In conducting research for my new book, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership, I discovered the purging of Black educators happened even though Black principals and teachers were more qualified than the white educators who replaced them. Proven Black principals and teachers were replaced on a near one-to-one basis with whites who held fewer or no qualifications. Even in segregated all-Black schools, Black educators were more likely to hold bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, certification, and higher levels of licensure than their white peers. Yet after Brown, they were deemed unfit to teach white students for racist reasons, losing both their jobs and their ability to directly influence education policy and practice.
The loss inflicted four traumas still felt today. The first trauma was economic. As I estimate in my book, the low end of calculated salary losses is about $250 million for elimination of 30,000 Black educators’ jobs. Over time, 100,000 Black principals and teachers were shunted off the payrolls due to white resistance to Brown, leaving Black educators nearly $1 billion poorer. Adding to the salary losses from firings were those induced from lack of hiring. Between 1968 and 1971 alone, a total of 23,000 new principal and teaching jobs were created in 11 southeastern states. Black educators were placed in fewer than 500 of these new jobs. In these post-Brown firing and hiring equations, Black educators were desegregation’s prey and white educators its beneficiaries. They lost their jobs — and they were blocked from newly created positions producing income losses and wealth transfers from Black people to white people totaling approximately $2.2 billion today.
The second trauma was the damage done to school systems because of the loss of a high-caliber principal and teacher workforce. The mass exodus of Black teachers and principals yielded school systems led by racist fearmongers manipulating the system to maintain white power and jobs at the expense of Black people. The assault on the professional stature of Black educators ensured that the desegregated school system would be held captive by the same Jim Crow power structure that had fought vehemently against desegregation for decades.
The third trauma resulted in the “near total disintegration of Black authority in every area of public education,” according to a 1972 report by the National Education Association. That served to greatly diminish the aspirations of Black educators and young people. It is reasonable to conclude that Black youth observing the fate of their elders, would worry (and be advised) that they would have limited futures as principals and teachers. The loss of leadership symbols, success symbols and symbols of aspiration were known and felt in the Black community.