Black Teachers, Public Service Employment, and Urban Middle-Class Politics

• In Event: Roundtable Session 84
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Desegregation

Abstract

Between the 1950s and 1980s there were multiple attempts to desegregate Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Over the course of this period, support for the utility of school desegregation within black communities waned. However, there continued to be strong support amongst African Americans for integrating Board of Education employees. Supporters of employment integration did not necessarily envision black and white teachers working together in every neighborhood in the city, but rather pushed by for blacks to achieve greater access to public sector jobs as teachers and Board of Education staff members. By the late 1960s, many black CPS teachers were frustrated with the inadequate conditions in schools serving black children and their marginalized role in the Chicago Teachers’ Union. Groups of black teachers protested the union and even considered creating an alternative black teachers’ union. In 1969 only 34% of teachers and 25% of the administrative staff in CPS were African American, however, by 1979, African Americans constituted 50% of all CPS employees. This paper analyzes the impact of shifts in the racial demographics of the CPS teaching force and Board of Education staff as more black teachers and staff members entered the public school system. I argue that African Americans’ increased representation as Board of Education employees, and the changing roles, and relative positions, of black teachers within the school system and teachers’ union had broader implications for black communities and black middle-class politics.
This social history utilizes archival research, government documents, political memoirs, and oral histories to analyze the ways that African Americans entered and transformed schools, city politics, and communities as CPS teachers and staff members. This study also relies on an analysis of quantitative data that I compiled from CPS’ annual Race/Ethnic Surveys of staff and students over several decades. A number of scholars have investigated struggles to desegregate schools in Chicago. However, there has been less attention paid to the impact of the increasing presence and power of black teachers and administrative staff in CPS after the late 1960s. This paper will examine transformations in black teachers’ orientation to the teachers’ union and the Board of Education from the late 1960s, when groups of black teachers protested the teachers’ union, to the election of Jacqueline Vaughn as the first black president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union in 1984. This work also speaks to an emerging scholarship that seeks to challenge traditional interpretations of the late twentieth century “urban crisis.” These scholars argue that African Americans in many major cities were more proportionally reliant upon public sector employment than manufacturing jobs and push us to refocus our analysis of race, class, and labor within the realm of public sector employment. In meeting this appeal, this paper considers how the growing number of black CPS teachers and staff transformed black politics in the city as anchors of communities, caretakers of children, and as a relatively stable black urban middle-class. Understanding this history is even more urgent given the recent political attacks on teachers and public sector employees nationally.

Author

• Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Governors State University