Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Bushkin. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's a gorgeous building called the Raca Auditorium, built in the nineteen thirties in the Classical Renaissance style. And in January of two thousand and four, on one of those cold Michigan days, a woman takes the stage in front of a big crowd. She's in her sixties. Her name is missus Thompson.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: Good evening, It's indeed a pleasure to be with you this evening here on the campus of the University of Michigan, the.

00:00:49
Speaker 3: Home of the Wolverines.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Is that right? And I heard you had a game last night you only lost it by two points. Huh.

00:01:01
Speaker 1: She tells a funny story about how she was once invited to speak at NASAU and thought she was going to the Bahamas, only to discover that it was NASA County, Long Island. She talks a little bit about her childhood and her family. Then right in the middle of her talk, she starts reading a notice of termination sent many years ago to a teacher named Darla Buchanan.

00:01:22
Speaker 2: Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment next year, it is necessary for me to notify you now that your services will not be needed for next year.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: The students in the auditorium are wrapped. This is not what they expected. But Missus Thompson goes on and reads all the way to the end.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: I think I understand that all of you must be under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment.

00:01:57
Speaker 1: This period of adjustment, remember that line. It's a nice bit of condescension and understatement. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about that euphemism in the letter read by Missus Thompson. This period of adjustment. Not that long ago. Americans set out to do something revolutionary to change the world. But we botched it, and we didn't want to admit that fact. So we swept the whole episode under the rug and wrote letters to everyone concerned to try and absolve ourselves of the whole business.

00:02:49
Speaker 2: I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concern.

00:03:02
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:03:03
Speaker 5: Right.

00:03:06
Speaker 1: The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan, was written by the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas, a medium sized city in the upper right hand corner of the state. Like a lot of cities and towns in the United States, particularly those in the South, Topeka had segregated public elementary schools. In the Jim Crow era, White children went to neighborhood schools. Black children went to a separate system of schools scattered around the city with their own black teachers and black principles. In the years after the Second World War, the leading civil rights group of the day, the NAACP, decided to start challenging segregation. Topeka was one of their test cases. They found thirteen black families and asked them to go down to their neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children. One of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leola Brown. Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later he was a pastor. This is Leola Brown from an interview she gave in nineteen ninety one to the Kansas State Historical Society.

00:04:09
Speaker 6: My husband Oliver Brown. He was a heavyweight fighter. He used to bit golden gloves.

00:04:15
Speaker 1: The Browns had a seven year old named Linda. The black elementary school she was supposed to go to was cal Monroe. To get there, she had to walk seven blocks, often in freezing weather, and cross a busy road, then get on a bus. The local white elementary school was Sumner, just four blocks on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the neighborhood all went there. So one day, as instructed by the NAACP, Oliver Brown took his daughter by the hand and walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary.

00:04:47
Speaker 6: As Linda said, when they got over there and that building looked so big, there being a little kid going upstairs. And then when they got ready to talk, they had her sit on the outside of the office. Dad went in was tungue to the principal.

00:04:59
Speaker 1: You could imagine how uncomfortable the conversation was. Oliver Brown was not supposed to be there, and the principal would have had no idea what to say to him other than I'm sorry, this is the way it is in Topeka. With little Linda waiting out in the hall, if she.

00:05:14
Speaker 6: Said, you could hear the voters kinda get a little loud, and he said, well, it wasn't him, it was the school board. That was a policy of the school board. You couldn't do nothing about it, you know. So he couldn't no way, he could not enroll Landon and that school without.

00:05:28
Speaker 1: Their preval All the black families got the same answer, your child is not welcome. So the local NAACP chapter sued the school board. Oliver Brown's name was put first, Brown versus to peak a Board of Education. It was bundled with a number of other desegregation cases from all around the country. More than two hundred plaintiffs in all, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, in one of the most famous legal decisions in American history, the Court ruled in Oliver Brown's favor. The practice of educating black and white school children separately was ruled unconstantal.

00:06:11
Speaker 5: It was a unanimous decision and had the broadest possible language, which should set for rest, once and for all the problem as to whether or not a second class citizenship segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of the country.

00:06:30
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you were taught about the Brown decision in school or have watched a documentary on it. It's a milestone, but at the same time it's a strange case. You could fill an auditorium with all the scholars who have a quarrel with Brown. I mean, just go back and read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor of Oliver and Liola Brown and the families of Topeka, but the court actually says something entirely different from what the black people of Topeka were saying.

00:06:58
Speaker 6: I went to Monroe School. You're Intopeka from grade one through eight.

00:07:03
Speaker 1: Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State Historical Society. On several occasions, Liola is asked about Monroe, the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola grew up in Topeka, she went to Monroe as well, and Leola Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe.

00:07:21
Speaker 6: Oh it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful. And had it not been through this walking, you know, school and going to a part of school were possibly never wady. You know, that's what we did.

00:07:35
Speaker 1: Later in the interview the issue comes up again. The interviewer asked Leola specifically, you didn't want your daughter to go to the white school because the white school was better than the black school. And Leola is adamant. Oh No, that never came up. We were getting a quality education at Monroe.

00:07:52
Speaker 4: We didn't have any.

00:07:55
Speaker 6: Going to pick with our schools for as education was sponsor and no the teachers, because they were qualified and they did what they were supposed to do.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: For Leola and Oliver Brown, the lawsuit was a matter of principle. They didn't think there was anything wrong with the qual education at Monroe, the all black school. They just thought that the Tapeka school Board shouldn't be telling them where they could or couldn't send Linda to school, particularly if the only reason the school board could come up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now, listen to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the Brown decision. They agreed that the Browns ought to be able to send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different. I'm quoting segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The Court's conclusion was that segregation was de facto unequal. That simply the act of educating black children separately from white children caused harm, serious harm. The court goes on, segregation with the sanction of law has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children. This was light years away from Leola Brown's position. Leola Brown said that black run schools like Monroe were good schools, but as a matter of principle, she ought to be able to enroll into a sumner. The Court said, actually, Monroe is not a good school at all. It can't be a good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola Brown said, we're fine, We just want some control over our lives. The Court said, you're not fine at all. Your educational and mental development has been retarded by your inferior schooling. Now, the court could have said something much more straightforward, how about this. Schools are where people make the connections that allow them to get ahead in the world. You cannot lock black people out of the place where social power and opportunity reside. That argument would have done the job right, but the court doesn't say that. In order to condemn the discrimination of Brown's face, the court instead makes the case that black people are psychologically crippled. The historian Darryl Scott wrote a brilliant book a while back called Contempt and Pity, in which he points out that there's been a long history behind this talk of psychological damage. It goes back to the days of slavery. It's always been incredibly useful for white people to explain the problems of black people as the result of something personal internal. It makes their problems their fault.

00:10:45
Speaker 7: If you go even back to an Antebellum period, you would see planners who would talk about how they have no sense of family. Now, of course, these are the very people who are selling people's families at the auction block, right. You know, they're destroying families, but they were justify it in their minds by saying they have no sense of families.

00:11:04
Speaker 1: Another historian, Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in his essay The Whole United States Is Southern, which you should read, by the way, if you ever want to be grabbed by the lapels. Paine argues that in the decades after the Civil War, Southern whites attempt to sell the rest of America on this way of thinking about race. They've basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political and economic force. But they want quoting pain to frame the issue in a language of separation. Customs are way of life and social equality, language that constructed race in interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to pretend racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So what does the U. S. Supreme Court do in nineteen fifty four in the Brown decision? It buys into the Southern way of thinking about race. Leo Le Brown and the other plaintiffs say, we have a structural problem. We don't have the power to send Linda to the school down the street. The court says, no, no, no, it's a psychological problem. Little Linda has been damaged in her heart. That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me, it's not. We're still dealing with the consequences. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it helps to explain why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic. It's about a wonderful bit of research done by two political scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jason Grissom and Christopher Reading. Grissom and Reading start with a well known fact white students are far more likely to be in gifted and talented programs than black students. If your kid isn't a gifted in towented program, you've probably observed this. We're the black kids right now. You might say, well, that's simply a reflection of the fact that white kids, for whatever reasons, have higher test scores on average than black kids. So Grissom and Reading look at a large national sample of elementary school kids and let's equalize for test course.

00:13:11
Speaker 8: In other words, let's compare two students, one black and one white, but they both are very high achieving.

00:13:17
Speaker 1: This is grisome.

00:13:18
Speaker 8: Would that difference in probability that they are identified by the system as gifted? Would that persist? And the answer is that it does. In fact, you know, it's still the case that even when you look at two students who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school, a white student and a black student, that white student is still more than two times as likely to be receiving gifted services as that black student is.

00:13:42
Speaker 1: Gifted. Programs are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the brightest children are given a chance to shine. Grisom's saying that's not the way things work in practice.

00:13:52
Speaker 8: And you can go a little further because you can throw other things into the equation that aren't just achievement. You can look at differences in income, the data have, how healthy the parent says that child is. We know what age that child entered kindergarten. You know, on average, white students and black students enter kinder garden at different ages. Because of the phenomenon of red shirting, white parents are more likely to hold their kids back at the start of schooling than black students are. That doesn't explain the gifted gap.

00:14:19
Speaker 1: In other words, you match up bright black kids with equally bright white kids, then you make sure the two groups are similar in age, class and the health of their parents, and you still find that the white kids are far more likely to be admitted to gifted and talented programs. Kind of a puzzle, right. Finally, Grissom and Reddings say, look, in many cases, teachers play a big role in which students get into gifted programs. They encourage them, they recommend them. So they think maybe the answer here lies with not who the child is, but who the child's teacher is.

00:14:54
Speaker 8: In the overwhelming majority of school districts in the United States, the way that a kid ever gets to be identified as gifted is if someone in the school, usually a classroom teacher, has to look at that kid and say, I think this kid might be gifted.

00:15:09
Speaker 1: So Grissom does something really simple. He looks at the race of the teacher, and what he finds is that for white kids, there's no effect. It doesn't matter, but not for black students.

00:15:20
Speaker 8: For a black student, the world looks different. So if I am a black student and I have a black classroom teacher, the probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in the next year it looks very much like the probability for a white student. But if I am a Black student and I have a white classroom teacher, my probability of being identified as gifted is substantially lower.

00:15:45
Speaker 7: How much lower?

00:15:46
Speaker 8: Okay, So for very high achieving black students, the probability of being assigned to gifted services under a white teacher is about half the probability as an observably similar black student taught by a black teacher.

00:16:02
Speaker 1: If you're black, having a black teacher makes a difference, and not just for getting into gifted programs. Having a black teacher raises the test scores of black students, It changes the way black students behave, and it dramatically decreases the chances a black male student would be suspended. A group of social scientists recently went over the records of one hundred thousand black students in North Carolina over a five year period. They found that having even one black teacher between the third and fifth grade reduced the chance that an African American boy would later drop out of high school by how much? By thirty nine percent one black teacher. Now, does this mean that white teachers are diabolical racists trying to hold down black students. No, this isn't conscious discrimination. The point is that teachers have power, the gatekeepers. They control the classroom. They decide who gets recommended for prizes like gifted programs and who doesn't. They decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing their attention to a child, a teacher can inspire by ignoring another or sending him more often to the principal's office. Teachers can discourage. Listen to Leola Brown again about why she liked her elementary school Monroe so much.

00:17:22
Speaker 6: I loved it.

00:17:23
Speaker 4: I loved it.

00:17:24
Speaker 6: The teachers who were fantastic. We got a fantastic education there. It wasn't, as you say, this case wasn't based on that, because we had fantastic teachers and we learned. We learned a lot, and they were good to us, more like an extended family like mothers and so forth. Because they took an interest in you, you know, and.

00:17:43
Speaker 1: They took an interest in you. That's what all the research on blacks and whites and gifted programs comes down to. You need to have someone who takes an interest in you if you want education to work and be fair.

00:17:56
Speaker 9: They made one serious mistake which I will have to hold them responsible for.

00:18:04
Speaker 1: I came across another archive of interviews from the Brown era Duke Universities behind the Veil Oral History Project. The interview you're hearing is from Richmond, Virginia. It's with an African American teacher named Celestine Porter, and she says that once you grant this idea that a teacher is a gatekeeper and that a child needs someone to take an interest in them, then that means integration should have been pursued very differently.

00:18:28
Speaker 9: They made students do the integration. They should have had teachers first, and they didn't do that at every one of those white schools, at every one of the black schools. If they were going to sign white children into the black school they should have had white teachers. If they were gonna send black children unto the white schools, they should have had some black teachers there. Now, the first people that should have been integrated should have been teacher and administrations first.

00:18:59
Speaker 4: But they didn't do that.

00:19:00
Speaker 9: They moved the children.

00:19:02
Speaker 1: She's absolutely right. Read the Brown Decision for yourself. The court goes on and on about kids, but they have virtually nothing to say about teachers. The word teacher comes up once in the main text and a few times in the footnotes. That's it. How on earth can you undertake the greatest transformation of public education in American history and barely mentioned teachers.

00:19:25
Speaker 9: Young people did not know business moved first to have borne the brunt oh the segregation process, and it did something to the Elstons. It did something to them, It made them hay, It gave them a sense of nobody's share. Farm Me and most of the students that had moved from the black schools into the white situation. We as teachers had been there to nurture there to help them along, to recognize their difficulties, to work with them when they moved into the white situation. Teachers didn't know. They didn't know teachers.

00:20:05
Speaker 1: The teachers were afraid of them. The Brown Decision was all about children. The signature memories of the Brown era are all about black children being escorted into previously all white schools. We should have been talking about teachers. About three and a half hours deue east of Topeka on I seventy, there is a little town called Moberly. Moberly is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie because it was settled by margrants from the South before the Civil War. There was a lot of slave owning in Little Dixie compared with the rest of Missouri, a lot of racial hostility in that part of the state. And I don't think you can understand what happened after the Brown Decision without first understanding what happened in Moberly. In the early nineteen fifties, Moberley had a school system employing around one hundred teachers across eight schools. One of those schools was black. It was called Lincoln. Lincoln had eleven teachers. The year after the Brown decision. Moberley integrates. They do that by closing the one black school, Lincoln. I'm busting all the black students there to white schools. After closing Lincoln, the Mobiley school system then says, wait, if we combine all the students in Mobile into one school system, we don't think we need as many teachers as we had before. So they say, let's evaluate all the teachers from the two newly combined systems. Keep the best ones, let the mediocre ones go. I think you can see what's coming. They decide to fire every one of the eleven black teachers who used to work at Lincoln. So the black teachers sue and they lose. They appeal, they lose again. In nineteen fifty nine, they asked the Supreme Court to consider the case. The Supreme Court says, no, Brown is the great victory, Moberly is the great defeat, and they're connected. Let me give you a flavor of the case. The black teachers say, you can't possibly say that we were the absolute worst of all teachers in the combined system. We've been evaluated for years by our superintendent and have been given high marks. The white school board counters with sure, but you are being compared to other black teachers. You need to be compared to white teachers. So the black teachers say, yeah, but we stack up really well against white teachers. And by the way, this was not a stretch. Virtually every profession except teaching was closed to educated African Americans in those years. If you were smart and liked learning in that era, you became a teacher. The court then says, so what I'm quoting human capabilities cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula. Intangible factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry, and adaptability vitally affect the work of any teacher. I think there's one intangible factor missing in that list, don't you what could it be? Dispose? It begins with an r. Forgive me for going on and on about this one obscure case, but you have to get the flavor of it. The plaintiffs say, wait, one of miss is a superstar graduate degrees qualifications ratings to the roof. Her name is mary Ala Timminy. And the white superintendent agrees she's a star, but he says, I'm still not hiring her because and when quoting here from the judge's decision because she gave the impression that she considered herself superior to other teachers and was resentful towards authority. Resentful towards authority, You think she just got fired. The judge simply can't get mary Ella Timony out of his head. I'm quoting again. It is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this teacher has. And I do not mean to say that such attitude is limited to any race or color, but when it does it exist, it vitally affects the teaching ability of the individual. She's upity, an appity negro. Of course, they don't want to keep her because they understand the same thing that Leola Brown understands, and all the many academics who have studied what actually happens to black kids in the classroom understand, which is that educational equality is a function of who holds the power in the classroom. So mobili misery gets rid of its black teachers, and by the way, so does almost everybody else across the entire South. Black teachers just get fired left and right. It wasn't something done secretly, it was done right out in the open. There was something like eighty two thousand African American teachers in the South before the Brown Decision. Within a decade, as the decision was slowly implemented across the country, about half have been fired.

00:25:05
Speaker 3: What surprises me is the kind of historical amnesia there is surrounding that issue that many many people today who are searching for black teachers have no understanding of the fact that many of them lost their jobs.

00:25:18
Speaker 1: One of the few scholars who has paid any attention to what happened is Michelle Foster, an education professor at the University of Louisville. Twenty years ago, Foster tracked as many black teachers from that era as she could find.

00:25:31
Speaker 3: What role did teachers did black women play in the South relative to children? They were nurse maids, they were housekeepers, they were domestics. That's the role they played. You know, every Southern or I meet a lot of stuff they said, I had a black somebody who took care of them. But that's a motherl You know, that's a little different position. When you're a teacher. You're evaluating, you're judging.

00:25:52
Speaker 1: Even those who got to keep their jobs told one story after another of humiliation. It was too much. One of the teachers Foster interviewed went for a meeting with the superintendent with all of the other black teachers who were being kept on. I'm quoting. They were fifteen of us, and not a single one of them in there as dark as I am. Not one that ought to tell you something. By the way, the remaining black teachers couldn't use the teacher's bathroom. They had to use the children's bathroom. To this day, the ranks of black teachers in the United States have not recovered from the humiliations and mass firings of the nineteen fifties and sixties. As a percentage, there are far fewer black teachers than there are black students. And when you think back to studies on how important black teachers are for the performance of black students, that's a tragedy. Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, one classroom after another was purged of its black teachers and topeaka Kansas, of course, Topeka made a show of it. They assigned a black teacher to a half time position at the formerly all white Randolph School. Principal, a man named Stanley Stalter, had the task of calling up white parents to see if they objected to this one halftime black teacher, and of course they did.

00:27:20
Speaker 4: Some were adamant. Nope, some of them had a very peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black teacher's room.

00:27:33
Speaker 1: That's the principal stalter interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society.

00:27:37
Speaker 4: Another one said, my child is now twelve years of age, and it is beginning her mantrual period, and this is not the time of her life to be put in here with a black teacher, a male. Hey, that one topped everything.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: There's a limit to how many times a school board is going to try and talk white tax paying parents out of their fear of placing a menstruating adolescent in class with a black teacher. Far easier just not to hire any black teachers at.

00:28:13
Speaker 2: All, Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment next year in schools for Negro children, it is not possible at this time to offer you employment for next year. If the court should rule that segregation in the elementary grades is unconstitutional, 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.

00:28:50
Speaker 1: I said at the beginning. The woman reading that letter at the conference of the University of Michigan was a Missus Thompson. That's her married name. Her first name is Linda. Her maiden name is Brown, Linda Brown, the Brown of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. This is a little girl, Oliver Brown tried and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School. She was invited to Michigan to speak in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. And what does Linda Brown Thompson do. In the middle of her talk, she interrupts her eyewitness account to remind her audience who bore the cost of integration, not white people, black people.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: I think I understand that all of you must be under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties an inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment. I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone. Concern Sincerely, Yours, Wendel Godwin, Superintendent of Schools.

00:30:12
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Sillmarra Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.