March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

• As one of the handful of Black teachers in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era of racially segregated public schools, she faced a daunting challenge in providing a first-class education to students considered second-class citizens.
• Before the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board decision that deemed segregated schools “separate and unequal,” the efforts of Black teachers went unheralded, underappreciated and virtually unknown.
• My research revealed at least one important lesson: What Black teachers face today is not that different from what we faced in the past.

In spite of it all

• What I found was that for Black people, education was in and of itself an act of active resistance against racial disenfranchisement.
• As education scholar Christopher Span explained in his 2012 seminal book “From Cottonfield to Schoolhouse”: “To be educated was to be respected; to be educated was to be a citizen.
• As a result, Black teachers used classrooms to not only impart the lessons of history, but also to encourage students to be actively involved in the fight for racial equity.

Education was paramount

• Here are a few that serve as lessons for today: Arguably the most important, the first is developing relationships and mentorships.
• Further solidifying those relationships was the fact that many of the teachers had taught several generations of families.
• Because of their teachers, Black students valued education and modeled their own behavior to achieve their own potential.
• She knew then that education was intended to be the great equalizer in America and the key to upward mobility – and she worked her entire career making sure that became a reality in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.