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 actual 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.
Unlike Black students, Black teachers had no protections or guarantees under the Brown ruling. As Southern states tried to destroy the NAACP using legislatures and courts, they started to target 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 of 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 of 1956, in the town of Elloree, South Carolina, 21 Black teachers at Elloree Training School refused to distance themselves from the NAACP, and because of this, the white school officials did not rehire them for the following year. All over the South, white school officials dismissed, demoted, or forced the resignation of Black teachers who had previously taught at Black-only schools. The Elloree teachers, with NAACP lawyers, took their case to court in Bryan v. Austin in September 1956.
In this episode, Kelly briefly 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, author of “‘Hell Is Popping Here in South Carolina’: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era” in the February 2021 issue of History of Education Quarterly.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Episode sources and links are available at unsunghistorypodcast.com.
