Board of Education is remembered as a watershed moment in the history of America’s civil rights progress and the fight against systemic racism. Ethridge, a National Education Association official who was a leader in the movement to integrate teacher organizations during the civil rights movement. Nearly 40,000 teaching positions held by Black teachers in 17 southern and border states would be lost in the ensuring years, according to Samuel B. “But when we moved a little further, they tried to say, ‘We don’t want Black teachers teaching White students.’”

“When the school system said ‘separate but equal,’ that was fine,” Palmer recalled to CNN.

Palmer was working as the executive secretary of state for the North Carolina Teachers Association, advocating for Black teachers after Brown was decided. It would take five years, an intervention by the Department of Justice and another Supreme Court order, before integrated public schooling in Prince Edward County proceeded.Īround the same time, in North Carolina, Dr. Five years later, in 1959, as Berryman was looking ahead to attending 7th grade, the county shuttered all public schools and opened a private school – for White children only.

Board of Education, which made racial segregation in public schools illegal.īut supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Berryman was attending public school, had no intention of complying. was 11 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in Brown v.

Effects of brown v board of education