Displacement, Demotion, and Desegregation: Black Educators in Virginia, 1954–2001 (Poster 26)

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Scholars such as Adam Fairclough, Michael Fultz, Leslie Fenwick, and others have chronicled the firings, demotions, and displacements of Black educators in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decisions. Although many Black teachers and administrators were fired, demoted, and displaced throughout the South in the aftermath of the Brown decisions, there were some Black teachers who retain their jobs and, as a result, desegregated historically white K-12 public schools from the 1960s onwards. Black teachers were also involved in desegregation as part of the first wave of Black graduate students at historically white institutions of higher education. This poster examines the contours of Black teachers’ desegregation off schools, colleges, and universities in one state: the Commonwealth of Virginia. Drawing upon archival papers, memoirs, newspapers, and oral history interviews, it focuses on two Black educators, Florence Coleman Bryant and Wilbert T. Lewis, who ended their careers as administrators at Charlottesville High School, but who took slightly different paths to get there. Not only does the poster focus on the first decades of school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s, but it also highlights the change over time as school desegregation reached its apex before the resegregation of schools took hold in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. By focusing on Black educators’ involvement in school desegregation during the latter half of the twentieth century, this poster illuminates how policies and practices at the local, state, and national level shaped their lives and work.

Author

• Alexander D. Hyres, University of Utah
  Presenting Author