Speaker 1: Pushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's
Speaker 1: a gorgeous building called the Rackham Auditorium, built in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties in the Classical Renaissance style. And in January
Speaker 1: of two thousand and four, on one of those cold
Speaker 1: Michigan days, a woman takes the stage in front of
Speaker 1: a big crowd. She's in her sixties. Her name is
Speaker 1: missus Thompson. Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be
Speaker 1: with you this evening here on the campus of the
Speaker 1: University of Michigan, the home of the Wolverines. Is that right?
Speaker 1: And I heard you had a game last night you
Speaker 1: only lost it by two points. Huh. She tells a
Speaker 1: funny story about how she was once invited to speak
Speaker 1: at Nassau and thought she was going to the Bahamas,
Speaker 1: only to discover that it was now County Long Island.
Speaker 1: She talks a little bit about her childhood and her family.
Speaker 1: Then right in the middle of her talk, she starts
Speaker 1: reading a notice of termination sent many years ago to
Speaker 1: a teacher named Darla Buchanan. Dear Miss Buchanan, due to
Speaker 1: the present uncertainty about enrollment next year, it is necessary
Speaker 1: for me to notify you now that your services will
Speaker 1: not be needed for next year. The students in the
Speaker 1: auditorium are wrapped. This is not what they expected. But
Speaker 1: Missus Thompson goes on and reads all the way to
Speaker 1: the end. I think I understand that all of you
Speaker 1: must be under considerable strength, and I sympathize with the
Speaker 1: uncertainties and inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this
Speaker 1: period of adjustment. This period of adjustment, remember that line.
Speaker 1: It's a nice bit of condescension and understatement. My name
Speaker 1: is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast
Speaker 1: about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about that
Speaker 1: youth missim in the letter read by Missus Thompson. This
Speaker 1: period of adjustment. Not that long ago. Americans set out
Speaker 1: to do something revolutionary to change the world. But we
Speaker 1: botched it, and we didn't want to admit that fact.
Speaker 1: So we swept the whole episode under the rug and
Speaker 1: wrote letters to everyone concerned to try and absolve ourselves
Speaker 1: of the whole business. I believe that whatever happens will
Speaker 1: ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concern Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1: The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan, was written by
Speaker 1: the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas,
Speaker 1: a medium sized city in the upper right hand corner
Speaker 1: of the state. Like a lot of cities and towns
Speaker 1: in the United States, particularly those in the South, Tepeka
Speaker 1: had segregated public elementary schools. In the Jim Crow era,
Speaker 1: White children went to neighborhood schools. Black children went to
Speaker 1: a separate system of schools scattered around the city with
Speaker 1: their own black teachers and black principles. In the years
Speaker 1: after the Second World War, the leading civil rights group
Speaker 1: of the day, the n w ACP, decided to start
Speaker 1: challenging segregation. Topeka was one of their test cases. They
Speaker 1: found thirteen black families and asked them to go down
Speaker 1: to their neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children.
Speaker 1: One of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leo L. Brown.
Speaker 1: Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later he
Speaker 1: was a pastor. This is Leola Brown from an interview
Speaker 1: she gave in nineteen ninety one to the Kansas State
Speaker 1: Historical Society. My husband, Oliver Brown, he was a heavyweight fighter,
Speaker 1: used to fight Golden Bloods. The Browns had a seven
Speaker 1: year old named Linda. The black elementary school she was
Speaker 1: supposed to go to was called Monroe. To get there,
Speaker 1: she had to walk seven blocks, often in freezing weather,
Speaker 1: and cross a busy road, then get on a bus.
Speaker 1: The local white elementary school was Sumner, just four blocks
Speaker 1: on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the neighborhood all went there.
Speaker 1: So one day, as instructed by the NAACP, Oliver Brown
Speaker 1: took his daughter by the hand and walked her over
Speaker 1: to enroll at Sumner Elementary. As Linda say it, when
Speaker 1: they got over there and that building looked so bigger,
Speaker 1: being a little kid going upsteps. And then when they
Speaker 1: got ready to talk, they had her sit on the
Speaker 1: outside of the office. Dad went in was talking to
Speaker 1: the principal. You could imagine how uncomfortable the conversation was.
Speaker 1: Oliver Brown was not supposed to be there, and the
Speaker 1: principal would have had no idea what to say to
Speaker 1: him other than I'm sorry, this is the way it
Speaker 1: is in Topeka. With little Linda waiting out in the hall,
Speaker 1: if she said, you could hear the voice of scanning
Speaker 1: getting loud to me, said It wasn't him, it was
Speaker 1: the school board. That was a policy of the school board.
Speaker 1: You can do nothing about it, you know. So he
Speaker 1: could no way because he could not in Rowland in
Speaker 1: that school without their appeas All the black families got
Speaker 1: the same answer, your child is not welcome. So the
Speaker 1: local NAACP chapter sued the school board. Oliver Brown's name
Speaker 1: was put first Brown Verses to Peaka Board of Education.
Speaker 1: It was bundled with a number of other desegregation cases
Speaker 1: from all around the country, more than two hundred plaintiffs
Speaker 1: in all, when all the way to the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: and on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in one of
Speaker 1: the most famous legal decisions in American history, the Court
Speaker 1: ruled in Oliver Brown's favor. The practice of educating black
Speaker 1: and white school children separately was ruled unconstantutional. It was
Speaker 1: a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language, which
Speaker 1: should set for rest, once and for all the problem
Speaker 1: as to whether or not a second class citizenship segregation
Speaker 1: could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you were taught about the Brown decision in school,
Speaker 1: or have watched a documentary on it. It's a milestone,
Speaker 1: but at the same time it's a strange case. You
Speaker 1: could fill an auditorium with all the scholars who have
Speaker 1: a quarrel with Brown. I mean, just go back and
Speaker 1: read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor
Speaker 1: of Oliver and Leola Brown and the families of Topeka,
Speaker 1: but the court actually says something entirely different from what
Speaker 1: the black people of Topeka were saying. I went to
Speaker 1: mineral school. You're in Topeka from grade to one through eight.
Speaker 1: Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State
Speaker 1: Historical Society on several occasions, and Leola is asked about Monroe,
Speaker 1: the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola
Speaker 1: grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well,
Speaker 1: and Leolah Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.
Speaker 1: Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful.
Speaker 1: And had it not been through this boking, you know,
Speaker 1: school and going to a part to school with possibly
Speaker 1: every wild do you know then what we did. Later
Speaker 1: in the interview the issue comes up again. The interviewer
Speaker 1: asked Leola specifically, you didn't want your daughter to go
Speaker 1: to the white school because the white school was better
Speaker 1: than the black school. And Leola is adamant. Oh No,
Speaker 1: that never came up. We were getting a quality education
Speaker 1: at Monroe. We didn't have any bowing to pick with
Speaker 1: our schools for his educationalscsser and nod the teachers because
Speaker 1: they were qualified and they die, but they were supposed
Speaker 1: to do for Leola and Oliver Brown. The lawsuit was
Speaker 1: a matter of principle. They didn't think there was anything
Speaker 1: wrong with the lality of education at Monroe, the all
Speaker 1: black school. They just thought that the Topeka school Board
Speaker 1: shouldn't be telling them where they could or couldn't send
Speaker 1: Linda to school, particularly if the only reason the school
Speaker 1: board could come up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now,
Speaker 1: listen to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the
Speaker 1: Brown decision. They agree that the Browns ought to be
Speaker 1: able to send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different.
Speaker 1: I'm quoting segregation of white and colored children in public
Speaker 1: schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The
Speaker 1: Court's conclusion was that segregation was de facto unequal. That
Speaker 1: simply the act of educating black children separately from white
Speaker 1: children caused harm, serious harm. The court goes on, segregation
Speaker 1: with the sanction of law has a tendency to retard
Speaker 1: the educational and mental development of Negro children. This was
Speaker 1: light years away from Leola Brown's position. Leola Brown said
Speaker 1: that black run schools like Monroe were good schools, but
Speaker 1: as a matter of principle, she ought to be able
Speaker 1: to enrolled into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe
Speaker 1: was not a good school at all. It can't be
Speaker 1: a good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola
Speaker 1: Brown said, we're fine. We just want some control over
Speaker 1: our lives. The Court said, you're not fine at all.
Speaker 1: Your educational and mental development has been retarded by your
Speaker 1: inferior schooling. Now, the Court could have said something much
Speaker 1: more straightforward. How about this. Schools are where people make
Speaker 1: the connections that allow them to get ahead in the world.
Speaker 1: You cannot lock black people out of the place where
Speaker 1: social power and opportunity reside. That argument would have done
Speaker 1: the job right, but the court doesn't say that. In
Speaker 1: order to condemn the discrimination in the Brown's face. The
Speaker 1: court instead makes the case that black people are psychologically crippled.
Speaker 1: The historian Darryl Scott wrote a brilliant book a while
Speaker 1: back called Contempt and Pity, in which he points out
Speaker 1: that there's been a long history behind this talk of
Speaker 1: psychological damage. It goes back to the days of slavery.
Speaker 1: It's always been incredibly useful for white people to explain
Speaker 1: the problems of black people as the result of something
Speaker 1: personal internal. It makes their problems their fault. If you
Speaker 1: go even back to an Antebellum period, you would see
Speaker 1: planners who would talk about how they have no sense
Speaker 1: of family. Now, of course, these are the very people
Speaker 1: who are selling people's families at the auction block. I
Speaker 1: regular they destroying families, but they were justified in their
Speaker 1: minds by saying they have no sense of families. Another historian,
Speaker 1: Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in his essay
Speaker 1: The Whole United States Is Southern, which you should read,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you ever want to be grabbed
Speaker 1: by the lapels. Pain argues that in the decades after
Speaker 1: the Civil War, Southern whites attempt to sell the rest
Speaker 1: of America on this way of thinking about race. They've
Speaker 1: basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political and
Speaker 1: economic force. But they want, and I'm quoting Pain, to
Speaker 1: frame the issue in a language of separation. Customs are
Speaker 1: a way of life and social equality. Language that constructed
Speaker 1: race in interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to
Speaker 1: pretend that racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So
Speaker 1: what does the US Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: four in the Brown decision? It buys into the Southern
Speaker 1: way of thinking about race. Leo le Brown and the
Speaker 1: other plaintiffs say, we have a structural problem. We don't
Speaker 1: have the power to send Linda to the school down
Speaker 1: the street. The court says, no, no, no, it's a
Speaker 1: psychological problem. Little Linda has been damaged in her heart.
Speaker 1: That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me, it's not.
Speaker 1: We're still dealing with the consequences. This is a little
Speaker 1: bit of a tangent, but I think it helps to
Speaker 1: explain why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic. It's about
Speaker 1: a wonderful bit of research done by two political scientists
Speaker 1: at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jason Grissom and Christopher Reading.
Speaker 1: Grissom and Reading start with a well known fact White
Speaker 1: students are far more likely to being gifted and talented
Speaker 1: programs than black students. If your kid isn't a gifted
Speaker 1: in talented program, you've probably observed this. Where are the
Speaker 1: black kids right now? You might say, well, that's simply
Speaker 1: a reflection of the fact that white kids, for whatever reasons,
Speaker 1: have higher test scores on average than black kids. So
Speaker 1: Grissom and Reading, look at a large national sample of
Speaker 1: elementary school kids and let's equalize for test course. In
Speaker 1: other words, let's compare two students, one black and one white,
Speaker 1: but they both are very high achieving. This is Chrism.
Speaker 1: Would that difference in probability that they are identified by
Speaker 1: the system as gifted? Would that persist? And the answer
Speaker 1: is that it does. In fact, you know, it's still
Speaker 1: the case that even when you look at two students
Speaker 1: who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school,
Speaker 1: a white student and a black student, that white student
Speaker 1: is still more than two times as likely to be
Speaker 1: receiving gifted services as that black student is. Gifted. Programs
Speaker 1: are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the brightest children
Speaker 1: are given a chance to shine. Chrism's saying that's not
Speaker 1: the way things work. In practice, and you can go
Speaker 1: a little further because you can throw other things into
Speaker 1: the equation that aren't just achievement. You can look at
Speaker 1: differences in income, the data have, how healthy the parents
Speaker 1: says that child is. We know what age that child
Speaker 1: entered kindergarten. On average, white students and black students enter
Speaker 1: garden at different ages. Because of the phenomenon of red shirting,
Speaker 1: white parents are more likely to hold their kids back
Speaker 1: at the start of schooling than black students are. That
Speaker 1: doesn't explain the gifted gap. In other words, you match
Speaker 1: up bright black kids with equally bright white kids, then
Speaker 1: you make sure the two groups are similar in age, class,
Speaker 1: and the health of their parents, and you still find
Speaker 1: that the white kids are far more likely to be
Speaker 1: admitted to gifted and talented programs. Kind of a puzzle, right. Finally,
Speaker 1: Grissom and Readings say, look, in many cases, teachers play
Speaker 1: a big role in which students get into gifted programs.
Speaker 1: They encourage them, they recommend them. So they think maybe
Speaker 1: the answer here lies with not who the child is,
Speaker 1: but who the child's teacher is. In the overwhelming majority
Speaker 1: of school districts in the United States, the way that
Speaker 1: a kid ever, gets to be identified as gifted is
Speaker 1: if someone in the school, usually a classroom teacher, has
Speaker 1: to look at that kid and say, I think this
Speaker 1: kid might be gifted. So Grissom does something really simple.
Speaker 1: He looks at the race of the teacher, and what
Speaker 1: he finds is that for white kids, there's no effect,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter, but not for black students. For a
Speaker 1: black student, the world looks different. So if I'm a
Speaker 1: black student and I have a black classroom teacher, the
Speaker 1: probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in the next year
Speaker 1: it looks very much like the probability for a white student.
Speaker 1: But if I am a Black student and I have
Speaker 1: a white classroom teacher, my probability of being identified as
Speaker 1: gifted is substantially lower. How much lower? Okay, So for
Speaker 1: very high achieving black students, the probability of being assigned
Speaker 1: to gifted services under a white teacher is about half
Speaker 1: the probability as an observably similar black student taught by
Speaker 1: a black teacher. If you're black, having a black teacher
Speaker 1: makes a difference, and not just for getting into gifted programs.
Speaker 1: How having a black teacher raises the test scores of
Speaker 1: black students, It changes the way black students behave, and
Speaker 1: it dramatically decreases the chances a black male student would
Speaker 1: be suspended. A group of social scientists recently went over
Speaker 1: the records of one hundred thousand black students in North
Speaker 1: Carolina over a five year period. They found that having
Speaker 1: even one black teacher between the third and fifth grade
Speaker 1: reduced the chance that an African American boy would later
Speaker 1: drop out of high school by how much? By thirty
Speaker 1: nine percent one black teacher. Now, does this mean that
Speaker 1: white teachers are diabolical racists trying to hold down black students. No,
Speaker 1: this isn't conscious discrimination. The point is that teachers have power,
Speaker 1: the gatekeepers. They control the classroom. They decide who gets
Speaker 1: recommended for prizes like gift to programs and who doesn't.
Speaker 1: They decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing
Speaker 1: their attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by
Speaker 1: ignoring another or sending him more often to the principal's office.
Speaker 1: Teachers can discourage. Listen to Leola Brown again about why
Speaker 1: she liked her elementary school Monroe so much. I loved it.
Speaker 1: I loved it. The teachers who are fantastic. We got
Speaker 1: a fantastic educationary. It wasn't, as I say, this case
Speaker 1: wasn't based on that, because we had fantastic teachers and
Speaker 1: we learned, We learned a lot, and they were good
Speaker 1: to us, more like an extended family like matters and
Speaker 1: so forth. Because they took an interest in you, you know,
Speaker 1: and they took an interest in you. That's what all
Speaker 1: the research on blacks and whites and gifted programs comes
Speaker 1: down to. You need to have someone who takes an
Speaker 1: interest in you if you want education to work and
Speaker 1: be fair. They made one serious mistake. I will have
Speaker 1: to hold them responsible. Fall I came across another archive
Speaker 1: of interviews from the Brown era Duke Universities behind the
Speaker 1: Ail Oral History Project. The interview you're hearing is from Richmond, Virginia.
Speaker 1: It's with an African American teacher named Celestine Porter, and
Speaker 1: she says that once you grant this idea that a
Speaker 1: teacher is a gatekeeper and that a child needs someone
Speaker 1: to take an interest in them, then that means integration
Speaker 1: should have been pursued very differently. They made students through
Speaker 1: the integration. They should have had teachers verse and they
Speaker 1: didn't do that and every one of those white schools
Speaker 1: at every one of the black schools. If they were
Speaker 1: gonna send white children to the black school they should
Speaker 1: have had white teachers. If they were gonna send black
Speaker 1: childremen to the white schools, they should have had some
Speaker 1: black teachers there. Now, the first people that should have
Speaker 1: been integrated should have been teachers and administrations first. But
Speaker 1: they didn't do that. They moved the choke. She's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: Read the Brown Decision for yourself. The court goes on
Speaker 1: and on about kids, but they have virtually nothing to
Speaker 1: say about teachers. The word teacher comes up once in
Speaker 1: the main text and a few times in the footnotes.
Speaker 1: That's it. How on earth can you undertake the greatest
Speaker 1: transformation of public education in American history and barely mentioned teachers.
Speaker 1: Young people didn't know business being moved first to have
Speaker 1: borne the brunt oh the segregation process. And it did
Speaker 1: something to the Austins. It did something to him, It
Speaker 1: made him hey, It gave them a sense of nobody's share.
Speaker 1: For me and most of the students that had moved
Speaker 1: from the black schools into the white situation, we as
Speaker 1: teachers had been that to nurture there to help them along,
Speaker 1: to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they
Speaker 1: moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't
Speaker 1: know teachers, and teachers were fraid of them. The Brown
Speaker 1: Decision was all about children. The signature memories of the
Speaker 1: Brown era are all about black children being escorted into
Speaker 1: previously all white schools. We should have been talking about teachers.
Speaker 1: About three and a half hours due east of Topeka
Speaker 1: on Ice seventy, there is a little town called Moberly.
Speaker 1: Morberly is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie
Speaker 1: because it was settled by migrants from the South before
Speaker 1: the Civil War. There was a lot of slave owning
Speaker 1: in Little Dixie compared with the rest of Missouri, a
Speaker 1: lot of racial hostility in that part of the state.
Speaker 1: And I don't think you can understand what happened after
Speaker 1: the Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Marburly.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen fifties, Morberly had a school system
Speaker 1: employing around a hundred teachers across eight schools. One of
Speaker 1: those schools was black. It was called Lincoln. Lincoln had
Speaker 1: eleven teachers. The year after the Brown Decision, Mobilely integrates.
Speaker 1: They do that by closing the one black school, Lincoln.
Speaker 1: I'm bussing all the black students there to white schools.
Speaker 1: After closing Lincoln, the Mobile school system then says, wait,
Speaker 1: if we combine all the students in Moberly into one
Speaker 1: school system, we don't think we need as many teachers
Speaker 1: as we had before. So they say, let's evaluate all
Speaker 1: the teachers from the two newly combined systems. Keep the
Speaker 1: best ones, let the mediocre ones go. I think you
Speaker 1: can see what's coming. They decide to fire every one
Speaker 1: of the eleven black teachers who used to work at Lincoln.
Speaker 1: So the black teachers sue and they lose. They appeal,
Speaker 1: they lose again. In nineteen fifty nine, they ask the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court to consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no,
Speaker 1: Brown is the great victory, Mobilely is the great defeat,
Speaker 1: and they're connected. Let me give you a flavor of
Speaker 1: the case. The black teachers say, you can't possibly say
Speaker 1: that we were the absolute worst of all teachers in
Speaker 1: the combined system. We've been evaluated for years by our
Speaker 1: superintendent and have been given high marks. The white school
Speaker 1: board counters with, sure, but you are being compared to
Speaker 1: other black teachers. You need to be compared to white teachers.
Speaker 1: So the black teachers say, yeah, but we stack up
Speaker 1: really well against white teachers. And by the way, this
Speaker 1: was not a stretch. Virtually every profession except teaching was
Speaker 1: closed to educated African Americans in those years. If you
Speaker 1: were smart and liked learning in that era, you became
Speaker 1: a teacher. The court then says, so what I'm quoting
Speaker 1: human capabilities cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula. Intangible
Speaker 1: factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry, and adaptability vitally
Speaker 1: affect the work of any teacher. I think there's one
Speaker 1: intangible factor missing in that list, don't you what could
Speaker 1: it be? Dispose? It begins with an R. Forgive me
Speaker 1: for going on and on about this one obscure case,
Speaker 1: but you have to get the flavor of it. The
Speaker 1: plaintiffs say, wait, one of us is a superstar graduate
Speaker 1: degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is Mary
Speaker 1: Allah Timmany. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star,
Speaker 1: But he says, I'm still not hiring her because and
Speaker 1: I quoting here from the judge's decision, because she gave
Speaker 1: the impression that she considered herself superior to other teachers
Speaker 1: and was resentful towards authority. Resentful towards authority. You think
Speaker 1: she just got fired. The judge simply can't get Mary
Speaker 1: Alla Timoney out of his head. I'm quoting again. It
Speaker 1: is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this
Speaker 1: teacher has. And I do not mean to say that
Speaker 1: such attitude is limited to any race or color, but
Speaker 1: when it does exist, it vitally affects the teaching ability
Speaker 1: of the individual. She's appity, an appity negro. Of course,
Speaker 1: they don't want to keep her because they understand the
Speaker 1: same thing that Leo L. Brown understands, and all the
Speaker 1: many academics who have studied what actually happens to black
Speaker 1: kids in the classroom understand, which is that educational equality
Speaker 1: is a function of who holds the power in the classroom.
Speaker 1: So mobilely misery gets rid of its Black teachers, and
Speaker 1: by the way, so does almost everybody else across the
Speaker 1: entire South. Black teachers just get fired left and right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't something done secretly, It was done right out
Speaker 1: in the open. There was something like eighty two thousand
Speaker 1: African American teachers in the South before the Brown Decision.
Speaker 1: Within a decade, as the decision was slowly implemented across
Speaker 1: the country, about half have been fired. What surprises me
Speaker 1: is the kind of historical amnesia there is surrounding that
Speaker 1: issue that many many people today who are searching for
Speaker 1: black teachers have no understanding of the fact that many
Speaker 1: of them lost their jobs. One of the few scholars
Speaker 1: who has paid any attention to what happened is Michelle Foster,
Speaker 1: an education professor at the University of Louisville. Twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: Foster tracked as many black teachers from that era as
Speaker 1: she could find. When, well, what role did teachers did
Speaker 1: black women play in the South relative to children? They
Speaker 1: were nursemaids, they were housekeepers, they were domestics. That's what
Speaker 1: the role they played. You know, every Southern or I
Speaker 1: meet a lot of stuff they said, I had a
Speaker 1: black somebody who took care of them. But that's a mother.
Speaker 1: You know, that's a little different position. When you're a teacher.
Speaker 1: You're evaluating, you're judging. Even those who got to keep
Speaker 1: their jobs told one story after another of humiliation. It
Speaker 1: was too much. One of the teachers Foster interviewed, went
Speaker 1: for a meeting with the superintendent with all of the
Speaker 1: other black teachers who were being kept on. I'm quoting.
Speaker 1: They were fifteen of us, and not a single one
Speaker 1: of them in there as dark as I am. Not
Speaker 1: one that ought to tell you something. By the way,
Speaker 1: the remaining black teachers couldn't use the teacher's bathroom. They
Speaker 1: had to use the children's bathroom. To this day, the
Speaker 1: ranks of black teachers in the United States have not
Speaker 1: recovered from the humiliations and mass firings of the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties. As a percentage, there are far fewer
Speaker 1: black teachers than there are black students. And when you
Speaker 1: think back to studies on how important black teachers are
Speaker 1: for the performance of black students, that's a tragedy. Georgia,
Speaker 1: South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, one classroom after another was purged
Speaker 1: of its black teachers and Tipeka, Kansas. Of course, Topeka
Speaker 1: made a show of it. They assigned a black teacher
Speaker 1: to a halftime position at the formerly all white Randolph School,
Speaker 1: and then the principle, a man named Stanley Stalter, had
Speaker 1: the task of calling up white parents to see if
Speaker 1: they objected to this one halftime black teacher, and of
Speaker 1: course they did. Some were adamant. Nope, some of them
Speaker 1: had a very peculiar reasons for not wanting this child
Speaker 1: in the black teacher's room. That's the principle. Stalter interviewed
Speaker 1: by the Kansas Historical Society. Another one said, my child
Speaker 1: is now at twelve years of age, and it is
Speaker 1: beginning her natural period, and this is not the time
Speaker 1: of her life to be put in here with a
Speaker 1: black teacher, a male. Hey, that one talk everything. There's
Speaker 1: a limit to how many times a school board is
Speaker 1: going to try and talk white tax paying parents out
Speaker 1: of their fear of placing a menstruating adolescent in class
Speaker 1: with a black teacher. Far easier just not to hire
Speaker 1: any black teachers at all, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to
Speaker 1: the present uncertainty about enrollment next year in schools for
Speaker 1: Negro children, it is not possible at this time to
Speaker 1: offer you employment for next year. If the court should
Speaker 1: rule that segregation in the elementary grades is unconstitutional, our
Speaker 1: board will proceed on the assumption that the majority of
Speaker 1: people in Topeka will not want to employ Negro teachers
Speaker 1: next year. For white children. I said at the beginning
Speaker 1: that the woman reading that letter at the conference of
Speaker 1: the University of Michigan was a Missus Thompson. That's her
Speaker 1: married name. Her first name is Linda. Her maiden name
Speaker 1: is Brown, Linda Brown, the Brown of Brown v. Topeka
Speaker 1: Board of Education. This is a little girl Oliver tried
Speaker 1: and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School. She was
Speaker 1: invited to Michigan to speak in celebration of the fiftieth
Speaker 1: anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. And what does Linda
Speaker 1: Brown Thompson do. In the middle of her talk, she
Speaker 1: interrupts her eyewitness account to remind her audience who bore
Speaker 1: the cost of integration, not white people, black people. I
Speaker 1: think I understand that all of you must be under
Speaker 1: considerable strength, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconvenience
Speaker 1: which you must be experiencing during the spirit of adjustment.
Speaker 1: I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to
Speaker 1: be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendell Godwin,
Speaker 1: Superintendent of Schools. Revisionist History is produced by Mail LaBelle
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista Stephanie Daniel and Ciomara
Speaker 1: Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Original music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell