History lesson: Brown v. Board of Education’s one big mistake

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” at its worst: Within the first decade that America’s public schools were integrated, as mandated this week (May 17) in 1954 by the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, black teachers across America, but especially in the South, were fired from their jobs.

The court’s decision rightly addressed the pernicious effect that racial segregation in public schools had on black children such as Linda Brown, whose father Oliver had cooperated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in suing the school board in Topeka, Kansas. Linda had been forced to walk seven blocks, often in miserable weather, to board a bus that took her across town to the rundown all-black Monroe School, while the spiffy all-white Sumner School was four blocks from her home.

But there was a problem with the court’s decision. Regardless of the distance Linda had to travel, or the relative physical conditions of Monroe and Sumner, Monroe’s teachers and administrators, like its students, were black, and studies had shown (and still do) that black students with black teachers (ditto white students and white teachers) got better grades, behaved better in class, and advanced further career-wise.

The court’s decision focused on integrating black students, but said nothing about their black teachers – Brown’s ruling mentions teachers just once. So a court decision promulgating the greatest transformation of public education in American history barely mentions the most critical aspect of an education, the teacher?

And across America, North and South, putting black kids in schools overwhelmingly staffed by white teachers – the unintended but actual result of Brown – was especially problematic because in the mid-1950s large numbers of those teachers regarded blacks as being mentally inferior, socially repugnant and even threatening.

Which was why Oliver Brown and his wife Leola Bruce G. Kauffmann Email author Bruce G. Kauffmann at bruce@history lessons.net. took issue with the court’s decision, noting that their lawsuit was not about transferring Linda to Sumner, but about a basic principle – that they could not be denied the choice as to where to educate their children based on race. Leola actually had fond memories of her own education at Monroe because she felt comfortable with her teachers, who were every bit as qualified and professional as their white counterparts. “They took an interest in us,” she said, which made her confident that she was the equal of anyone.

“They [the Supreme Court] made one mistake,” Leola recalled. They should have integrated the black teachers and administrators before the students, or at least alongside them. “They didn’t do that,” she said, so included among the hundreds of thousands of black teachers fired across the country in the decade after Brown was every single teacher from Monroe.