Brown v. Board of Education

• As one of the handful of Black teachers in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era of racially segregated public schools, she faced a daunting challenge in providing a first-class education to students considered second-class citizens.
• Before the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board decision that deemed segregated schools “separate and unequal,” the efforts of Black teachers went unheralded, underappreciated and virtually unknown.
• My research revealed at least one important lesson: What Black teachers face today is not that different from what we faced in the past.

In spite of it all

• What I found was that for Black people, education was in and of itself an act of active resistance against racial disenfranchisement.
• As education scholar Christopher Span explained in his 2012 seminal book “From Cottonfield to Schoolhouse”: “To be educated was to be respected; to be educated was to be a citizen.
• As a result, Black teachers used classrooms to not only impart the lessons of history, but also to encourage students to be actively involved in the fight for racial equity.

Education was paramount

• Here are a few that serve as lessons for today: Arguably the most important, the first is developing relationships and mentorships.
• Further solidifying those relationships was the fact that many of the teachers had taught several generations of families.
• Because of their teachers, Black students valued education and modeled their own behavior to achieve their own potential.
• She knew then that education was intended to be the great equalizer in America and the key to upward mobility – and she worked her entire career making sure that became a reality in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

• “States shouldn’t let race be the primary factor in deciding how to draw boundaries, but it should be a consideration,” Roberts wrote.
• “The line we have drawn is between consciousness and predominance.”
  Alabama state officials submitted the state’s new boundaries by the Republican-controlled state legislature in late July.
• The U.S. Supreme Court took up a similar case and in June 2022, decided to roll back some its 2020 decision.
• “That immense power has arguably made the court a leading player in enacting policy in the U.S,” Pacelle wrote.

• Gallaudet University, the world's premier institution for deaf and hard of hearing students, will hold a graduation ceremony to honor the 23 Black Deaf students and four Black teachers of the Kendall School Division II for Negroes.
• Kendall School Division II was a segregated private elementary school for Black Deaf students that operated on Gallaudet's campus from 1952 to 1954.
• From 1898 to 1905, Kendall School, a K-12 program on the campus of what is now Gallaudet University, enrolled and educated Black students.
• This led to – rather than the acceptance of Black Deaf students into Kendall School outright – the construction on the Gallaudet campus of the segregated Kendall School Division II for Negroes, an inferior building with fewer resources than those made available to white students.

• However, in the nearly seven decades since that decision, through documented redlining, predatory lending practices, and blatant discrimination, many urban neighborhoods remain largely unchanged in their racial demographics.
• “That Wells Fargo would continue to exhibit this kind of behavior in the 21st century is unconscionable.
• “It is outrageous, but sadly not surprising, that Wells Fargo continues to engage in predatory and racially discriminatory lending practices in 2023,” said Parker.
• WHO: Attorney Trent Copeland of Ellis George Cipollone O’Brien Annaguey LLP, legendary civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump and former San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr.
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