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):
Pushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's
a gorgeous building called the Rackham 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. Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be
with you this evening here on the campus of the
University of Michigan, the home of the Wolverines. Is that right?
And I heard you had a game last night you
only lost it by two points. Huh. She tells a
(01:02):
funny story about how she was once invited to speak
at Nassau and thought she was going to the Bahamas,
only to discover that it was now 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. Dear Miss Buchanan, due to
(01:25):
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. 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. I think I understand that all of you
(01:46):
must be under considerable strength, and I sympathize with the
uncertainties and inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this
period of adjustment. This period of adjustment, remember that line.
It's a nice bit of condescension and understatement. My name
(02:08):
is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast
about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about that
youth missim in the letter read by Missus Thompson. This
period of adjustment. Not that long ago. Americans set out
(02:32):
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 whole episode under the rug and
wrote letters to everyone concerned to try and absolve ourselves
of the whole business. I believe that whatever happens will
ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concern Yeah. Right.
(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, Tepeka
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 n w ACP, decided to start
challenging segregation. Topeka was one of their test cases. They
found thirteen black families and asked them to go down
(03:50):
to their neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children.
One of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leo L. 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. My husband, Oliver Brown, he was a heavyweight fighter,
(04:13):
used to fight Golden Bloods. The Browns had a seven
year old named Linda. The black elementary school she was
supposed to go to was called 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
(04:33):
on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the 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. As Linda say it, when
they got over there and that building looked so bigger,
being a little kid going upsteps. And then when they
got ready to talk, they had her sit on the
(04:55):
outside of the office. Dad went in was talking to
the principal. 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 said, you could hear the voice of scanning
(05:16):
getting loud to me, said It wasn't him, it was
the school board. That was a policy of the school board.
You can do nothing about it, you know. So he
could no way because he could not in Rowland in
that school without their appeas 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
(05:40):
was put first Brown Verses to Peaka 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, when 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
(06:05):
and white school children separately was ruled unconstantutional. 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
(06:26):
could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.
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
(06:46):
read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor
of Oliver and Leola Brown and the families of Topeka,
but the court actually says something entirely different from what
the black people of Topeka were saying. I went to
mineral school. You're in Topeka from grade to one through eight.
Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State
Historical Society on several occasions, and Leola is asked about Monroe,
(07:11):
the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola
grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well,
and Leolah Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.
Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful.
And had it not been through this boking, you know,
school and going to a part to school with possibly
(07:31):
every wild do you know then what we did. 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. We didn't have any bowing to pick with
(07:55):
our schools for his educationalscsser and nod the teachers because
they were qualified and they die, but they were supposed
to do for Leola and Oliver Brown. The lawsuit was
a matter of principle. They didn't think there was anything
wrong with the lality of education at Monroe, the all
black school. They just thought that the Topeka school Board
shouldn't be telling them where they could or couldn't send
(08:16):
Linda to school, particularly if the only reason the school
board could come up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now,
listen to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the
Brown decision. They agree that the Browns ought to be
able to send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different.
(08:37):
I'm quoting segregation of white and colored children in public
schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The
Court's 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
(09:01):
with the sanction of law has a tendency to retard
the educational and mental development of Negro children. This was
light 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 enrolled into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe
(09:25):
was not a good school at all. It can't be
a good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola
Brown said, 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
(09:45):
inferior schooling. Now, the Court could have said something much
more straightforward. How 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
(10:08):
the job right, but the court doesn't say that. In
order to condemn the discrimination in the Brown's face. The
court instead makes the case that black people are psychologically crippled.
The historian Darryl 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
(10:30):
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 makes their problems their fault. If you
go even back to an Antebellum period, you would see
planners who would talk about how they have no sense
(10:52):
of family. Now, of course, these are the very people
who are selling people's families at the auction block. I
regular they destroying families, but they were justified in their
minds by saying they have no sense of families. Another historian,
Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in his essay
The Whole United States Is Southern, which you should read,
(11:12):
by the way, if you ever want to be grabbed
by the lapels. Pain 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. They've
basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political and
economic force. But they want, and I'm quoting Pain, to
(11:33):
frame the issue in a language of separation. Customs are
a way of life and social equality. Language that constructed
race in interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to
pretend that racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So
what does the US Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty
(11:53):
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 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.
(12:17):
That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me, it's not.
We're still dealing with the consequences. This is 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
(12:37):
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 being gifted and talented
programs than black students. If your kid isn't a gifted
in talented program, you've probably observed this. Where are the
black kids right now? You might say, well, that's simply
(12:58):
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 test course. In
other words, let's compare two students, one black and one white,
but they both are very high achieving. This is Chrism.
Would that difference in probability that they are identified by
(13:22):
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
receiving gifted services as that black student is. Gifted. Programs
(13:43):
are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the brightest children
are given a chance to shine. Chrism's saying that's not
the way things work. In practice, 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 parents
says that child is. We know what age that child
(14:05):
entered kindergarten. On average, white students and black students enter
garden at different ages. Because of the phenomenon of red shirting,
white parents are more likely to hold their kids back
at the start of schooling than black students are. That
doesn't explain the gifted gap. 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,
(14:27):
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 Readings say, look, in many cases, teachers play
a big role in which students get into gifted programs.
They encourage them, they recommend them. So they think maybe
(14:49):
the answer here lies with not who the child is,
but who the child's teacher is. 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. So Grissom does something really simple.
(15:11):
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. For a
black student, the world looks different. So if I'm 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.
(15:35):
But if I am a Black student and I have
a white classroom teacher, my probability of being identified as
gifted is substantially lower. How much lower? Okay, So for
very high achieving black students, the probability of being assigned
to gifted services under a white teacher is about half
(15:56):
the probability as an observably similar black student taught by
a black teacher. If you're black, having a black teacher
makes a difference, and not just for getting into gifted programs.
How 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
(16:18):
be suspended. A group of social scientists recently went over
the records of 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
(16:39):
nine percent one black teacher. Now, does this mean that
white teachers are 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 gift to programs and who doesn't.
(17:02):
They decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing
their attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by
ignoring 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. I loved it.
(17:23):
I loved it. The teachers who are fantastic. We got
a fantastic educationary. It wasn't, as I 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 matters and
so forth. Because they took an interest in you, you know,
and they took an interest in you. That's what all
(17:45):
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. They made one serious mistake. I will have
to hold them responsible. Fall I came across another archive
of interviews from the Brown era Duke Universities behind the
(18:09):
Ail 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 pursued very differently. They made students through
(18:30):
the integration. They should have had teachers verse and they
didn't do that and every one of those white schools
at every one of the black schools. If they were
gonna send white children to the black school they should
have had white teachers. If they were gonna send black
childremen to the white schools, they should have had some
black teachers there. Now, the first people that should have
(18:54):
been integrated should have been teachers and administrations first. But
they didn't do that. They moved the choke. 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.
(19:16):
That's it. How on earth can you undertake the greatest
transformation of public education in American history and barely mentioned teachers.
Young people didn't know business being moved first to have
borne the brunt oh the segregation process. And it did
something to the Austins. It did something to him, It
(19:40):
made him hey, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
For me and most of the students that had moved
from the black schools into the white situation, we as
teachers had been that to nurture there to help them along,
to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they
(20:01):
moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't
know teachers, and teachers were fraid 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.
(20:24):
About three and a half hours due east of Topeka
on Ice seventy, there is a little town called Moberly.
Morberly is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie
because it was settled by migrants 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.
(20:44):
And I don't think you can understand what happened after
the Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Marburly.
In the early nineteen fifties, Morberly had a school system
employing around a 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, Mobilely integrates.
(21:08):
They do that by closing the one black school, Lincoln.
I'm bussing all the black students there to white schools.
After closing Lincoln, the Mobile school system then says, wait,
if we combine all the students in Moberly into one
school system, we don't think we need as many teachers
as we had before. So they say, let's evaluate all
(21:28):
the teachers from the two newly combined systems. Keep the
best ones, let the 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 ask the
(21:49):
Supreme Court to consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no,
Brown is the great victory, Mobilely 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
(22:09):
the combined system. We've been evaluated for years by our
superintendent and have 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
(22:31):
was not a stretch. Virtually every profession except teaching was
closed to educated African 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
(22:51):
factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry, 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
(23:13):
for going on and on about this one obscure case,
but you have to get the flavor of it. The
plaintiffs say, wait, one of us is a superstar graduate
degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is Mary
Allah Timmany. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star,
But he says, I'm still not hiring her because and
(23:36):
I quoting here from the judge's decision, because she gave
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
Alla Timoney out of his head. I'm quoting again. It
(23:59):
is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this
teacher has. And I do not mean to say that
such attitude is limited to any race or color, but
when it does exist, it vitally affects the teaching ability
of the individual. She's appity, an appity negro. Of course,
they don't want to keep her because they understand the
(24:20):
same thing that Leo L. Brown understands, and all the
many 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 mobilely 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. What surprises me
(25:06):
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. 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,
(25:27):
Foster tracked as many black teachers from that era as
she could find. When, well, what role did teachers did
black women play in the South relative to children? They
were nursemaids, they were housekeepers, they were domestics. That's what
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 mother.
You know, that's a little different position. When you're a teacher.
(25:49):
You're evaluating, you're judging. 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
(26:12):
one that ought to tell 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 firings of the nineteen
(26:35):
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 another was purged
(26:56):
of its black teachers and Tipeka, Kansas. Of course, Topeka
made a show of it. They assigned a black teacher
to a halftime position at the formerly all white Randolph School,
and then the principle, 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 of
(27:18):
course they did. Some were adamant. Nope, some of them
had a very peculiar reasons for not wanting this child
in the black teacher's room. That's the principle. Stalter interviewed
by the Kansas Historical Society. Another one said, my child
(27:39):
is now at twelve years of age, and it is
beginning her natural period, and this is not the time
of her life to be put in here with a
black teacher, a male. Hey, that one talk everything. There's
(28:01):
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 all, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to
the present uncertainty about enrollment next year in schools for
(28:22):
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 the assumption that the majority of
people in Topeka will not want to employ Negro teachers
(28:43):
next year. For white children. I said at the beginning
that 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
(29:04):
Board of Education. This is a little girl Oliver tried
and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School. 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
(29:28):
the cost of integration, not white people, black people. I
think I understand that all of you must be under
considerable strength, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconvenience
which you must be experiencing during the spirit of adjustment.
(29:48):
I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendell Godwin,
Superintendent of Schools. Revisionist History is produced by Mail LaBelle
(30:15):
and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista Stephanie Daniel and Ciomara
Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
our engineer. Original music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to
Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell
Pushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's
a gorgeous building called the Rackham 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. Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be
with you this evening here on the campus of the
University of Michigan, the home of the Wolverines. Is that right?
And I heard you had a game last night you
only lost it by two points. Huh. She tells a
(01:02):
funny story about how she was once invited to speak
at Nassau and thought she was going to the Bahamas,
only to discover that it was now 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. Dear Miss Buchanan, due to
(01:25):
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. 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. I think I understand that all of you
(01:46):
must be under considerable strength, and I sympathize with the
uncertainties and inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this
period of adjustment. This period of adjustment, remember that line.
It's a nice bit of condescension and understatement. My name
(02:08):
is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast
about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about that
youth missim in the letter read by Missus Thompson. This
period of adjustment. Not that long ago. Americans set out
(02:32):
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 whole episode under the rug and
wrote letters to everyone concerned to try and absolve ourselves
of the whole business. I believe that whatever happens will
ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concern Yeah. Right.
(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, Tepeka
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 n w ACP, decided to start
challenging segregation. Topeka was one of their test cases. They
found thirteen black families and asked them to go down
(03:50):
to their neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children.
One of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leo L. 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. My husband, Oliver Brown, he was a heavyweight fighter,
(04:13):
used to fight Golden Bloods. The Browns had a seven
year old named Linda. The black elementary school she was
supposed to go to was called 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
(04:33):
on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the 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. As Linda say it, when
they got over there and that building looked so bigger,
being a little kid going upsteps. And then when they
got ready to talk, they had her sit on the
(04:55):
outside of the office. Dad went in was talking to
the principal. 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 said, you could hear the voice of scanning
(05:16):
getting loud to me, said It wasn't him, it was
the school board. That was a policy of the school board.
You can do nothing about it, you know. So he
could no way because he could not in Rowland in
that school without their appeas 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
(05:40):
was put first Brown Verses to Peaka 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, when 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
(06:05):
and white school children separately was ruled unconstantutional. 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
(06:26):
could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.
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
(06:46):
read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor
of Oliver and Leola Brown and the families of Topeka,
but the court actually says something entirely different from what
the black people of Topeka were saying. I went to
mineral school. You're in Topeka from grade to one through eight.
Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State
Historical Society on several occasions, and Leola is asked about Monroe,
(07:11):
the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola
grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well,
and Leolah Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.
Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful.
And had it not been through this boking, you know,
school and going to a part to school with possibly
(07:31):
every wild do you know then what we did. 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. We didn't have any bowing to pick with
(07:55):
our schools for his educationalscsser and nod the teachers because
they were qualified and they die, but they were supposed
to do for Leola and Oliver Brown. The lawsuit was
a matter of principle. They didn't think there was anything
wrong with the lality of education at Monroe, the all
black school. They just thought that the Topeka school Board
shouldn't be telling them where they could or couldn't send
(08:16):
Linda to school, particularly if the only reason the school
board could come up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now,
listen to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the
Brown decision. They agree that the Browns ought to be
able to send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different.
(08:37):
I'm quoting segregation of white and colored children in public
schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The
Court's 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
(09:01):
with the sanction of law has a tendency to retard
the educational and mental development of Negro children. This was
light 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 enrolled into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe
(09:25):
was not a good school at all. It can't be
a good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola
Brown said, 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
(09:45):
inferior schooling. Now, the Court could have said something much
more straightforward. How 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
(10:08):
the job right, but the court doesn't say that. In
order to condemn the discrimination in the Brown's face. The
court instead makes the case that black people are psychologically crippled.
The historian Darryl 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
(10:30):
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 makes their problems their fault. If you
go even back to an Antebellum period, you would see
planners who would talk about how they have no sense
(10:52):
of family. Now, of course, these are the very people
who are selling people's families at the auction block. I
regular they destroying families, but they were justified in their
minds by saying they have no sense of families. Another historian,
Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in his essay
The Whole United States Is Southern, which you should read,
(11:12):
by the way, if you ever want to be grabbed
by the lapels. Pain 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. They've
basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political and
economic force. But they want, and I'm quoting Pain, to
(11:33):
frame the issue in a language of separation. Customs are
a way of life and social equality. Language that constructed
race in interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to
pretend that racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So
what does the US Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty
(11:53):
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 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.
(12:17):
That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me, it's not.
We're still dealing with the consequences. This is 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
(12:37):
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 being gifted and talented
programs than black students. If your kid isn't a gifted
in talented program, you've probably observed this. Where are the
black kids right now? You might say, well, that's simply
(12:58):
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 test course. In
other words, let's compare two students, one black and one white,
but they both are very high achieving. This is Chrism.
Would that difference in probability that they are identified by
(13:22):
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
receiving gifted services as that black student is. Gifted. Programs
(13:43):
are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the brightest children
are given a chance to shine. Chrism's saying that's not
the way things work. In practice, 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 parents
says that child is. We know what age that child
(14:05):
entered kindergarten. On average, white students and black students enter
garden at different ages. Because of the phenomenon of red shirting,
white parents are more likely to hold their kids back
at the start of schooling than black students are. That
doesn't explain the gifted gap. 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,
(14:27):
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 Readings say, look, in many cases, teachers play
a big role in which students get into gifted programs.
They encourage them, they recommend them. So they think maybe
(14:49):
the answer here lies with not who the child is,
but who the child's teacher is. 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. So Grissom does something really simple.
(15:11):
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. For a
black student, the world looks different. So if I'm 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.
(15:35):
But if I am a Black student and I have
a white classroom teacher, my probability of being identified as
gifted is substantially lower. How much lower? Okay, So for
very high achieving black students, the probability of being assigned
to gifted services under a white teacher is about half
(15:56):
the probability as an observably similar black student taught by
a black teacher. If you're black, having a black teacher
makes a difference, and not just for getting into gifted programs.
How 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
(16:18):
be suspended. A group of social scientists recently went over
the records of 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
(16:39):
nine percent one black teacher. Now, does this mean that
white teachers are 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 gift to programs and who doesn't.
(17:02):
They decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing
their attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by
ignoring 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. I loved it.
(17:23):
I loved it. The teachers who are fantastic. We got
a fantastic educationary. It wasn't, as I 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 matters and
so forth. Because they took an interest in you, you know,
and they took an interest in you. That's what all
(17:45):
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. They made one serious mistake. I will have
to hold them responsible. Fall I came across another archive
of interviews from the Brown era Duke Universities behind the
(18:09):
Ail 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 pursued very differently. They made students through
(18:30):
the integration. They should have had teachers verse and they
didn't do that and every one of those white schools
at every one of the black schools. If they were
gonna send white children to the black school they should
have had white teachers. If they were gonna send black
childremen to the white schools, they should have had some
black teachers there. Now, the first people that should have
(18:54):
been integrated should have been teachers and administrations first. But
they didn't do that. They moved the choke. 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.
(19:16):
That's it. How on earth can you undertake the greatest
transformation of public education in American history and barely mentioned teachers.
Young people didn't know business being moved first to have
borne the brunt oh the segregation process. And it did
something to the Austins. It did something to him, It
(19:40):
made him hey, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
For me and most of the students that had moved
from the black schools into the white situation, we as
teachers had been that to nurture there to help them along,
to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they
(20:01):
moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't
know teachers, and teachers were fraid 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.
(20:24):
About three and a half hours due east of Topeka
on Ice seventy, there is a little town called Moberly.
Morberly is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie
because it was settled by migrants 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.
(20:44):
And I don't think you can understand what happened after
the Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Marburly.
In the early nineteen fifties, Morberly had a school system
employing around a 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, Mobilely integrates.
(21:08):
They do that by closing the one black school, Lincoln.
I'm bussing all the black students there to white schools.
After closing Lincoln, the Mobile school system then says, wait,
if we combine all the students in Moberly into one
school system, we don't think we need as many teachers
as we had before. So they say, let's evaluate all
(21:28):
the teachers from the two newly combined systems. Keep the
best ones, let the 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 ask the
(21:49):
Supreme Court to consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no,
Brown is the great victory, Mobilely 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
(22:09):
the combined system. We've been evaluated for years by our
superintendent and have 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
(22:31):
was not a stretch. Virtually every profession except teaching was
closed to educated African 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
(22:51):
factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry, 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
(23:13):
for going on and on about this one obscure case,
but you have to get the flavor of it. The
plaintiffs say, wait, one of us is a superstar graduate
degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is Mary
Allah Timmany. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star,
But he says, I'm still not hiring her because and
(23:36):
I quoting here from the judge's decision, because she gave
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
Alla Timoney out of his head. I'm quoting again. It
(23:59):
is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this
teacher has. And I do not mean to say that
such attitude is limited to any race or color, but
when it does exist, it vitally affects the teaching ability
of the individual. She's appity, an appity negro. Of course,
they don't want to keep her because they understand the
(24:20):
same thing that Leo L. Brown understands, and all the
many 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 mobilely 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. What surprises me
(25:06):
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. 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,
(25:27):
Foster tracked as many black teachers from that era as
she could find. When, well, what role did teachers did
black women play in the South relative to children? They
were nursemaids, they were housekeepers, they were domestics. That's what
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 mother.
You know, that's a little different position. When you're a teacher.
(25:49):
You're evaluating, you're judging. 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
(26:12):
one that ought to tell 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 firings of the nineteen
(26:35):
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 another was purged
(26:56):
of its black teachers and Tipeka, Kansas. Of course, Topeka
made a show of it. They assigned a black teacher
to a halftime position at the formerly all white Randolph School,
and then the principle, 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 of
(27:18):
course they did. Some were adamant. Nope, some of them
had a very peculiar reasons for not wanting this child
in the black teacher's room. That's the principle. Stalter interviewed
by the Kansas Historical Society. Another one said, my child
(27:39):
is now at twelve years of age, and it is
beginning her natural period, and this is not the time
of her life to be put in here with a
black teacher, a male. Hey, that one talk everything. There's
(28:01):
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 all, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to
the present uncertainty about enrollment next year in schools for
(28:22):
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 the assumption that the majority of
people in Topeka will not want to employ Negro teachers
(28:43):
next year. For white children. I said at the beginning
that 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
(29:04):
Board of Education. This is a little girl Oliver tried
and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School. 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
(29:28):
the cost of integration, not white people, black people. I
think I understand that all of you must be under
considerable strength, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconvenience
which you must be experiencing during the spirit of adjustment.
(29:48):
I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendell Godwin,
Superintendent of Schools. Revisionist History is produced by Mail LaBelle
(30:15):
and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista Stephanie Daniel and Ciomara
Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
our engineer. Original music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to
Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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