<em>Unearthing and Bequeathing Black Feminist Legacies of</em> Brown <em>to a New Generation of Women and Girls</em>

Abstract

On May 18, 1955, one year after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) Supreme Court decision and only days preceding her death, Mary McLeod Bethune bequeathed to her race combination of moral virtues and prophetic exhortations penned as My Last Will and Testament (Bethune-Cookman University, n. d.; Loder-Jackson, 2010). In light of Brown 's ambitious aim to dismantle Jim Crow, the intransigent system of racial apartheid in public that was legally undergirded for decades by the infamous separate-but-equal doctrine of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court case (Kluger, 2004; Patterson, 2001), Bethune's bequeathal of a thirst for education and a responsibility to our young (BethuneCookman University, n.d., para. 8 & 15), in particular, implied unique stewardship obligation for Black women educators. Black women educators' majority representation in U.S. Southern allBlack schools entailed weighty professional charge for them to prepare Black children to negotiate nascent interracial society (Tillman, 2004a, 2004b; V. S. Walker, 2009). Yet, at the dawn of Brown Black educators anticipated that they would be placed between proverbial rock and hard place (Fultz, 2008, p. 67) as they bore the overwhelming burden of: integrating White schools that were hostile to them and their students; being torn away from Black schools and communities where they were often revered; and witnessing the wholescale dismantling of Black schools and teachers associations that anchored them both professionally and communally (Fultz, 2004, 2008; Gray, Reed, & Walton, 1987; Perry, 1975; Rodgers, 1975; Tillman, 2004a, 2004b; V. S. Walker, 2009, 2013a, 2013b).As Plessy's pernicious separate-but-(un)equal mandate persists in 21st century public education, if Bethune was alive she would be dismayed by how many of these prophetic concerns materialized and jeopardized the educational legacies she bequeathed. Nonetheless, Bethune's legacies are perpetual, as she was arguably the foremost Black American woman educational leader of the early 20th century (McCluskey & Smith, 2001). In an effort to shed light on the collective intellectual thought and struggles of Black women educators during this era, this article exposes the link to Bethune ' s legacy by uncovering the overshadowed contributions of three of her lesser-known contemporaries who lived long enough to participate in Brown's enactment. Marion Thompson Wright was university educator, scholar, social worker, and journal editor whose ground-breaking research on educational disparities in Newark, New Jersey in the 1930s and 1940s was indispensable to Brown's social science arguments (Wright, 1941, 1944, 1953, 1954). Ruby Jackson Gainer was schoolteacher, teachers' union leader, and Black teachers association member in Birmingham, Alabama, who fought for teacher salary equalization as part of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) pre-Brown legal strategy in the 1940s, and also advocated for the integration of the National Education Association (NEA; Gainer, 1947). Mamie Phipps Clark was an early childhood educator, humanitarian, and scholar in Washington, D.C., who was the brainchild of and collaborator with her husband, Kenneth Clark, on the renowned 1930s and 1940s doll studies that proved indispensable to Brown's enactment (K. B. Clark & M. P. Clark, 1939, 1940, 1950; M. P. Clark 1939; McLean, 2005).Brown was incomparable to Supreme Court cases that preceded it, particularly in its reliance on social science research and novel set of legal precedents, including the teacher salary equalization cases, which were strategically adjudicated by the NAACP expressly to dismantle Plessy (Kirk, 2009; Kluger, 2004; McNeil, 1984). Wright, Gainer, and Clark helped initiate this foundational research and litigation, but their legacies were eclipsed by Brown 's pantheon of race men, namely Thurgood Marshall and Kenneth Clark, who dedicated their lives to fighting for racial justice on behalf of Black people (Banks, 2010; Carby, 2000; Roach, 2004). …