A Hidden History of Integration and the Shortage of Teachers of Color
Evelyn J. Chatmon, the first African American female assistant superintendent in Baltimore County Public Schools, grew up under Jim Crow in Maryland during the 1940s and 50s. Even though she could see the white elementary school from her house, she had to ride a bus for more than an hour to the black school, where there was no running water. Students drank from a ladle dipped into a bucket and used an outhouse, even in the bitter cold of winter.
But Chatmon also recalled that her educators were extraordinarily talented and provided her with excellent instruction despite the poor conditions.
“This is the hidden piece of history,” said Vanessa Siddle Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies at Emory University and the president-elect of the American Educational Research Association. “What we’ve seen written about inequality and oppressive school conditions is all true, but it’s incomplete. It’s only part of the story.”
The script that was written, she said, is that segregated schools were all bad and “that nothing really good happened for black children until we desegregated them into white schools.”
That hidden history, that there were good educators and advocates within the all-black schools, she said, can also offer clues to the current shortage of teachers of color in America’s public schools today.
Exceptional Educators
According to Walker, the experience of Evelyn Chatmon was shared by many black students who had teachers of color before schools were desegregated. With limited professional options, many well-educated black people became teachers who ardently passed on a thirst for knowledge to their pupils. They developed rigorous curriculum that challenged and inspired them, and though society told black CONTINUE READING: A Hidden History of Integration and the Shortage of Teachers of Color