Educating in a Burning House: Black Teacher Desegregation in North Carolina and South Carolina, 1960–2001

• In Event: Mapping Black Teaching Experiences Across Time and Space

Abstract

Although a significant number of Black teachers and administrators were fired, demoted, and displaced throughout the South in aftermath of the Brown decisions, there were Black teachers who kept their jobs and desegregated white K-12 public schools beginning in 1960. This paper draws upon oral history interviews, curriculum materials, and archival sources including the papers of teacher organizations to examine the contours of Black teachers’ desegregation of schools in North Carolina and South Carolina. Not only does it focus on the first decades of school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s, but also highlights the change over time as school desegregation reached its apex before the re-segregation of schools took hold in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

Author

• Alexander D. Hyres, University of Utah
  Presenting Author