Integrating schools 70 years ago was a good thing. But it had unintended consequences.

In April, Philadelphia hosted the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. While the planners of the convening may have glowing remarks about its host city, researchers took Pennsylvania to task.

At the meeting, Travis Bristol of the University of California, Berkeley, and Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, reminded attendees that more than half of Pennsylvania schools have zero teachers of color. Statewide, more than 90% of all teachers are white, even though one-third of students are students of color — one of the biggest gaps between student and teacher demographics of any other state.

The national numbers aren’t much better.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of teachers has increased in the last 20 years, from three million to more than 3.7 million. However, the number of Black teachers remained the same: 228,000. Since more Black teachers weren’t being hired, the percentage of Black teachers decreased, from nearly 8% to around 6%.

These numbers didn’t come about in a vacuum. They come as part of a legacy where Black teachers were excluded from classrooms across the country — ironically, in the name of integration. The consistent lack of Black educators across U.S. classrooms is thanks, in part, to the majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, issued May 17, 1954.

On the 70th anniversary of the case, we must reflect on its complicated legacy.

In his opinion for the majority, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren relied on the findings of a Delaware court to justify the court’s rationale for the integration of schools. Warren cited a previous case, which found:

“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children ... A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.”

But that rationale didn’t lead to full integration, in which white students attended Black schools with Black educators as Black students attended white schools with white educators. Rather, Black students were reluctantly assimilated into all-white schools. The implications of this, according to Leslie Fenwick, author of Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership, were disastrous for the job prospects of Black teachers. As Fenwick told NPR in 2022:

“... not only are Black educators at the time affected by being fired, demoted and dismissed, they also lose economic power because they’re not hired into the newly integrated system. This then means that the newly integrated system has been orchestrated to be a white space, a white controlled space where the levers of leadership, the levers of teaching, the levers of what the curriculum will include, the levels of funding are primarily controlled — almost exclusively controlled by white hands. And so students, what they experience then and now is a curriculum that is almost exclusively white in authorship, in imagery and content.”

The unavoidable truth is the decision helped facilitate the mass removal of Black teachers from the education industry.

The Brown decision mandated that Black children attend white schools. However, no court decision mandated that Black educators be hired in newly integrated schools. As more Black children attended majority white schools, educators in those schools remained white. White educators never lost their jobs, and when there was a need to hire more educators, Black educators weren’t chosen to fill those vacant roles.

Brown v. Board of Education created a legacy that public education has yet to recover from because it has yet to do anything about it — other than pay lip service to the notion of increasing the number of Black teachers.

Let me be clear: I’m not arguing that the Brown decision was wrong. Striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine was the right thing to do because the doctrine was imposed upon Black people by the white power structure. But that doesn’t mean all aspects of Black education in 1954 — at Black schools, by Black teachers — were inferior. Consider this: The activists of the civil rights movement — the brilliant, brave pioneers like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who we are still learning from today — received their education from Black educators in segregated schools.

As they did before, today’s Black teachers could inspire a new civil rights movement among Black students. But they can’t do that because they aren’t being hired — certainly not in Philadelphia, where district schools have lost 1,200 Black teachers in the last 20 years.

Increasing the number of Black teachers — as well as protecting the teaching of Black history — is the great educational challenge of our time.

Now, 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we need a new integration of our public schools — this time, of our teachers. To make this happen, we need more than just numbers and lip service and laments. We need action.

Rann Miller is an educator and freelance writer based in South Jersey. His Urban Education Mixtape blog supports urban educators and parents of children attending urban schools. Miller is also the author of “Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids,” reissued in 2024. @RealRannMiller