Brandon Johnson

Did you know?

On  May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The 9-0 decision was hailed as a major victory for the civil rights of African-Americans, paving the way for the integration of the nation’s schools. But in retrospect, while there was reason to celebrate the court decision, there were also many things the Black community lost after the Brown decision.

Effective Black Schools Were Closed

The superior education that many Black schools provided before integration is a source of fierce pride for alumni of those schools, in addition to the subject of a growing body of scholarship, according to journalist Jonathan Tilove. Remarkably, Black communities, under the thumb and under the radar of oppression, created schools that imbued Black children with a sense of confidence and possibility in the very midst of a system determined to limit them.

Effective Black Teachers Were Fired

In Black communities, desegregation lost support when thousands of teachers and principals lost jobs when their schools were closed. Jerome Morris of the University of Georgia spoke to Tilove about the impact these teachers had on their students at a huge number of these Black schools. Morris said one of the teachers was a godmother to certain students; other teachers lived in the Black community and knew the “parents and grandparents on a personal basis,” thus making them “comfortable calling or visiting the families” if a student acted up at school.

A Consistent Record of Black Achievement

As early as the 1970s, economist Thomas Sowell, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was writing about “patterns of black excellence” at segregated schools like Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington, which produced Martin Luther King Jr.; Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, which produced Thurgood Marshall; McDonough 35 in New Orleans, which produced the first Black state superintendent of schools (California’s Wilson Riles); and Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. Dunbar, the first Black high school in America, produced the first Black Cabinet member (Robert C. Weaver); the first Black general (Benjamin O. Davis); the discoverer of blood plasma (Charles R. Drew); the first Black senator since Reconstruction (Edward W. Brooke, R-Mass.); Charles Hamilton Houston, the first special counsel to the NAACP and chief architect of the assault on Jim Crow that led to Brown; and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia delegate to Congress. In 1899, students at Dunbar – then called the M Street School – scored higher on citywide tests than white students in Washington.

Answers to the Black-White Achievement Gap

Brown’s most profound irony may be that answers to closing the achievement gap lie buried in the history of the schools that Brown’s implementation destroyed. What are the answers? Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support. It is astonishing how many Black children attended schools during segregation that delivered on these objectives, and how few do so now.

No Such Thing as “Acting White”

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