The Effects of the Brown Decision on Black Educators

Abstract

Since the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954,1 Blacks throughout the nation have watched the efforts to enforce the Court's mandate with mixed emotions. In the euphoria of the decision many believed that the long battle against segregation in the American public educational system, a practice that had cheated their children out of anything resembling a quality education, was at an end. They felt that the ruling handed down was the legal and moral thing for the Court to do. A small minority, aware of the commitments of some whites to racial segregation in the schools and other areas of American society, doubted whether the Court's ruling would be enforced and prophesized a long and bitter battle before the public schools were desegregated. As a group, very few of them gave thought to the effects the Court's decision would have on the black educators who taught the more than two million black students enrolled in segregated schools. Because of opposition to the enforcement of the decision, it was not until more than twenty years after the 1954 ruling that enough information was available to assess adequately its impact and consequences on black educators. Opposition to the enforcement of the Brown decision, especially in the South where most black students were enrolled in segregated schools, had been predicted by some Blacks as early as 1954; but very few at the time thought in terms of the implications of the decision on black educators. One of the more accurate analyses of the decision's implication on black educators, as well as black education, came from Charles S. Johnson, president of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In an essay written for the Journal of Negro Education, Summer, 1954,2 Johnson noted several ad-