BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Abstract

Desegregated Teachers: Contesting the Meaning of Equality of Educational Opportunity in the South Post Brown, by Barbara J. Shircliffe. New York: Peter Lang, 2012, 231 pp., S38.95, hardback.On September 3, 1957, Governor Orval E. Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard for the sole purpose of preventing the desegregation of a single urban high school. In a dramatic standoff that captured national media attention, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by deploying Army troops from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Arkansas and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to ensure that a handful of African American children could safely enter school grounds. Precipitated by the United States Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ( 1954), which overturned fifty years of legal precedent endorsing racial segregation in American education, this event was simply a small part of a larger wave of desegregation of teachers and pupils. While African American children were often regarded as the primary beneficiaries of school desegregation by judges, White officials and civil rights lawyers, current literature has demonstrated an ongoing struggle to cope with the effects of a social movement driven forward by legal reform. The author does a fine job of outlining the aftermath of integration post-Brown in Southern states.In chapter 1, the contradictory outcomes of decades of desegregation guidelines and the effectiveness of race conscious policies to promote school integration for students and affirmative action for teachers are discussed. In particular, the historical roots of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), both of which drove desegregation efforts in the South, were addressed. In general, desegregation plans focused primarily on shifting the most experienced and talented African American teachers to predominantly White schools and the inexperienced White teachers to predominantly African American schools. This strategy arguably resulted in more losses than gains for African American teachers by way of displacements and demotions. Similarly, most of the literature that details the effects of school segregations on European Americans has given far more attention to pupil loss instead of White flight, a term used to describe the mass exodus of White teachers from predominantly mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban settings.Chapter 2 places the struggle of African American teachers for pay equity in the context of the broader desegregation movement. In the South, massive efforts were made to ensure equal access to a quality education. Attention was called to increasing state and federal aid to address the educational disparities that had rapidly grown between 1910 and 1935. These initiatives would include the construction of new schools or consolidation of those in rural settings, expanding the availability of transportation and raising standards for teacher certification and pay. The author goes on to discuss the indifference or oftentimes hostility of Whites in educating African American children beyond the primary grades and the resultant underdevelopment of Black education in the South.Chapter 2 also outlines the four main sources of support for African American teachers in the South: (a) African American communities, (b) northern philanthropist, (c) White southern progressives and (d) the Black state teachers associations. Members of the teachers association would eventually come together to establish the National Association of Teachers of Colored Schools (NATCS) in 1907 as a parallel organization to the National Education Association (NEA). Leaders challenged the notion that African American teachers were second-class professionals. The desegregation outlook today is grim given that Whites are still largely concentrated in schools with other Whites, leaving the largest minority groups-Black and Latino students-isolated in many urban schools. …