The invisible champions of student justice

Teachers striking in Los Angeles, West Virginia, Denver and Oakland, are fighting for more than better school conditions. They are also protesting the privatization that drains resources from public schools and dilutes the democratic power of communities that are already marginalized.

This is not the first time teachers have agitated both to secure educational resources and safeguard democracy. In an important book, “The Lost Education of Horace Tate,” Emory professor Vanessa Siddle Walker chronicles the invisible activities of African-American educator organizations to bring about school integration. She focuses on Horace Tate, the leader of one such group: the Georgia Teacher and Education Association (GT&EA).

Though we think of the NAACP as the force behind school desegregation, the NAACP relied on organizations such as GT&EA, who had been fighting for equal educational opportunity since Reconstruction.

By advocating for justice for their students, AfricanAmerican teachers risked their jobs and safety. Thus, GT&EA worked behind the scenes, and on numerous levels. They organized citizens into civic groups and registered them to vote. They provided these groups with detailed documentation about the gross disparities in school resources.

While white schools were well-appointed, white officials refused to spend money on African-American schools. African-American students were forced to learn in dilapidated buildings without running water. They had no textbooks, nor school transportation. Some African-American children walked six miles a day to and from school. White students had 176 days of school, while African Americans only received 158.

GT&EA showed civic groups how to petition school boards for school resources. When the district refused to provide coal to heat his school, Horace Tate instructed parents to keep their children at home until the district capitulated.

When appeals to local and state government failed, GT&EA provided NAACP the factual record it needed to sue. GT&EA financed the legal battles with the contributions from underpaid teachers.

GT&EA members were just as dedicated in the classroom. They understood that African-American children “required lessons in democracy so they could see the ways in which America violated its own principles.” Beyond teaching the state curriculum, they taught democracy, organizing classrooms into branches of government or political parties and conducting mock elections.

They also built students’ self-confidence in the face of the daily humiliations suffered under Jim Crow. They taught the children about African-American history and culture. Tate bought typewriters for his school to prepare students for a future America — one without employment discrimination. Teachers valued their status as role models.

GT&EA supported integration to ensure equitable distribution of resources. However, they feared that integration without shared power would result in the loss of protection for African-American students and teachers that GT&EA fought for over the years. As Martin Luther King Jr. declared at a GT&EA convention, true integration cannot just be adding “a little color to a still predominately white-controlled power structure,” or, as one leader put it “elimination, tokenism nor a one-way stream.” White students had to attend formerly AfricanAmerican schools, and African-American principals had to lead formerly white schools. Otherwise, it would merely be “outergration” — a term Tate coined.

Thus, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, GT&EA developed an integration plan that included, among other things, sensitivity training, faculty approved curricula with

Though we think of the NAACP as the force behind school desegregation, the NAACP relied on organizations such as GT&EA, who had been fighting for equal educational opportunity since Reconstruction.

multi-ethnic books, roles for both communities in local integration plans, prohibition on the arbitrary elimination of AfricanAmerican schools and prohibitions against flying the Confederate flag.

However, whites hijacked integration, to the extent they implemented it at all. Integration became less about providing better opportunities for AfricanAmerican students and more about hoarding those opportunities for whites.

The National Education Association pushed for black and white educators’ associations to merge, without preserving the influence of the African-American organizations. Following the mergers, hundreds of African-American principals and teachers were fired. As Tate predicted, rather than maintaining African-American schools, they were closed or taken over by whites. AfricanAmericans who attended formerly all-white schools were placed in “slow” groups and subjected to harsh discipline.

Had white leaders honored the knowledge and experience of GT&EA, integration may have taken a different path. It could have freed the African-American mind, “but the mind of the White South as well,” as Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays said.

Many of the lessons we are “discovering” today, about education and activism, were practiced decades ago by these brave AfricanAmerican teachers. With schools more segregated today than they have been in decades, perhaps we have a chance for a do-over, this time learning from this lost history and listening to those teachers and communities who know their children best.