What Winning Cost
from Cultural Context of Knowledge Hosted by Dr. Donald Easton-Brooks
In the spring of 1951, a sixteen-year-old named Barbara Rose Johns, tired of being taught in a tar-paper shack, led four hundred and fifty classmates onto a picket line. That walkout became one of the five cases the Supreme Court joined together as Brown v. Board of Education. A child started it. This episode holds two truths at once. First, the long road to Brown, walked at the same time by Mexican, Japanese, Native, and Black families: Sylvia Mendez and the LULAC cases that shaped the brief Thurgood Marshall carried into Brown; Japanese families teaching their own children inside incarceration camps; Native families facing termination, relocation, and the 1958 Indian Adoption Project; and the five Black cases, armed with the Clarks' doll study. Second, the cost. In the act of integrating the children, the country fired the teachers. Within a decade of Brown, more than thirty-eight thousand Black teachers and principals lost their jobs. As families fought back, the state turned a welfare safety net into a tool that removed Black children from Black homes. Brown was right. The harm was not in the ruling. It was in how the country chose to carry it out. Join the email list for the show notes, the full reference list, and the written companion to every episode, plus the series reading list to start: https://podcast.donaldeastonbrooks.com/subscribe?from=podcast
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