. It
goes back to the days of slavery. It's always been
incredibly useful for white people to explain the problems of
black people as the result of something personal internal. It
(10:43):
makes their problems their fault.
Speaker 7 (10:45):
If you go even back to an Antebellum period, you
would see planners who would talk about how they have
no sense of family. Now, of course, these are the
very people who are selling people's families at the auction block, right.
You know, they're destroying families, but they were justify it
in their minds by saying they have no sense of families.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Another historian, Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in
his essay The Whole United States Is Southern, which you
should read, by the way, if you ever want to
be grabbed by the lapels. Paine argues that in the
decades after the Civil War, Southern whites attempt to sell
the rest of America on this way of thinking about race.
(11:25):
They've basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political
and economic force. But they want quoting pain to frame
the issue in a language of separation. Customs are way
of life and social equality, language that constructed race in
interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to pretend racial
(11:46):
conflict is just a psychological problem. So what does the U. S.
Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty four in the Brown decision?
It buys into the Southern way of thinking about race.
Leo Le Brown and the other plaintiffs say, we have
a structural problem. We don't have the power to send
(12:07):
Linda to the school down the street. The court says, no, no, no,
it's a psychological problem. Little Linda has been damaged in
her heart. That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me,
it's not. We're still dealing with the consequences. This is
(12:27):
a little bit of a tangent, but I think it
helps to explain why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic.
It's about a wonderful bit of research done by two
political scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jason Grissom and
Christopher Reading. Grissom and Reading start with a well known
fact white students are far more likely to be in
(12:48):
gifted and talented programs than black students. If your kid
isn't a gifted in towented program, you've probably observed this.
We're the black kids right now. You might say, well,
that's simply a reflection of the fact that white kids,
for whatever reasons, have higher test scores on average than
black kids. So Grissom and Reading look at a large
national sample of elementary school kids and let's equalize for
(13:10):
test course.
Speaker 8 (13:11):
In other words, let's compare two students, one black and
one white, but they both are very high achieving.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
This is grisome.
Speaker 8 (13:18):
Would that difference in probability that they are identified by
the system as gifted? Would that persist? And the answer
is that it does. In fact, you know, it's still
the case that even when you look at two students
who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school,
a white student and a black student, that white student
is still more than two times as likely to be
(13:39):
receiving gifted services as that black student is.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Gifted. Programs are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the
brightest children are given a chance to shine. Grisom's saying
that's not the way things work in practice.
Speaker 8 (13:52):
And you can go a little further because you can
throw other things into the equation that aren't just achievement.
You can look at differences in income, the data have,
how healthy the parent says that child is. We know
what age that child entered kindergarten. You know, on average,
white students and black students enter kinder garden at different ages.
Because of the phenomenon of red shirting, white parents are
(14:12):
more likely to hold their kids back at the start
of schooling than black students are. That doesn't explain the
gifted gap.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
In other words, you match up bright black kids with
equally bright white kids, then you make sure the two
groups are similar in age, class and the health of
their parents, and you still find that the white kids
are far more likely to be admitted to gifted and
talented programs. Kind of a puzzle, right. Finally, Grissom and
Reddings say, look, in many cases, teachers play a big
(14:42):
role in which students get into gifted programs. They encourage them,
they recommend them. So they think maybe the answer here
lies with not who the child is, but who the
child's teacher is.
Speaker 8 (14:54):
In the overwhelming majority of school districts in the United States,
the way that a kid ever gets to be identified
as gifted is if someone in the school, usually a
classroom teacher, has to look at that kid and say,
I think this kid might be gifted.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
So Grissom does something really simple. He looks at the
race of the teacher, and what he finds is that
for white kids, there's no effect. It doesn't matter, but
not for black students.
Speaker 8 (15:20):
For a black student, the world looks different. So if
I am a black student and I have a black
classroom teacher, the probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in
the next year it looks very much like the probability
for a white student. But if I am a Black
student and I have a white classroom teacher, my probability
(15:42):
of being identified as gifted is substantially lower.
Speaker 7 (15:45):
How much lower?
Speaker 8 (15:46):
Okay, So for very high achieving black students, the probability
of being assigned to gifted services under a white teacher
is about half the probability as an observably similar black
student taught by a black teacher.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
If you're black, having a black teacher makes a difference,
and not just for getting into gifted programs. Having a
black teacher raises the test scores of black students, It
changes the way black students behave, and it dramatically decreases
the chances a black male student would be suspended. A
group of social scientists recently went over the records of
(16:25):
one hundred thousand black students in North Carolina over a
five year period. They found that having even one black
teacher between the third and fifth grade reduced the chance
that an African American boy would later drop out of
high school by how much? By thirty nine percent one
black teacher. Now, does this mean that white teachers are
(16:46):
diabolical racists trying to hold down black students. No, this
isn't conscious discrimination. The point is that teachers have power,
the gatekeepers. They control the classroom. They decide who gets
recommended for prizes like gifted programs and who doesn't. They
decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing their
attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by ignoring
(17:09):
another or sending him more often to the principal's office.
Teachers can discourage. Listen to Leola Brown again about why
she liked her elementary school Monroe so much.
Speaker 6 (17:22):
I loved it.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
I loved it.
Speaker 6 (17:24):
The teachers who were fantastic. We got a fantastic education there.
It wasn't, as you say, this case wasn't based on that,
because we had fantastic teachers and we learned. We learned
a lot, and they were good to us, more like
an extended family like mothers and so forth. Because they
took an interest in you, you know, and.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
They took an interest in you. That's what all the
research on blacks and whites and gifted programs comes down to.
You need to have someone who takes an interest in
you if you want education to work and be fair.
Speaker 9 (17:56):
They made one serious mistake which I will have to
hold them responsible for.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
I came across another archive of interviews from the Brown
era Duke Universities behind the Veil Oral History Project. The
interview you're hearing is from Richmond, Virginia. It's with an
African American teacher named Celestine Porter, and she says that
once you grant this idea that a teacher is a
gatekeeper and that a child needs someone to take an
interest in them, then that means integration should have been
(18:26):
pursued very differently.
Speaker 9 (18:28):
They made students do the integration. They should have had
teachers first, and they didn't do that at every one
of those white schools, at every one of the black schools.
If they were going to sign white children into the
black school they should have had white teachers. If they
were gonna send black children unto the white schools, they
(18:49):
should have had some black teachers there. Now, the first
people that should have been integrated should have been teacher
and administrations first.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
But they didn't do that.
Speaker 9 (19:00):
They moved the children.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
She's absolutely right. Read the Brown Decision for yourself. The
court goes on and on about kids, but they have
virtually nothing to say about teachers. The word teacher comes
up once in the main text and a few times
in the footnotes. That's it. How on earth can you
undertake the greatest transformation of public education in American history
(19:23):
and barely mentioned teachers.
Speaker 9 (19:25):
Young people did not know business moved first to have
borne the brunt oh the segregation process, and it did
something to the Elstons. It did something to them, It
made them hay, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
(19:45):
Farm Me and most of the students that had moved
from the black schools into the white situation. We as
teachers had been there to nurture there to help them along,
to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they
moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't
know teachers.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
The teachers were afraid of them. The Brown Decision was
all about children. The signature memories of the Brown era
are all about black children being escorted into previously all
white schools. We should have been talking about teachers. About
three and a half hours deue east of Topeka on
(20:27):
I seventy, there is a little town called Moberly. Moberly
is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie because
it was settled by margrants from the South before the
Civil War. There was a lot of slave owning in
Little Dixie compared with the rest of Missouri, a lot
of racial hostility in that part of the state. And
I don't think you can understand what happened after the
Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Moberly. In
(20:51):
the early nineteen fifties, Moberley had a school system employing
around one hundred teachers across eight schools. One of those
schools was black. It was called Lincoln. Lincoln had eleven teachers.
The year after the Brown decision. Moberley integrates. They do
that by closing the one black school, Lincoln. I'm busting
(21:12):
all the black students there to white schools. After closing Lincoln,
the Mobiley school system then says, wait, if we combine
all the students in Mobile into one school system, we
don't think we need as many teachers as we had before.
So they say, let's evaluate all the teachers from the
two newly combined systems. Keep the best ones, let the
(21:33):
mediocre ones go. I think you can see what's coming.
They decide to fire every one of the eleven black
teachers who used to work at Lincoln. So the black
teachers sue and they lose. They appeal, they lose again.
In nineteen fifty nine, they asked the Supreme Court to
consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no, Brown is
(21:54):
the great victory, Moberly is the great defeat, and they're connected.
Let me give you a flavor of the case. The
black teachers say, you can't possibly say that we were
the absolute worst of all teachers in the combined system.
We've been evaluated for years by our superintendent and have
(22:14):
been given high marks. The white school board counters with sure,
but you are being compared to other black teachers. You
need to be compared to white teachers. So the black
teachers say, yeah, but we stack up really well against
white teachers. And by the way, this was not a stretch.
Virtually every profession except teaching was closed to educated African
(22:36):
Americans in those years. If you were smart and liked
learning in that era, you became a teacher. The court
then says, so what I'm quoting human capabilities cannot be
reduced to a mathematical formula. Intangible factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry,
(22:56):
and adaptability vitally affect the work of any teacher. I
think there's one intangible factor missing in that list, don't
you what could it be? Dispose? It begins with an r.
Forgive me for going on and on about this one
obscure case, but you have to get the flavor of it.
(23:18):
The plaintiffs say, wait, one of miss is a superstar
graduate degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is
mary Ala Timminy. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star,
but he says, I'm still not hiring her because and
when quoting here from the judge's decision because she gave
(23:39):
the impression that she considered herself superior to other teachers
and was resentful towards authority. Resentful towards authority, You think
she just got fired. The judge simply can't get mary
Ella Timony out of his head. I'm quoting again. It
is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this
(24:03):
teacher has. And I do not mean to say that
such attitude is limited to any race or color, but
when it does it exist, it vitally affects the teaching
ability of the individual. She's upity, an appity negro. Of course,
they don't want to keep her because they understand the
same thing that Leola Brown understands, and all the many
(24:23):
academics who have studied what actually happens to black kids
in the classroom understand, which is that educational equality is
a function of who holds the power in the classroom.
So mobili misery gets rid of its black teachers, and
by the way, so does almost everybody else across the
(24:43):
entire South. Black teachers just get fired left and right.
It wasn't something done secretly, it was done right out
in the open. There was something like eighty two thousand
African American teachers in the South before the Brown Decision.
Within a decade, as the decision was slowly implemented across
the country, about half have been fired.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
What surprises me is the kind of historical amnesia there
is surrounding that issue that many many people today who
are searching for black teachers have no understanding of the
fact that many of them lost their jobs.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
One of the few scholars who has paid any attention
to what happened is Michelle Foster, an education professor at
the University of Louisville. Twenty years ago, Foster tracked as
many black teachers from that era as she could find.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
What role did teachers did black women play in the
South relative to children? They were nurse maids, they were housekeepers,
they were domestics. That's the role they played. You know,
every Southern or I meet a lot of stuff they said,
I had a black somebody who took care of them.
But that's a motherl You know, that's a little different position.
When you're a teacher. You're evaluating, you're judging.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Even those who got to keep their jobs told one
story after another of humiliation. It was too much. One
of the teachers Foster interviewed went for a meeting with
the superintendent with all of the other black teachers who
were being kept on. I'm quoting. They were fifteen of us,
and not a single one of them in there as
dark as I am. Not one that ought to tell
(26:13):
you something. By the way, the remaining black teachers couldn't
use the teacher's bathroom. They had to use the children's bathroom.
To this day, the ranks of black teachers in the
United States have not recovered from the humiliations and mass
(26:34):
firings of the nineteen fifties and sixties. As a percentage,
there are far fewer black teachers than there are black students.
And when you think back to studies on how important
black teachers are for the performance of black students, that's
a tragedy. Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, one classroom after
(26:55):
another was purged of its black teachers and topeaka Kansas,
of course, Topeka made a show of it. They assigned
a black teacher to a half time position at the
formerly all white Randolph School. Principal, a man named Stanley Stalter,
had the task of calling up white parents to see
if they objected to this one halftime black teacher, and
(27:18):
of course they did.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Some were adamant. Nope, some of them had a very
peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black
teacher's room.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
That's the principal stalter interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
Another one said, my child is now twelve years of age,
and it is beginning her mantrual period, and this is
not the time of her life to be put in
here with a black teacher, a male. Hey, that one
(27:58):
topped everything.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
There's a limit to how many times a school board
is going to try and talk white tax paying parents
out of their fear of placing a menstruating adolescent in
class with a black teacher. Far easier just not to
hire any black teachers at.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
All, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about
enrollment next year in schools for Negro children, it is
not possible at this time to offer you employment for
next year. If the court should rule that segregation in
the elementary grades is unconstitutional, our board will proceed on
(28:37):
the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will
not want to employ Negro teachers. Next year for white children.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I said at the beginning. The woman reading that letter
at the conference of the University of Michigan was a
Missus Thompson. That's her married name. Her first name is Linda.
Her maiden name is Brown, Linda Brown, the Brown of
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. This is a little girl,
Oliver Brown tried and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School.
(29:12):
She was invited to Michigan to speak in celebration of
the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. And what
does Linda Brown Thompson do. In the middle of her talk,
she interrupts her eyewitness account to remind her audience who
bore the cost of integration, not white people, black people.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
I think I understand that all of you must be
under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an
inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.
I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendel Godwin,
(30:00):
Superintendent of Schools.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Sillmarra Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Bushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's
a gorgeous building called the Raca Auditorium, built in the
nineteen thirties in the Classical Renaissance style. And in January
of two thousand and four, on one of those cold
Michigan days, a woman takes the stage in front of
a big crowd. She's in her sixties. Her name is
(00:37):
missus Thompson.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be with you
this evening here on the campus of the University of Michigan, the.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Home of the Wolverines.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Is that right? And I heard you had a game
last night you only lost it by two points. Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
She tells a funny story about how she was once
invited to speak at NASAU and thought she was going
to the Bahamas, only to discover that it was NASA County,
Long Island. She talks a little bit about her childhood
and her family. Then right in the middle of her talk,
she starts reading a notice of termination sent many years
ago to a teacher named Darla Buchanan.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment
next year, it is necessary for me to notify you
now that your services will not be needed for next year.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
The students in the auditorium are wrapped. This is not
what they expected. But Missus Thompson goes on and reads
all the way to the end.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I think I understand that all of you must be
under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an
inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
This period of adjustment, remember that line. It's a nice
bit of condescension and understatement. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked
and misunderstood. This episode is about that euphemism in the
(02:20):
letter read by Missus Thompson. This period of adjustment. Not
that long ago. Americans set out to do something revolutionary
to change the world. But we botched it, and we
didn't want to admit that fact. So we swept the
(02:41):
whole episode under the rug and wrote letters to everyone
concerned to try and absolve ourselves of the whole business.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
be the best for everyone concern.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan, was written by
the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas,
a medium sized city in the upper right hand corner
of the state. Like a lot of cities and towns
in the United States, particularly those in the South, Topeka
had segregated public elementary schools. In the Jim Crow era,
White children went to neighborhood schools. Black children went to
(03:29):
a separate system of schools scattered around the city with
their own black teachers and black principles. In the years
after the Second World War, the leading civil rights group
of the day, the NAACP, decided to start challenging segregation.
Topeka was one of their test cases. They found thirteen
black families and asked them to go down to their
(03:50):
neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children. One
of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leola Brown.
Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later he
was a pastor. This is Leola Brown from an interview
she gave in nineteen ninety one to the Kansas State
Historical Society.
Speaker 6 (04:09):
My husband Oliver Brown. He was a heavyweight fighter. He
used to bit golden gloves.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
The Browns had a seven year old named Linda. The
black elementary school she was supposed to go to was
cal Monroe. To get there, she had to walk seven blocks,
often in freezing weather, and cross a busy road, then
get on a bus. The local white elementary school was Sumner,
just four blocks on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the
(04:36):
neighborhood all went there. So one day, as instructed by
the NAACP, Oliver Brown took his daughter by the hand
and walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary.
Speaker 6 (04:47):
As Linda said, when they got over there and that
building looked so big, there being a little kid going upstairs.
And then when they got ready to talk, they had
her sit on the outside of the office. Dad went
in was tungue to the principal.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
You could imagine how uncomfortable the conversation was. Oliver Brown
was not supposed to be there, and the principal would
have had no idea what to say to him other
than I'm sorry, this is the way it is in Topeka.
With little Linda waiting out in the hall, if she.
Speaker 6 (05:14):
Said, you could hear the voters kinda get a little loud,
and he said, well, it wasn't him, it was the
school board. That was a policy of the school board.
You couldn't do nothing about it, you know. So he
couldn't no way, he could not enroll Landon and that
school without.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Their preval All the black families got the same answer,
your child is not welcome. So the local NAACP chapter
sued the school board. Oliver Brown's name was put first,
Brown versus to peak a Board of Education. It was
bundled with a number of other desegregation cases from all
around the country. More than two hundred plaintiffs in all,
(05:51):
went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on
May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in one of the most
famous legal decisions in American history, the Court ruled in
Oliver Brown's favor. The practice of educating black and white
school children separately was ruled unconstantal.
Speaker 5 (06:11):
It was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language,
which should set for rest, once and for all the
problem as to whether or not a second class citizenship
segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of
the country.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I'm guessing you were taught about the Brown decision in
school or have watched a documentary on it. It's a milestone,
but at the same time it's a strange case. You
could fill an auditorium with all the scholars who have
a quarrel with Brown. I mean, just go back and
read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor
of Oliver and Liola Brown and the families of Topeka,
(06:52):
but the court actually says something entirely different from what
the black people of Topeka were saying.
Speaker 6 (06:58):
I went to Monroe School. You're Intopeka from grade one
through eight.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State
Historical Society. On several occasions, Liola is asked about Monroe,
the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola
grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well,
and Leola Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.
Speaker 6 (07:21):
Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful.
And had it not been through this walking, you know,
school and going to a part of school were possibly
never wady. You know, that's what we did.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Later in the interview the issue comes up again. The
interviewer asked Leola specifically, you didn't want your daughter to
go to the white school because the white school was
better than the black school. And Leola is adamant. Oh No,
that never came up. We were getting a quality education
at Monroe.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
We didn't have any.
Speaker 6 (07:55):
Going to pick with our schools for as education was
sponsor and no the teachers, because they were qualified and
they did what they were supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
For Leola and Oliver Brown, the lawsuit was a matter
of principle. They didn't think there was anything wrong with
the qual education at Monroe, the all black school. They
just thought that the Tapeka school Board shouldn't be telling
them where they could or couldn't send Linda to school,
particularly if the only reason the school board could come
up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now, listen
(08:27):
to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the Brown decision.
They agreed that the Browns ought to be able to
send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different. I'm
quoting segregation of white and colored children in public schools
has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The Court's
(08:48):
conclusion was that segregation was de facto unequal. That simply
the act of educating black children separately from white children
caused harm, serious harm. The court goes on, segregation with
the sanction of law has a tendency to retard the
educational and mental development of Negro children. This was light
(09:10):
years away from Leola Brown's position. Leola Brown said that
black run schools like Monroe were good schools, but as
a matter of principle, she ought to be able to
enroll into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe is
not a good school at all. It can't be a
good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola Brown said,
(09:34):
we're fine, We just want some control over our lives.
The Court said, you're not fine at all. Your educational
and mental development has been retarded by your inferior schooling. Now,
the court could have said something much more straightforward, how
(09:56):
about this. Schools are where people make the connections that
allow them to get ahead in the world. You cannot
lock black people out of the place where social power
and opportunity reside. That argument would have done the job right,
but the court doesn't say that. In order to condemn
the discrimination of Brown's face, the court instead makes the
case that black people are psychologically crippled. The historian Darryl
(10:22):
Scott wrote a brilliant book a while back called Contempt
and Pity, in which he points out that there's been
a long history behind this talk of psychological damage. It
goes back to the days of slavery. It's always been
incredibly useful for white people to explain the problems of
black people as the result of something personal internal. It
(10:43):
makes their problems their fault.
Speaker 7 (10:45):
If you go even back to an Antebellum period, you
would see planners who would talk about how they have
no sense of family. Now, of course, these are the
very people who are selling people's families at the auction block, right.
You know, they're destroying families, but they were justify it
in their minds by saying they have no sense of families.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Another historian, Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in
his essay The Whole United States Is Southern, which you
should read, by the way, if you ever want to
be grabbed by the lapels. Paine argues that in the
decades after the Civil War, Southern whites attempt to sell
the rest of America on this way of thinking about race.
(11:25):
They've basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political
and economic force. But they want quoting pain to frame
the issue in a language of separation. Customs are way
of life and social equality, language that constructed race in
interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to pretend racial
(11:46):
conflict is just a psychological problem. So what does the U. S.
Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty four in the Brown decision?
It buys into the Southern way of thinking about race.
Leo Le Brown and the other plaintiffs say, we have
a structural problem. We don't have the power to send
(12:07):
Linda to the school down the street. The court says, no, no, no,
it's a psychological problem. Little Linda has been damaged in
her heart. That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me,
it's not. We're still dealing with the consequences. This is
(12:27):
a little bit of a tangent, but I think it
helps to explain why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic.
It's about a wonderful bit of research done by two
political scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jason Grissom and
Christopher Reading. Grissom and Reading start with a well known
fact white students are far more likely to be in
(12:48):
gifted and talented programs than black students. If your kid
isn't a gifted in towented program, you've probably observed this.
We're the black kids right now. You might say, well,
that's simply a reflection of the fact that white kids,
for whatever reasons, have higher test scores on average than
black kids. So Grissom and Reading look at a large
national sample of elementary school kids and let's equalize for
(13:10):
test course.
Speaker 8 (13:11):
In other words, let's compare two students, one black and
one white, but they both are very high achieving.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
This is grisome.
Speaker 8 (13:18):
Would that difference in probability that they are identified by
the system as gifted? Would that persist? And the answer
is that it does. In fact, you know, it's still
the case that even when you look at two students
who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school,
a white student and a black student, that white student
is still more than two times as likely to be
(13:39):
receiving gifted services as that black student is.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Gifted. Programs are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the
brightest children are given a chance to shine. Grisom's saying
that's not the way things work in practice.
Speaker 8 (13:52):
And you can go a little further because you can
throw other things into the equation that aren't just achievement.
You can look at differences in income, the data have,
how healthy the parent says that child is. We know
what age that child entered kindergarten. You know, on average,
white students and black students enter kinder garden at different ages.
Because of the phenomenon of red shirting, white parents are
(14:12):
more likely to hold their kids back at the start
of schooling than black students are. That doesn't explain the
gifted gap.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
In other words, you match up bright black kids with
equally bright white kids, then you make sure the two
groups are similar in age, class and the health of
their parents, and you still find that the white kids
are far more likely to be admitted to gifted and
talented programs. Kind of a puzzle, right. Finally, Grissom and
Reddings say, look, in many cases, teachers play a big
(14:42):
role in which students get into gifted programs. They encourage them,
they recommend them. So they think maybe the answer here
lies with not who the child is, but who the
child's teacher is.
Speaker 8 (14:54):
In the overwhelming majority of school districts in the United States,
the way that a kid ever gets to be identified
as gifted is if someone in the school, usually a
classroom teacher, has to look at that kid and say,
I think this kid might be gifted.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
So Grissom does something really simple. He looks at the
race of the teacher, and what he finds is that
for white kids, there's no effect. It doesn't matter, but
not for black students.
Speaker 8 (15:20):
For a black student, the world looks different. So if
I am a black student and I have a black
classroom teacher, the probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in
the next year it looks very much like the probability
for a white student. But if I am a Black
student and I have a white classroom teacher, my probability
(15:42):
of being identified as gifted is substantially lower.
Speaker 7 (15:45):
How much lower?
Speaker 8 (15:46):
Okay, So for very high achieving black students, the probability
of being assigned to gifted services under a white teacher
is about half the probability as an observably similar black
student taught by a black teacher.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
If you're black, having a black teacher makes a difference,
and not just for getting into gifted programs. Having a
black teacher raises the test scores of black students, It
changes the way black students behave, and it dramatically decreases
the chances a black male student would be suspended. A
group of social scientists recently went over the records of
(16:25):
one hundred thousand black students in North Carolina over a
five year period. They found that having even one black
teacher between the third and fifth grade reduced the chance
that an African American boy would later drop out of
high school by how much? By thirty nine percent one
black teacher. Now, does this mean that white teachers are
(16:46):
diabolical racists trying to hold down black students. No, this
isn't conscious discrimination. The point is that teachers have power,
the gatekeepers. They control the classroom. They decide who gets
recommended for prizes like gifted programs and who doesn't. They
decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing their
attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by ignoring
(17:09):
another or sending him more often to the principal's office.
Teachers can discourage. Listen to Leola Brown again about why
she liked her elementary school Monroe so much.
Speaker 6 (17:22):
I loved it.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
I loved it.
Speaker 6 (17:24):
The teachers who were fantastic. We got a fantastic education there.
It wasn't, as you say, this case wasn't based on that,
because we had fantastic teachers and we learned. We learned
a lot, and they were good to us, more like
an extended family like mothers and so forth. Because they
took an interest in you, you know, and.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
They took an interest in you. That's what all the
research on blacks and whites and gifted programs comes down to.
You need to have someone who takes an interest in
you if you want education to work and be fair.
Speaker 9 (17:56):
They made one serious mistake which I will have to
hold them responsible for.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
I came across another archive of interviews from the Brown
era Duke Universities behind the Veil Oral History Project. The
interview you're hearing is from Richmond, Virginia. It's with an
African American teacher named Celestine Porter, and she says that
once you grant this idea that a teacher is a
gatekeeper and that a child needs someone to take an
interest in them, then that means integration should have been
(18:26):
pursued very differently.
Speaker 9 (18:28):
They made students do the integration. They should have had
teachers first, and they didn't do that at every one
of those white schools, at every one of the black schools.
If they were going to sign white children into the
black school they should have had white teachers. If they
were gonna send black children unto the white schools, they
(18:49):
should have had some black teachers there. Now, the first
people that should have been integrated should have been teacher
and administrations first.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
But they didn't do that.
Speaker 9 (19:00):
They moved the children.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
She's absolutely right. Read the Brown Decision for yourself. The
court goes on and on about kids, but they have
virtually nothing to say about teachers. The word teacher comes
up once in the main text and a few times
in the footnotes. That's it. How on earth can you
undertake the greatest transformation of public education in American history
(19:23):
and barely mentioned teachers.
Speaker 9 (19:25):
Young people did not know business moved first to have
borne the brunt oh the segregation process, and it did
something to the Elstons. It did something to them, It
made them hay, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
(19:45):
Farm Me and most of the students that had moved
from the black schools into the white situation. We as
teachers had been there to nurture there to help them along,
to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they
moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't
know teachers.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
The teachers were afraid of them. The Brown Decision was
all about children. The signature memories of the Brown era
are all about black children being escorted into previously all
white schools. We should have been talking about teachers. About
three and a half hours deue east of Topeka on
(20:27):
I seventy, there is a little town called Moberly. Moberly
is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie because
it was settled by margrants from the South before the
Civil War. There was a lot of slave owning in
Little Dixie compared with the rest of Missouri, a lot
of racial hostility in that part of the state. And
I don't think you can understand what happened after the
Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Moberly. In
(20:51):
the early nineteen fifties, Moberley had a school system employing
around one hundred teachers across eight schools. One of those
schools was black. It was called Lincoln. Lincoln had eleven teachers.
The year after the Brown decision. Moberley integrates. They do
that by closing the one black school, Lincoln. I'm busting
(21:12):
all the black students there to white schools. After closing Lincoln,
the Mobiley school system then says, wait, if we combine
all the students in Mobile into one school system, we
don't think we need as many teachers as we had before.
So they say, let's evaluate all the teachers from the
two newly combined systems. Keep the best ones, let the
(21:33):
mediocre ones go. I think you can see what's coming.
They decide to fire every one of the eleven black
teachers who used to work at Lincoln. So the black
teachers sue and they lose. They appeal, they lose again.
In nineteen fifty nine, they asked the Supreme Court to
consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no, Brown is
(21:54):
the great victory, Moberly is the great defeat, and they're connected.
Let me give you a flavor of the case. The
black teachers say, you can't possibly say that we were
the absolute worst of all teachers in the combined system.
We've been evaluated for years by our superintendent and have
(22:14):
been given high marks. The white school board counters with sure,
but you are being compared to other black teachers. You
need to be compared to white teachers. So the black
teachers say, yeah, but we stack up really well against
white teachers. And by the way, this was not a stretch.
Virtually every profession except teaching was closed to educated African
(22:36):
Americans in those years. If you were smart and liked
learning in that era, you became a teacher. The court
then says, so what I'm quoting human capabilities cannot be
reduced to a mathematical formula. Intangible factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry,
(22:56):
and adaptability vitally affect the work of any teacher. I
think there's one intangible factor missing in that list, don't
you what could it be? Dispose? It begins with an r.
Forgive me for going on and on about this one
obscure case, but you have to get the flavor of it.
(23:18):
The plaintiffs say, wait, one of miss is a superstar
graduate degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is
mary Ala Timminy. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star,
but he says, I'm still not hiring her because and
when quoting here from the judge's decision because she gave
(23:39):
the impression that she considered herself superior to other teachers
and was resentful towards authority. Resentful towards authority, You think
she just got fired. The judge simply can't get mary
Ella Timony out of his head. I'm quoting again. It
is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this
(24:03):
teacher has. And I do not mean to say that
such attitude is limited to any race or color, but
when it does it exist, it vitally affects the teaching
ability of the individual. She's upity, an appity negro. Of course,
they don't want to keep her because they understand the
same thing that Leola Brown understands, and all the many
(24:23):
academics who have studied what actually happens to black kids
in the classroom understand, which is that educational equality is
a function of who holds the power in the classroom.
So mobili misery gets rid of its black teachers, and
by the way, so does almost everybody else across the
(24:43):
entire South. Black teachers just get fired left and right.
It wasn't something done secretly, it was done right out
in the open. There was something like eighty two thousand
African American teachers in the South before the Brown Decision.
Within a decade, as the decision was slowly implemented across
the country, about half have been fired.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
What surprises me is the kind of historical amnesia there
is surrounding that issue that many many people today who
are searching for black teachers have no understanding of the
fact that many of them lost their jobs.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
One of the few scholars who has paid any attention
to what happened is Michelle Foster, an education professor at
the University of Louisville. Twenty years ago, Foster tracked as
many black teachers from that era as she could find.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
What role did teachers did black women play in the
South relative to children? They were nurse maids, they were housekeepers,
they were domestics. That's the role they played. You know,
every Southern or I meet a lot of stuff they said,
I had a black somebody who took care of them.
But that's a motherl You know, that's a little different position.
When you're a teacher. You're evaluating, you're judging.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Even those who got to keep their jobs told one
story after another of humiliation. It was too much. One
of the teachers Foster interviewed went for a meeting with
the superintendent with all of the other black teachers who
were being kept on. I'm quoting. They were fifteen of us,
and not a single one of them in there as
dark as I am. Not one that ought to tell
(26:13):
you something. By the way, the remaining black teachers couldn't
use the teacher's bathroom. They had to use the children's bathroom.
To this day, the ranks of black teachers in the
United States have not recovered from the humiliations and mass
(26:34):
firings of the nineteen fifties and sixties. As a percentage,
there are far fewer black teachers than there are black students.
And when you think back to studies on how important
black teachers are for the performance of black students, that's
a tragedy. Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, one classroom after
(26:55):
another was purged of its black teachers and topeaka Kansas,
of course, Topeka made a show of it. They assigned
a black teacher to a half time position at the
formerly all white Randolph School. Principal, a man named Stanley Stalter,
had the task of calling up white parents to see
if they objected to this one halftime black teacher, and
(27:18):
of course they did.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Some were adamant. Nope, some of them had a very
peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black
teacher's room.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
That's the principal stalter interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
Another one said, my child is now twelve years of age,
and it is beginning her mantrual period, and this is
not the time of her life to be put in
here with a black teacher, a male. Hey, that one
(27:58):
topped everything.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
There's a limit to how many times a school board
is going to try and talk white tax paying parents
out of their fear of placing a menstruating adolescent in
class with a black teacher. Far easier just not to
hire any black teachers at.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
All, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about
enrollment next year in schools for Negro children, it is
not possible at this time to offer you employment for
next year. If the court should rule that segregation in
the elementary grades is unconstitutional, our board will proceed on
(28:37):
the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will
not want to employ Negro teachers. Next year for white children.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I said at the beginning. The woman reading that letter
at the conference of the University of Michigan was a
Missus Thompson. That's her married name. Her first name is Linda.
Her maiden name is Brown, Linda Brown, the Brown of
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. This is a little girl,
Oliver Brown tried and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School.
(29:12):
She was invited to Michigan to speak in celebration of
the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. And what
does Linda Brown Thompson do. In the middle of her talk,
she interrupts her eyewitness account to remind her audience who
bore the cost of integration, not white people, black people.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
I think I understand that all of you must be
under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an
inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.
I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendel Godwin,
(30:00):
Superintendent of Schools.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Sillmarra Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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