Black Teachers & The Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas that that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Although the process was slow and contentious, the SCOTUS decisions in Brown and Brown II required that desegregation must occur "with all deliberate speed" to provide Black students with the equal protection under the law required by the 14th Amendment.

Black teachers had no protections or guarantees under the Brown ruling. As Southern states tried to destroy the NAACP using legislatures and courts, they targeted teachers with the belief that, as Candace Cunningham writes, “to dispense with Black teachers was to weaken the NAACP. To dispose of Black teachers was to destabilize the civil rights movement.” In March 1956, the South Carolina general assembly passed a series of anti-NAACP statutes, including the anti-NAACP oath, which made it illegal for local, county, or state government employees to be NAACP members.

In May 1956, in Elloree, South Carolina, 21 Black teachers refused to distance themselves from the NAACP, and the white school officials did not rehire them for the following year. The Elloree teachers, with NAACP lawyers, took their case to court in Bryan v. Austin in September 1956.

In this episode, Kelly tells the story of what happened with Black teachers in Elloree, South Carolina, in aftermath of Brown v. Board, and interviews Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University, Candace Cunningham.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Episode image: Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. Warren K. Leffler. 1963. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003654393/

Sources:

• “Hell Is Popping Here in South Carolina”: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era," by Candace Cunningham, History of Education Quarterly, February 3, 2021.
• "A Hidden History of Integration and the Shortage of Teachers of Color," by Cindy Long, NEA Today, March 11, 2020
• "School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment," Working Paper by Owen Thompson, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2019.
• "65 Years After ‘Brown v. Board,’ Where Are All the Black Educators?" by Madeline Will, EdWeek, May 14, 2019.

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