<p>Ctymomteacher,
From what I have read and heard from black peers who had moms who were teachers in the south when schools were desegregated, your experience was unusual.</p>
<p>"Thousands of black teachers were fired when schools were forced to desegregate.
By Greg Toppo
USA Today
May 16, 2004
*
In the spring of 1953, with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, Wendell Godwin, superintendent of schools in Topeka, sent letters to black elementary school teachers. Painfully polite, the letters couldn't mask the message: If segregation dies, you will lose your jobs.
"Our Board will proceed on the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ negro teachers next year for White children," he wrote.
A year later, the high court declared segregation unconstitutional. During the next 20 years, thousands of black educators in Topeka and elsewhere lost their jobs. Researchers say the firings decimated the black teaching force, helping set the stage for decades of poor performance by black students.
It's a little-known and unintended consequence of the ruling, but observers say the nation is still paying the price. "By and large, this culture of black teaching died with Brown," says Vanessa Siddle Walker of Emory University, author of "Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South." <a href="http://www.indystar.com/articles/2/147000-7592-010.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.indystar.com/articles/2/147000-7592-010.html</a></p>
<p>I myself come from a family of educators in that my paternal grandfather, grandmom and her sister all were teachers. The experience that my mom had growing up in the 1920s in a segregated DC was different from what students seem to experience now in schools that are predominantly black.</p>
<p>Parents knew the teachers, and teachers were expected to have high standards. My mom told me that, for example, her h.s. English teacher flunked the entire class, making them all go to summer school. My mom's grammar was flawless. Her English teacher was Miss Cromwell, who was the first black woman to graduate from one of the Seven Sisters schools (I think it was Smith). </p>
<p>My mom never heard of black people saying that being educated was "acting white." From what I can figure out, this is a phenomenon that seems to have begun after the 1950s, when schools were forced to desegregate.</p>
<p>When it comes to Affirmative Action, I do think that we still need it in this country to rectify the centuries in which it was virtually impossible for people here of black African descent to get any kind of education. Even well educated black people have been affected by this because whatever they have managed to accomplish, they probably could have accomplished much more if they and their ancestors had not been so restricted.</p>
<p>For instance, I was a fourth generation college student. This was a wonderful tribute to my ancestors including one who was born a slave and managed somehow to attend Howard. He must have been amazingly brilliant and motivated. I wonder what he might have accomplished if he could have gone to any school in the US, and what he might have accomplished if all jobs had been open to him and he hadn't had to work as a waiter (not an unusual occupation for blacks back then who were fortunate enough to get any kind of higher education). What more might I have done if I had come from a family so well off that I didn't have to work up to 30 hours a week during the school year while I was in college?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I would like to see far more emphasis placed on remediating the secondary and elementary school systems. While AA at the college level is fine, there are many capable black students who have no chance of college because their secondary and elementary educations are so bad.</p>