If desegregation was immensely positive for African American students it would be easy to assume that Black teachers benefited too. But that is not the case, according to research by Eric Hanushek and colleagues at Stanford University.
Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, nearly half of African Americans with post-secondary education living in the South listed teaching as their occupation. That number has since dropped to just 6.7 percent today, the research conducted on a database covering 781 Southern school districts showed.
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But why would this happen when the education space had been opened up?
Data shows that while schools were consolidated with more Black students accepted at formerly whites-only schools, white teachers were put in charge of integrated classrooms but their Black counterparts were demoted to substitutes or outright fired in a discriminatory manner.
In the six years between 1964 and 1972, more than 15,800 Black teachers left schools in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia alone.
Countrywide, the number of African American teachers dropped by nearly a third, the Thompson research showed. Their numbers continued to decline from 8.1 percent in 1971 to 6.9 percent in 1986.
Other reason for the decline included increased opportunities for African-Americans in other fields. The other reason could be that tests that serve as culturally-biased gatekeeper have been put in place to lock teachers of color out of the profession.
“Teachers of color bring benefits to classrooms beyond content knowledge and pedagogy,” according to a 2017 study from The Education Trust, a national nonprofit advocacy organization that promotes high academic achievement.
No wonder most of the early Black revolutionaries in the U.S. were teachers or in academia.
