Rights and Care Discourses Among Southern Teachers During School Desegregation

• In Event: Exploring the Tensions Between Teacher Professionalism and Students’ Rights During the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how southern school desegregation challenged the professional identities of teachers as the civil rights of students often superseded teacher rights in the federal courts. The objectives of the paper are to describe southern teachers’ perspectives toward faculty desegregation during the 1970s and to illuminate how desegregation challenged teachers’ professional identities. How Whiteness mediated teachers’ professional identities is addressed.

Literature/Theoretical Framework
Throughout the 1960s, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the organization driving school desegregation in the South, argued that faculty integration was necessary to provide Black students equal educational opportunity, encourage desegregation, and prevent the dismissals of qualified Black teachers. By the end of the 1960s, the federal courts began ordering southern school districts to develop plans for faculty desegregation often based on racial targets to guide for teacher recruitment, hiring, transfer, layoffs (Parker, 2008). There is limited analysis on how southern teachers responded to and understood these mandates.
Scholarship on the teacher experiences during desegregation focuses on African American teachers and/or takes a case study approach. This literature indicates that African American teachers felt marginalized in desegregated schools and frustrated by continued discrimination against Black children (Mayo, 2007; Morris, 2001; Foster, 1997). Literature, though limited and largely autobiographical, indicates desegregation challenged White teachers’ racial assumptions (Wielder, 1997; Culbertson, 1972; Malloy, 1986). In a case study of a high school in Austin, Texas, Wilson and Segall (2001) found the experiences of African American and White teachers largely diverge.
This paper hopes to contribute to this literature by analyzing teacher narratives across different contexts to uncover how teachers negotiated tensions between their professional rights and obligations and students rights.

Methods and Data sources

This paper is based on extensive archival research at state and local archives, districts courts, and the National Archives and Records Administration Southeast division (NARA-SE). Court documents, including cases most relevant the LDF’s demands for faculty desegregation, only note formal complaints from teachers, particularly in cases in which White or African American associations attempted to intervene. Therefore, data collection was extended to the records of southern teachers associations, professional publications, newspapers, and oral histories of teachers housed in various southern university and state archives.

Conclusions/point of view
This analysis illustrates that white teachers’ perspectives on faculty desegregation reflect conflicts between teachers’ beliefs about professionalism and racist constructions of the needs of African American children. These tensions can be seen as being mediated by what Narayan (1995) describes as a colonializing rights and care discourses. African American teachers also struggled with issues of professionalism as they expressed a desire to be viewed as teachers of all children but express a social justice commitment to the education of Black children.

Scientific or scholarly significance
These finding illustrates how Whiteness mediated the construction of the professional identities of teachers during school desegregation. How teachers negotiate tensions between the rights of teachers and students is relevant to current efforts to hold teacher accountability to gaps in student achievement.

Author

• Barbara Joseph Shircliffe, University of South Florida