Ninth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research

Methodology

I used the records of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GTEA) to understand (a) the ways Black educators functioned as advocates in seeking justice for Black children in the years before and after Brown and (b) the ways the activities of Black educators coincided with, or diverged from, the dominant narrative of Brown. Importantly, these records resurfaced because of the activity of GTEA’s last executive director, Dr. Horace Edward Tate. For most weeks over a two-year period, I conducted interviews with Dr. Tate twice weekly. Simultaneously, I began the review of some GTEA files and journals remaining at the GTEA headquarters built in 1961 and at his home.

After Dr. Tate’s death, his widow, Mrs. Virginia Tate, granted access to the full collection of organizational records he had hidden in the attic of the 1951 GTEA building. Stored in this site were the original 11 GTEA steel file cabinets and two rooms of unprocessed materials related to the organization. Together with the files and boxes at his home, the full collection includes books, photographs, memos, reports, proceedings, letters, close to 300 hours of audio files, and varied other miscellaneous documents. I also supplemented the GTEA collection with other archival sources to contextualize and interpret the perspectives of the educators.

As is characteristic of previous studies where I have sought to elevate the beliefs and activities of Black educators, I have utilized historical ethnography as a methodological tool to reconstruct the activities and beliefs of Dr. Tate and the 12,000 Black educators he represented. This methodology seeks to understand the ways behaviors held meaning for the participants and to use their understanding to interpret the documents of their era. The details of the methodology are available in Walker (1996, 2009a).

Findings

Findings from this research reveal Black educators as visionaries and advocates for Black education in the years before the formation of the NAACP and as co-participants with the NAACP in efforts to seek justice for Black children. In their focus on addressing inequality, Black educators operated interdependently with the NAACP in three distinguishable, though overlapping, forms and eras, and they functioned independently to address broader forms of educational inequality at the local, state, and national level. In the overview of the findings that follows, I provide a sketch of their activities in each of these moments, using selected examples to demonstrate the ways effective advocacy for change across each period required a symbiotic co-dependency between the national NAACP and organized Black educators. For purposes of this discussion, the behavior of Black educators is captured primarily through the GTEA database; however, evidence in other firsthand accounts of the activities of Black educators confirms that the GTEA behaviors are representative of similar advocacy strategies of Black educators in other states (Bickley, 1979; Middleton, 1984; Murray, 1984; Patterson, 1981; Picott, 1975; Porter & Neyland, 1977; Potts, 1978; Thompson, 1973).

Importantly, Black educators in this same time period supplemented their local and national advocacy for educational equality with a parallel pedagogical and curricular agenda designed to spur change by intentionally teaching generations of Black children citizenship, democracy, and voting as a means to confront oppression. Famed Georgia educator Lucy Laney captured this intent well in Cleveland in 1919 when she posited at an NAACP convention meeting that Black educators were embracing a strategy they knew would work—that they would “start at the bottom with the children.” ¹ This parallel advocacy plan is equally important in understanding the comprehensive story of advocacy of Black educators to effect better educational opportunities for Black children. However, the structure, idea dissemination, values, and implementation that characterized Laney’s pedagogical and curricular agenda are omitted in the current discussion (see Walker, 2013).

Phase One: Public Congruence and Parallel Agendas, 1917–1921

Political agency for Black education is typically vested in the activities of the NAACP, founded in 1909. In its early years, the NAACP concerned itself with a plethora of the important issues facing the 10 million Blacks on American shores, focusing especially on agitation related to work, wages, and property but including educational concerns as well. By 1914, the organization considered itself “on the map with 4000 members and 27 northern branches.” ² By 1919 it had expanded to 47,000 members with 328 branches in 43 states and become a national voice representing the interests of Black people. Indeed, in the years between 1917 and 1922, the organization approximately quadrupled in size and began to speak with more consistency in its programming and resolutions about issues of concern to southern constituents, particularly the inequality in southern schools. ³

Historians and NAACP records capture several factors to explain the NAACP’s growth. Lured by northern industrial opportunities and invited by northern Black newspapers and leadership, increasing numbers of southern Blacks abandoned the repression of the South and relocated in northern cities to become factory workers in the World War I era (Lentz-Smith, 2009; Sullivan, 2009; Wilkerson, 2011). This migration both increased the availability of northern NAACP members and evoked capitulations to Black demands when the South began to lose its economic stability as Black workers departed. Moreover, Black soldiers returned from the Great War with a determined refusal to accept inequality in a democracy for which they had risked their lives (McWhirter, 2011). With the atrocities the soldiers faced as an identifiable point of protest and overt NAACP discussions about the ways the war had been about the “despising of the darker races by the dominant groups of men,” the organization provided an important national forum through which to engage protest about the country’s treatment of its Black citizens since, it posited, the consent of the governed need to be accounted for both in smaller nations of Europe “and Negroes in the U.S.” ⁴ With continuing discrimination in America as a “powerful stimulus” and a concurrent increase in lynching (McWhirter, 2011), Black Americans had multiple reasons to seek a national channel for protest. ⁵

This remarkable period of growth by the NAACP is captured by NAACP President John Shillady as “spontaneous.” ⁶ His comments during an NAACP meeting embraced the newly formed southern branch chapters and reflected a hope that the Great War had helped forge the possibility of an American vision that would be responsive to the needs of its Black citizens. Yet, although the national context may have spurred Black hope, neither the context nor spontaneity likely fully capture the remarkable growth of the NAACP during this period. ⁷ To explore more fully its growth, one might turn to a less known historical event that appears to have capitalized on the climate of the era. The decisions crafted at this event appear equally significant as the wider societal context in explaining the momentous growth of the NAACP as well as the parallel growth of a local educators’ movement.

Consider the Amenia Conference of 1916. With Booker T. Washington recently deceased, Black leaders gathered 85 miles north of New York City at Troubeck, the beautiful estate of Joel Spingarn. The leaders gathered to put aside curricular differences that had divided them and to generate a new strategy to address the inequalities experienced by Blacks throughout the country. By consensus, no minutes were maintained of the meeting and only the commonly agreed upon points were publicized. One of these points was an agreement to create organizations that could represent the collective interests of Black citizens. ⁸

The year after the conference, and consistent with its vision for organizing, one of its attendees, James Weldon Johnson, an Atlanta University graduate who was shortly thereafter to become the Field Secretary for the NAACP, returned to the south to plant new NAACP chapters. Across Georgia, as well as other places in the south, the former principal met with Blacks in local settings and spoke persuasively and compellingly of the need for Black unity through the NAACP. His fieldwork was wildly successful. In Georgia, applications for new charters for NAACP branches appear across the state in larger towns such as Atlanta, Albany, and Savannah, but also in more remote places such as Cordele, Hawkinsville, and Harlem. ⁹

However, in the same year Johnson planted new NAACP chapters, the state of Georgia also experienced a renewed organization of Black educators. Present with Johnson at the Amenia meeting in 1916 was former classmate at Atlanta University, Henry A. Hunt, then the principal of the Fort Valley Industrial and High School in Fort Valley, Georgia. Although the athletic Hunt was a few years older than Johnson, both had been at Atlanta University during the years when young Black boys sat around on straw beds and imagined how they might help the race (Adams, 1930; Bacote, 1971). ¹⁰ The fact that the two appear to have maintained a collegial bond until their deaths only months apart in 1938 suggests unspoken cooperation, rather than competition, in the two organizational movements in Georgia in 1917. ¹¹ In particular, both movements reflected the Amenia conclusion to which both agreed: that Blacks should begin organizing.

Before 1917 ended, with Hunt’s leadership, the Georgia Association for the Advancement of Education had been birthed. It was not the first organization of Black educators. Black educators had been organized in Georgia as early as 1878 under the leadership of another Atlanta University Graduate, Richard R. Wright, and begun immediately to protest the inequality in distribution of funding for Black and White children in a difficult era (Butchart, 2010; GTEA, 1966). In 1900 Black educators were still petitioning the state legislature for equality (Dittmer, 1980). However, as Georgia’s segregation laws remained intractable despite public protest in multiple cities and the state became more overt in its violence and disenfranchisement, the educators’ organization, by 1913, was reduced to ineffectiveness (History Committee, 1966). By 1917, the general consensus was that the former state organization composed primarily of Black educators, however earnest they might be, could not effectively create new opportunities for Black children. The argument instead was that it was “everybody’s business” to get the “unjust and horrible conditions” confronting Black schooling changed. ¹²

Under Hunt’s leadership, the movement became immediately and widely visible. It provided explicit detail about its plan for a state organization that included all the members of the state and was referred to as a “great movement” that would support the educational needs of Black youth. Black churches received special collections to support the new organization, and newspaper headlines blared publicly and consistently the educational organization’s existence and goals: “Need Felt for Educational Awakening—So Declares Georgia Association for the Advancement of Education,” “Fighting for Better Educational Facilities,” “Educational Association to Meet in Macon—A Thousand Delegates Expected to Attend.” On the local level, the new educational organization included plans to lobby state officials to address the needs of Black schools, including teachers’ salaries. By 1919, the educational association, with Hunt as its leader, also memorialized the State School Board with a set of frank petitions about salaries, terms, buildings, and other educational items needed for Black education in Georgia. ¹³ A year later, 100 teachers appeared in a delegation before the Board of Education in Atlanta to protest their salary compared to White teachers. Even the letterhead of the organization reflected its intent and urgency during this period: “NEGRO YOUTH MUST BE EDUCATED—NEGRO YOUTH SHALL BE EDUCATED.” ¹⁴ Although never correlated, the efforts the educators use on the local level to lobby state leaders for changes in school conditions parallel the federal presidential and congressional lobbying of the national NAACP. ¹⁵

A close examination of the parallel organizing activities of the NAACP and the Black educators reveals two movements—one local and one nationally based—spawned in the same time and, likely, from the same societal conditions and the same source. In Georgia, some White leaders, admittedly in the minority, were publicly aligned with the doctrine of “all men up rather than some men down.” Georgia likewise had a governor whose condemnation of lynching in the state was widely publicized. The voices of these White citizens encouraged a belief that the economic losses of the migration, coupled with the rhetoric of the Great War, created a context where lobbying for education could produce positive results. Blacks were also politically astute, talking publicly of being willing to “wipe their hands clean” of the Republican party and begin their own new national party. ¹⁶ These energized Blacks operating in concert with some conciliatory Whites provide important context to explain the local factors that made the organization of both groups possible.

Several additional points are also important to understand the two organizational efforts. First, the available evidence suggests that the movements are not merely parallel but overlapping. For example, within Georgia, educators are among those discernable in planting new NAACP chapters and some membership rosters reveal overlapping membership. In particular, the principal of the first public Black high school in Georgia is visible in the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, and well-known educator Lucy Laney hosts the NAACP organizational meeting in Augusta. Hunt, writing to his friend “Jim,” [James Weldon Johnson] also initiates a youth chapter of the NAACP at Fort Valley in 1921. ¹⁷ Although a full analysis of educational actors overlapping with both organizations is not possible, available evidence exists to infer strongly that educators were part of both parallel movements.

In addition to the educators and local NAACP branches overlapping on the state level, the Georgia educators, like Black educators in other states, are also visible in NAACP activities on the national level. Obvious are Hunt and Laney, both of whom are speakers at the 1919 NAACP convention in Cleveland and both of whom would have been among the group of petitioners to solicit the NAACP to hold its first southern meeting in Atlanta in 1920—a bid Atlanta wins despite the subsequent protestation of the competing Philadelphia branch. The presence of some Georgia educators among the list of people to whom the national NAACP office sends copies of the annual report also reveals the close association between NAACP leaders and local Georgia educational leaders. ¹⁸

Two final points about the relationship between the two organizations are important in this period of overlapping people and activity. Although both organizations postulate positions relative to the need for Black children to be educated, they do so in different ways. In each of the sets of resolutions for the NAACP throughout this period, some general commitment to addressing educational inequality appears and is visibly evident in their fight to amend federal education acts. ¹⁹ However, although the national NAACP speaks of educational inequality and commitment to change in broad ways, the local educators are more precise about the needs that ought to be addressed. In Georgia and other states, educators wanted longer school terms, better salaries, and transportation and buildings. ²⁰ Thus, although both articulate mutually ideological beliefs, the national NAACP’s educational agenda articulates broad principles whereas the local focus is more precise in naming areas to be addressed.

Importantly, the primary educational activity of this period is centered in the educators’ organization and does not appear to be the focus for most local NAACP branches. GTEA visibly approaches state officials to seek changes in salaries, facilities, and other areas related to education; the local branches focus on applications for charter, membership, and queries about membership buttons or their copies of the Crisis. As outliers, the Atlanta and Savannah branches do provide some evidence of activity related to education—perhaps because these branches were located in cities where Blacks still had voting power. However, even in these settings, despite the press and scholarship attributing to the local branch all of the success for effective school fights (Toppin, 1967), the behaviors of the local chapter align closely with the vision of the educators’ organization, raising distinct questions about whether an ongoing educational fight intentionally channeled through the local branch. ²¹

In this period, the national NAACP organization and the local educators maintain a public congruence of ideas about education but appear to operate in distinct agendas of practice. Records indicate that the national NAACP focused most of its attention on lobbying for fairness for Blacks in political matters or lobbying for anti-lynching legislation. ²² In contrast, educators appear primarily responsible for addressing the educational agenda locally through making the issue visible and making requests of state officials.

The final point essential for interpreting the parallel and interdependent activities during this period is the necessity of one or more people who will unite the national and local organizational agendas related to education. I refer to this person who is equally comfortable exercising leadership in both groups as a “connector.” The importance of the connector is foundational for understanding later periods of co-dependency. In this time period, the most visible connector between the national NAACP and the state was the local educational leader, Hunt. He and his other officials are said to be working night and day to carry forward the cause of Black education and urging the state to act in the matter of facilities and salaries. ²³ However, Hunt is not merely lauded in the state for his agency, but he is also well known in the national NAACP office. In addition to his relationship with Johnson, Hunt is a “friend” of W. E. B. Du Bois and is one of the speakers at the London segment of the NAACP-sponsored Pan African Conference in 1921.

It would be an overgeneralization to suggest that Hunt was the only person who connected the local activities with the national activities during this period, as others can also be readily identified. However, as the leader of the educators, Hunt appears to be the most prominent, and his capacity to function effectively in both settings surely helps explain the correlation between the national NAACP’s statements about education and the activities seeking to remedy educational inequality on the local level advocated by the educators’ organization. Further, the connector’s role is evident in the telling statement made by Richard Kluger in Simple Justice (2004) indicating that local people interested in advancing the interests of the Black community were often in multiple groups, or that they were the same people. In addition to local overlap, these data suggest that a connector likely explains the similarity in ideology and parallel movements that link local and national efforts during this and other periods.

In sum, Shallidy’s description of “spontaneous” growth in the period rightly depicts the outstanding increase in membership numbers of the NAACP in this first period. However, focusing only on NAACP growth and activities provides a limited characterization of the educational advocacy of the period. Specifically, it fails to acknowledge the public parallel growth of local educational advocacy movements—led typically not by local NAACP chapters but by educators, and it ignores the 1916 private meeting that may have prompted the simultaneous rise in membership of both groups. In this postwar climate, both the national and local leaders aligned to create a context that allowed an ideological public congruence of educational ideas and parallel activities to occur, even if the overlapping agendas and people operated in different spheres. ²⁴

Phase Two: Private Cooperation and Divergent Foci, 1922–1932

If Phase One can be best characterized as a shared educational agenda between the two groups that is publicly visible, Phase Two can be characterized as private cooperation with a divergent focus. As the national context becomes increasingly indifferent and hostile toward Black advancement, a different script for progress is needed locally. In Georgia, educators write this script. Their local efforts reflect the larger national movement of educators in support of Black schooling. Meanwhile, the national NAACP, with the possibility of some private cooperation, lays the groundwork for the next phase of advocacy related to education.

Consider first the nonactors during this period—the local NAACP branches. By 1922, and earlier for smaller branches, local NAACP chapters were either nonexistent or too unorganized for any kind of national fight, educational or otherwise. ²⁵ These difficulties continue through the 1920s and are true even in the flagship Atlanta chapter for whom spurts of activity and decline are an ongoing apt characterization. ²⁶ According to NAACP records, the national organization was carrying 100–200 dead branch chapters during this period, likely most of them southern. ²⁷

Some of the loss of southern branches, after such an exhilarating period of cooperation, is directly related to the hostile southern climate. Members in southern branches were aware of cases where a White man could crack a pistol and shoot an unarmed Black man because he asked to work by the day instead of the month or could be jailed shooting from his own house trying to protect himself. Their “timidity” to advance an NAACP cause in this climate is unsurprising as they risked direct physical reprisal. ²⁸ Nonetheless, to isolate the oppressive climate as a solo explanation for local branch inactivity misses some of the lack of congruence between the local chapters and national headquarters. Despite the fact that the national office recognized the climate under which southern branches operated—as evidenced by the files it maintained on lynching and its desire to obtain insurance against bodily harm for its northern-based employees who needed to travel south—they continued to expect local branches to publicly support anti-lynching legislation, protest race riots, and speak directly about injustice. These requests, though appropriate for northern branches able to participate openly in the democratic process, failed to demonstrate a full understanding of southern members for whom material loss, or even death, could result from such open protests. ²⁹ Those branches that do continue to operate support the goals of the national. Perhaps in response to the national office’s need for money, the local branches focus on membership drives, mass meetings, and sending money to the national office. They also preoccupy themselves with concerns about membership pins and buttons that signify identification with the national, and perhaps lessen personal risk. ³⁰ For the most part, however, alignment or lack of alignment is a moot point as most local branches simply are inactive or die out. ³¹

The Atlanta local branch provides one example of an exception to this characterization of diminished or nonexistent advocacy coming from the local NAACP branches. After the public school fight of 1917 referenced in the last section, the Atlanta branch is silent about schools until 1924. At this time, Walter White travels south in an effort to “turn the attention of the men present to the work of the Association.” ³² Although the branch does demonstrate some educational advocacy after White’s visit, as a result of which the national office creates a press release lauding its work in obtaining school concessions in Atlanta, little evidence exists to suggest that this was fully the work of the local branch. In fact, during the same period the national office is announcing its success with the education fight, the branch itself reports being reorganized. ³³

In contrast to the general inactivity of the local branches, the educators continue to advocate for Black schools in other ways throughout the period. “Find a way or make one!” The statement is vintage Hunt, one he inherited from a previous generation of Black educational advocates (Haynes, 1952). In this new era where overt challenges have limited success at the local level, the educators shift to two new areas of advocacy. First, Black educators are behind the push to build Rosenwald schools in Georgia. As critiqued by Du Bois and unveiled in detail by J. Anderson (1988) and Watkins (2001), philanthropists Julius Rosenwald began in 1917 to provide incentive money to spur the south to build schools for Black children. His efforts, ironically when Blacks were migrating out of the south, may have been a direct result of his belief that the Negro group would create a “drag upon the general progress of the nation” if the group’s needs remained unaddressed (Embree, 1936, p. 12). Thus, the timing of the funding and his focus on industrial education suggest a possible willingness to help the White south use schools to placate southern Blacks inclined to migrate. Additionally, the fact that he ends his annual $1,000 contributions (from 1912 to 1916) to the NAACP lends fodder to the possibility that Rosenwald intentionally shifted his support of Black education to extend the Tuskegee model of industrial education he had admired since 1913. ³⁴

Nonetheless, whatever was Rosenwald’s original purpose, the money pouring into the South directly addressed the educators’ concerns of the previous era—specifically “better school houses”—and the period provides one example of the ways Black educators exploited available money and converted its use to their own purposes. ³⁵ The educators began by being sure Black parents knew how to obtain the newly available Rosenwald grants. By co-opting the White head of the Division of Negro Education during the era and beginning a process of holding their annual meetings in conjunction with the Black statewide Parent–Teachers Association, Black educators created opportunities to get information into communities so that Rosenwald schools could be built throughout the state. In particular, ads in their journal during the period reflect the focus: “Help us Build Rosenwald Schools” the educators plead. As J. Anderson (1988) has correctly noted of the period, the process created a form of double taxation for Black parents; yet, in an era when they needed school houses, Black parents willingly made financial contributions. Moreover, Black schools routinely rejected the expectations of purely industrial education as the foundation of Black education and unabashedly embraced both industrial and liberal education. ³⁶ Thus, Black educators shrewdly found ways to obtain philanthropic money while maintaining an education vision they believed consistent with the needs of Black children.

Second, throughout the period of the building program, Black educators also continued their focus on the broad spectrum of needs confronting Black schools. In 1926, they listed as the objectives of their association: better salaries, teachers, school-houses, terms, larger appropriations to Negro schools, and better attendance. One of the ways they sought to do this was to lobby state officials using “legislative committees” and “key people” who would “make a plea for justice to our schools and to our teachers’ salaries.” ³⁷ In their educational journal, the Herald, the role of the teacher to help parents to obtain better facilities was explicitly named by their association. It was the job of the teacher to “organize in her community an educational committee,” especially in rural areas. Moreover, the teacher was the person who was to have a “program for them. Tell them it is their duty to go before the local board when it meets on the first Tuesday in the court house and to ask for things that are fair and just and in keeping with the needs of your schools.”

The educators also focus their professional meetings on how to improve the schools. In 1929, 200–300 teachers representing five or six counties were present at one regional meeting, many of them traveling for “many hours and more miles over slippery, muddy roads,” all determined to make the 100% reporting for their county. The annual educational meeting for that year predicted 3,500 to be in attendance. A 1930 program provides a glimpse of the interests of the educators participating: “How to get the help of the local people who must work together for school advancement”; “How to Get Better teachers, School Houses, Salaries and Longer School Terms.” ³⁸ Throughout the period, the Black educators’ advocacy remains constant.

In addition to the lobby of educators within the state organization addressing inequity by spurring parental support for building, the evidence of Black educators operating collectively in a national organization can also be identified. When educational conditions had become oppressive in southern states at the turn of the 20th century, Black educators reached across state lines to create educational associations that would allow them to have access to information from each other that might be useful in their own states. As chronicled by Fultz (1995c) and Perkins (1989), the National Association for Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS) formed in 1903. Their explicit purpose was to study cooperatively problems in Negro education and to find ways to solve those problems, including obtaining better schoolhouses for children and better salaries for teachers.

Their plan was considered ambitious at the time. However, NATCS conducted its first study of Black education in 1904, and as early as 1912, attendees reported detailed differentials in expenditures for Black and White schools and urged committees to initiate legislative action (Perry, 1975). In 1923, with Hunt among the signers, the members of NATCS revised their old constitution but continued to affirm their interest in advancing the cause of education, positing that educators needed to “show the way” for others. The NATCS is consistent throughout the period in its commitment to studying problems in Black schools and to change conditions related to salaries, school buildings, heavy enrollment per teacher, and poorly supported high schools. Near the end of the period, it is also self-congratulatory about the ways it has helped “create a favorable public sentiment” and names better buildings, increased equipment, longer terms, compulsory attendance laws, increased salaries, awakening interest in teacher retirement and teacher tenure efforts among its accomplishments. ³⁹

In these public ways, educators locally and nationally preoccupy themselves with direct efforts to build the Black schools. Meanwhile, the national NAACP adopts a more focused agenda for education during this period that corresponds with the specific needs identified by educators in the previous period. In addition to its continued efforts to stop educational bills that would perpetuate inequality in southern schools, by 1923, the NAACP national office also seeks to obtain information from its branches that would provide specific details related to school terms and other forms of inequality in local southern schools. ⁴⁰

However, available records raise intriguing questions about how the national office obtained its answers. For example, the NAACP national records do not indicate a sufficient number of responses returned to the office to provide the detailed report of southern education that appears in the Crisis reports by Du Bois a few years hence. Although a 1923 Press Release posits that the national office utilized data on school conditions in the south from state reports, only two Department of Education reports from southern states could be located in Du Bois’s office and both of these were from Alabama. With the apparent absence of data in NAACP office files, the possibility of cooperation with another group to obtain information is possible. ⁴¹ Consider the activities of the NATCS. For example, shortly after the NAACP put out a request for a comprehensive portrait of the needs of Black schools in 1923, saying publicly that it was “studying” school conditions, the NATCS announced mysteriously that it was “affiliating with other organizations to help Negro children.” ⁴² Two years later, the NATCS reports they have found “startling facts” that will force a better day for Negro education. ⁴³

Although no direct correlation can be drawn linking NATC activity to NAACP reports, the Du Bois school reports do begin to appear in the Crisis after this announcement. An examination of the people who can be identified in both groups—James Weldon Johnson, Mordecai Johnson, John Davis, Charles Thompson, and W. E. B. Du Bois—also helps amplify the possibility of shared data, especially since the goals of both groups were congruent. The NAACP also indicates some inclination to refer some matters to educators at the state level, making it equally possible they are willing to do so at the national level. ⁴⁴ Finally, the NATCS notes again at the end of the period how it is “joining with other agencies in an effort to improve educational conditions among negroes throughout the country,” and they refer specifically to “comparative figures showing the differences in salary, equipment, and per capita pupil expenditure in white and colored schools,” arguing that this information “was one of the potent forces in setting machinery to work to ameliorate subnormal conditions. ⁴⁵ Although not publicly traceable, a concealed collaboration with the NAACP is very possible.

A second national organization of Black educators, begun also during this period, was another direct way to “take steps to relieve a situation that has disturbed and perplexed” southern schools. ⁴⁶ Formerly excluded from the Southern Association for Colleges and Secondary Schools, the southern White accrediting body, Black educators met in 1928, with NATCS endorsement, to appeal to the Southern Association for help in organizing an association for Black schools. Their group would begin in 1932 and eventually become the Association for Colleges and Secondary Schools (the “Association”) in 1934. Central among its tenants was the postulation that they wanted the Southern Association to assume responsibility for evaluating Black schools and that they wanted their schools evaluated on the same measures used by White schools (Cozart, 1967).

Theirs was a subtle but brilliant plan. The members of the new organization did not discuss with White members of the Southern Association their internal goal of full integration into the organization, but the pressure they exerted for creating an approved list for Black schools that measured them by traditional Southern Association standards created a climate where local Black principals could use the standards of the Southern Association, originally written for White schools, to leverage needs in their Black schools. White superintendents, especially in the next phase of activity, were thus caught between their desire to have their Black schools approved by the Southern Association and providing the facilities and resources needed to obtain this prestigious rating (Cozart, 1967; Walker, 2009a).

This period of activity among national educational organizations and local state educational organizations depicts advocacy on multiple levels to develop Black schools. However, it also suggests a possible private cooperation between the national NAACP and educators. In this period, the NAACP adopted the broad-based educational vision that characterized the educators in the earlier period but may have needed the educators to acquire data for the comprehensive report about these concerns they made publicly visible. Conversely, the educators likely benefited in their requests to state officers and local school boards from the public face of the NAACP, which kept national attention focused on southern educational problems.

Phase Three: Hidden Collaboration and Invisible Tension, 1933–1954

The third phase of educational and NAACP activity leading to the Brown decision is evident by 1933. As in other eras, both the educators and the NAACP work consciously toward addressing the problems in southern schools. However, this period elevates the co-dependency necessary for the educational agenda of either group to be effective. Ironically, however, although the need for one another is greatest in this era, this period also reveals increased tensions.

The historical script receiving the most attention during this period elevates the activities of brilliant attorneys and courageous parents. Historians attribute to the Margold Report of 1931 the legal strategy the NAACP would use to destroy Plessy v. Ferguson. Likewise, they point to Charles Houston, who had sought to work with the NAACP since his days as a law student at Harvard, the primary vision for crafting the plan. ⁴⁷ After training a cadre of lawyers who would later support the legal team, Houston left Howard Law School for New York to become chief counsel for the NAACP and, by 1936, engaged in fact finding in the South and had filed the first case. He eventually left his staff appointment with the NAACP, leaving the legal team under the direction of his student, Thurgood Marshall, as precedent-setting cases dismantled segregation in graduate schools and forced equalization in teachers’ salaries. Ultimately, the leadership for the public school cases and the eventual decision in Brown would be continued by Marshall, or as the press dubbed him “Mr. Civil Rights” (Kluger, 2004, p. 759).

In the midst of this flurry of national visibility related to its legal team, the national NAACP sought to reengage its lost southern branches. “Your community needs the NAACP and the Association needs your community,” the Director of Branches wrote in letters of appeal, noting it could “do what no mere local organization can do, for it is a nation-wide chain of organization.” ⁴⁸ Concurrently, they reprimanded southern branches for lack of activity by elevating the financial contributions from the north for cases based in the south and made personal appeals to people they believed would actively support the effort. ⁴⁹ Even in the flagship Atlanta Branch, where hopes were high but results often less than desired, ongoing communication was needed to maintain the local and national relationship. ⁵⁰

Local branches do respond to the national appeal and, for the first time since the first period of cooperative activity, new or reorganized branches begin appearing across Georgia. In particular, local branches gain membership strength and visibility through mass meetings, especially when a member of the national office is present, and they are responsive to the national movement in their efforts to send money. They also sometimes quietly address requests made by the national office, such as the queries about segregation ordinances or murders. ⁵¹ Nonetheless, local activity often needs to be prodded by the national office, and ongoing communication issues about the focus of the local branch resurface in this period.

Focused interest in education is also evident among some branches, especially when a national speaker is present. For an event in Albany, more than 1,000 people stood in the rain, some coming from 150 miles away, to talk about education. The citizenship schools of the Atlanta branch also drew visibility. ⁵² In Albany, the local branch wrote a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt detailing local school conditions. Nonetheless, despite educators as members in the new branches, no comprehensive push for education can be documented using the branches as the organizational engine of agency. In fact, when one query comes to the national office about the desire of local Black citizens for a school, the letter is referred to Hunt. ⁵³

In contrast to the minimized attention to education at the local branch level, the educational organization’s decades-long quest for equality can be traced throughout the 1930s. At the beginning of this period, Hunt is again president of the educators, though by 1933 he transfers to Washington to become part of Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet. ⁵⁴ After his departure, several other presidents assume leadership throughout the decades of the 1930s (History Committee, 1966). Although they do not appear to have the same links to the national NAACP or the capacity to amass a body of seemingly united followers that Hunt enjoyed, the new leaders follow, almost as a blueprint, the local strategy introduced by Hunt, who traveled throughout the state at his own expense to “mold sentiment” among state leaders by bringing the needs of Blacks to the officials. ⁵⁵ In 1938, the GTEA president reports having traveled more than 7,000 miles in the interest of the GTEA, with most of the expenses his own. Likewise, members of the body’s elected executive committee, all of whom are vested with the responsibility of representing the will of the collective body and reporting back to it the result of their activities, traveled in different sections of Georgia at no cost to the GTEA. As with Hunt, the educational leaders after him also continue their efforts to lobby the Governor and state officials in Georgia. Throughout the period, their emphasis remains constant. As evidenced by their letterhead, the agenda was clear: “Better Teachers, Schoolhouses, Salaries, Terms.” ⁵⁶

By the late 1930s, the educators link their demands to a larger context. Even as they sought to use available Rosenwald money to build schools in the earlier period, they are focused in this period on lobbying to claim their portion of the $10,000,000 pouring into Georgia as a result of the Works Progress Administration programs. President Agnes Scott Jones notes she wants a “New Deal for the Negro Child,” and in several documents describes the GTEA eight-point program: more qualified teachers, salaries raised, equipment and facilities improved, school term minimum of seven months, more four-year high schools, extension agencies, and adult education. ⁵⁷ Executive committee minutes capture some details of their activity. They describe a meeting in the mid-1930s where the elected leaders are crafting plans to obtain school needs, sending letters to superintendents, conducting surveys (and receiving detailed responses) on school conditions throughout the state, discussing how to change textbooks to get more Black inclusion, and strategizing ways to get Black teachers paid as the Depression lags on, inclusive of considering legal action.

Interestingly, however, the advocacy of the educators during this period is shielded from the public. Unlike the advocacy of the first two phases when the organization made no secret of its agenda or activities, some evidence suggests that the organization retreats from wide publicity and becomes more intentional in varying messages for different audiences. To their fellow educators whom they wish to join their ranks, GTEA uses enticement language similar to the NAACP, arguing that GTEA is “the one medium through which the Negro teachers in the state of Georgia can express themselves as a group.” Among educators is the clear message that all need to be involved as “it is most urgent that our organization should be able now to express itself in no uncertain terms.” ⁵⁸

However, although members are aware of, and directly receive reports of, educational advocacy initiatives, these activities are diminished in newspaper accounts. Whereas newspaper headlines in the first phase of advocacy blared the demands and strategies of the educators, newspaper reports in the 1930s focus on descriptions of the educators’ professional activities, describe White visitors at educational meetings who posit the need for equality, or make veiled statements, such as a meeting of the teachers’ executive committee comment that is to make “plans of vital importance to the work of the Association and the program of Negro education.” ⁵⁹ Thus, the period reflects the groundwork for a strategy where different faces of the educators are revealed to different actors, ostensibly as a form of protection for its individual members.

The appearance of some parallel attention at the local level between the educators and the NAACP branches to education between the national and local educators may link directly to local decisions about the name under which they chose to advocate. As one writer from the small town of Cordele indicates, the “Deep South opposes such an organization [the NAACP].” The writer wonders if they cannot simply use another name, such as that of a “Development League,” for the local NAACP agenda. ⁶⁰ In response, the national office deeply opposes acting in any name other than the NAACP. Perhaps failing to understand the nuances of the southern context, it believes the work would be just as opposed under any name. The local groups appear to dismiss the concern of the national body as evidence reveals a number of Development or Civic Leagues to push the NAACP civic agenda while relegating to the educators—who had been overseeing advocacy since Reconstruction—their concerns about education.

Although the 1940s represent a period when both groups continue their efforts of the 1930s, the 1940s also deserve particular elevation, for this decade also begins to reveal the explicit links that make the two groups codependent. The first form of co-dependency between the national NAACP and educators is financial. Before the 1930s, philanthropic supporters such as the Rosenwald Foundation and George Peabody could be counted on to help with office deficits; by this period, the needs for legal defense had increased while the contributions decreased, and the national office is frank in its requests for help to “carry on” the work. Although the staff was reduced, the office still needed to liquidate a deficit. ⁶¹ The efforts to build local branches certainly provided some financial resources but the NAACP still needed other sources of revenue. ⁶² To address this need, the educators—who appear to embrace legal measures to force progress—elected to begin funneling money from the NATCS (later renamed the American Teacher Association, or ATA) to the NAACP. Between 1938 and 1953, the ATA provided $16,690, more than half the amount contributed by the historically elevated philanthropy, the American Fund for Public Service (Tushnet, 1987).

The NAACP needs the educators in this period in another way also. How does a New York–based organization with limited southern branch activity know which parents in which school districts will be willing to serve as plaintiffs? Although Charles Houston travels south in 1934 to make the contacts for the legal plan and, in collaboration with others, creates a documentary of school conditions, his actual itinerary during this trip includes more heads of fraternal organizations, church and civic leaders, and relief workers and fewer educators. ⁶³ Indeed, a direct traceable path to parental agency emanating from local parents or from the organizations they contacted to support the effort is little evidenced in the national records for this period. ⁶⁴

In contrast, local educational advocacy is present. By this time a new president who would later become executive director of the GTEA has been named, Charles Harper. Like Hunt, Harper exemplifies all the characteristics of a connector, having been active in the local NAACP Atlanta branch since its inception and also well known to national NAACP workers. ⁶⁵ Through Harper and his utilization of the organization of educators, the procedures evident in Marshall’s 1943 “Outline for Procedure for Legal Cases” can be identified, despite the fact that Marshall originally distributed the guidelines to local branches. ⁶⁶ Consider a representative letter Harper writes to the national office in 1947.

Dear Mr. Marshall,

The Georgia Teachers and Education Association plans on moving in on several boards of Education in this State who are discriminating against Negroes in the matter of the length of school term, transportation, salary and housing.

The committee in charge plans on having patrons affected to file a petition with the local boards of education seeking a correction of the disadvantages which their children suffer. If the Association does not get satisfactory results, the Board of directors, in cooperation with local NAACP branches and patrons, plan to take these superintendents and Boards of Education into the Federal courts. . . . Our Board has directed me to ask if you would not draw up a form of petition presumably by patrons and presented to various boards of education. The Board felt that the same petition, varying in the names of the parties addressed and in the specific wrongs attacked can be sent different boards of education and should be encouched in such terms and language as to make it legally sound. Our Committee is meeting Sunday the 2nd in Albany and would be pleased to have this petition at that session as they plan to hear [sic] these petitions filed immediately. ⁶⁷

In a follow-up, more detailed letter, the educators are specific about exactly how they would like the NAACP attorneys to construct a legal document:

In one part of the letter we would like for you to set forth the legal basis for our petition. This part of the letter should be so general that it could be sent to all boards of education. Another part of the letter would be a skeleton or a suggestive form in which we might fill in the details. For example, in one county we would like to call attention specifically to the lack of transportation for Negro pupils. In another county it might to [sic] the length of term. Still in another county it might be discrimination as reflected in teachers’ salaries In other words we have the detailed information that we might fill in at this section of the letter. . . . We want the letter of course to end with this section setting forth a frant [sic] warning that if we do not get results with this procedure the G. T. E. A. is prepared to take the next steps which might involve legal procedures. ⁶⁸

Together the letters reveal several features that amplify the argument of local advocacy emanating from educators. For example, the educators are “moving in” on local inequality. Consistent with Marshall’s outline of steps, the organization has amassed data documenting inequality in a variety of settings and had patrons file a petition with local boards as a precursor to federal court action. Moreover, the educators assume responsibility for patron support. Perhaps consistent with the national NAACP’s desire that their branches be involved, the local NAACP branch will have a role, but that role is to mask the advocacy of the educators by representing the advocacy as coming from themselves.

The description of both letters aligns with complaints enumerated in numerous, apparently, unfiled but signed petitions in the GTEA records and apologetic letters of delay from the national office confirm their receipt of NAACP support of their petitions. Neither, however, explains exactly how the educators interacted with patrons to obtain the signatures. However, the account of Principal Horace E. Tate in Greensboro, Georgia, does. As described elsewhere (Walker, 2009b), Tate was among the local principals who heard Harper speak of the steps GTEA was taking to eradicate inequality and, given the opportunity in his local setting, had the courage to link potential plaintiffs to Harper, who in turn linked them to the national effort. ⁶⁹ In Greensboro, when school bus transportation was sought, such a process involved Tate driving from Greensboro to Atlanta to pick up Harper, then from Atlanta back to a quiet spot just outside of Greensboro to deliver him in the dark to a trusted parent who could take Harper to the parents’ meeting at which Tate could not be seen. Several hours later, Tate rendezvoused with the trusted parent and returned Harper to Atlanta before he drove back to Greensboro. The night’s effort required approximately eight hours of driving time, and the process was repeated over multiple meetings. It also required full secrecy as to his role. Writing a friend in Arkansas, Tate confides that his county is about to file a suit but that it is “strictly on the QT so don’t mention this in any of your correspondence with even my closest friends.” ⁷⁰ Veiled to most, the local principal was behind the law suit. A likely similar episode occurred in Irwin County, an area where a similar suit in the same time period made national news. According to the New York Times, 18 “negro parents [sought] to equalize education facilities in Irwin County.” The local governor charged the complaint to have derived from “northern agitators.” ⁷¹ However, the hidden advocates in this case are likely similar to the episodes described by Tate. Records of the Irwin County NAACP branch provide no discussion of the suit; like many other branches during the 1940s throughout the state, they are not very active. In contrast, the GTEA collection reveals a series of press releases about the case, revealing perhaps the interest of the initiator. ⁷²

Significantly, although the period uncovers the co-dependency required for legal action, it does not reveal an easy collaboration between the local educators and the national NAACP, both of whom sometimes evidence suspicion and territorial ownership. Prior to Harper’s leadership, one president spoke, ostensibly of the NAACP, as an “outside” group, one they believed was seeking to come in and usurp the activity the educators had been leading locally for decades. ⁷³ Likewise, despite Houston finally reaching out to the ATA for support of the legal program, the leadership of educators is often omitted in communications from the national office. Instead, overtly negative statements about educators are sometimes made, and the NAACP expresses a clear preference that educational matters be harnessed under the umbrella of the national office. The differences between the two groups on whether to push for integration or equality are particularly magnified in the series of meetings about graduate education held after the Gaines decision. ⁷⁴

Despite tension, however, both the local and national educators are critical in this movement. Attorney for the NAACP, Oliver Hill, in an interview shortly before his death challenged traditional portraits of civil rights that omitted educators in the years and captured the era succinctly: the “teachers were organized,” he posited and had decided “to do something about [inequality].” When Hill flew to Atlanta to litigate their salary cases, he reports that Harper “had the witnesses all lined up.” ⁷⁵

Hill’s memory is corroborated by the minutes of the state conference of the NAACP during this period. Although the national NAACP had wanted organization across its branches for two generations, the Georgia statewide conference did not convene until 1948. ⁷⁶ Seven of 11 local branches sent delegates. The concerns included the poll tax, retirement fund for teachers, and national defense training schools. Although Harper reported on the Atlanta teachers’ salary case, the statewide conference of the NAACP included no discussion of the discrimination occurring in the schools. ⁷⁷ Perhaps the conference could omit education as a focus of concern as those present understood that the educators, who were networked across all 159 counties in Georgia, handled school inequality.

The collaboration of this period, invisible to inquiring eyes but remembered by those who participated and evidenced in the educators’ documents, worked well for both organizations. Through press releases, the national NAACP wanted the public to be aware of its advocacy and successes challenging segregation; for different reasons, the educators did not want leaders in the state to be aware of the full breadth of ways local educators were challenging segregation. By having a “connector,” who was the executive director of their association, the educators could pay Harper the salary that put him in a position to represent their interests without the threat of being fired. Meanwhile, the NAACP could assume the role of national agitator.

As a foreshadowing of events to occur after Brown, the Atlanta branch finally assumed the lead in a school desegregation case during the end of this period. ⁷⁸ Unlike the system of hidden advocacy, this case emanated directly from patrons of a local branch. Ironically, however, perhaps in the belief that local branches could finally assume southern leadership, the national office would turn to its local branches after Brown seeking input on Brown’s implementation. The educational organization would not be invited to this meeting. ⁷⁹

Discussion

If the activity of Black educators is examined through their organizations, Black educators can be identified as hidden actors throughout the years preceding Brown. Whether working in ways that publicly converge with the NAACP agenda or engaging in private cooperation, or functioning as hidden advocates, Black educators are central in every phase in the historical narrative. In addition to their collaborative activity, their educational advocacy plan predates the known NAACP advocacy, provides a more expanded vision of educational needs, maintains a consistent focus throughout, and utilizes a variety of local and national strategies to accomplish their goal of solving problems in education.

However, despite the long advocacy of Black educators working through their educational organizations, the research suggests that neither the educators nor the NAACP alone likely could have created the Brown decision. Rather, the two organizations operated in a form of co-dependency where each needed the other to accomplish their mutual and overlapping agendas. Without the context the national NAACP created, the demands the local educators made and the concessions they received likely would not have happened (Lawson & Payne, 1998). Likewise, the national NAACP did not have the organizational network that allowed them to access plaintiffs throughout the south. Although the parameters of this story are not fully discernable, the records do reveal the ways in which educational progress is linked to parallel and co-dependent activity.

Important to note, the periods of parallel agendas and co-dependency work most effectively when a “connector” who holds membership, visibility, and influence in both organizations is the leader of the educators. In the case of both Hunt and Harper, the local leadership and national connections with the NAACP, as well as with the national educational groups, are discernable. Under their leadership, educational agendas are also parallel and co-dependent. In contrast, in the 1930s, the leaders of GTEA do not appear to have the same national connections, and interestingly, the same co-dependency is less discernable.

Much in this story remains untold. The role of White actors in both organizations, the influence of personal relationships in spurring local people to act, the activities of youth in the varied attempted NAACP youth chapters, the generational continuity of vision of the educators, the roles of other organizations in seeking education during this period, and the capacity of the press to project the public memory aligned with the national NAACP office are among the facets of this story that have not been elevated. Additional research should interrogate more deeply the ways the inclusion of these actors and activities would contextualize, extend, or further refine the portrait presented. It should also look beyond the broad parameters of similarity here described and seek texture in the interpretations of actors and visions, especially over time. Especially useful would be a comparison of the activities of White educational organizations during the same period.

In my view, the implications of this long-term portrait view of Black educators in the history of advocacy for Black children are significant. Although the history has elevated the role of the NAACP in the years after Brown, the more inclusive narrative suggests that the first, most consistent, most broadly focused advocates for Black children were Black educators. Expanding the narrative to include their role does not diminish the important roles played by the NAACP or otherwise suggest that the Brown decision did not transform America in profound ways (Cobb, 2005). However, the addition of these invisible actors raises questions that can become an important lens to interpret the events in the years immediately after Brown, particularly because few have considered the influence of the loss of these organizational structures in understanding the education of Black children after Brown (Walker, 2009b)—in effect, delegating to the local NAACP branches and the national office the advocacy for implementing the decision relegated to those least involved in solving problems in education the vision and burden of implementation. The irony in this historic twist of events is lost in current discussions about ways to proceed with an effective implementation of Brown that will have similar far-reaching impacts (Office of Civil Rights Report, 2012). I believe, this nuanced and co-dependent history is essential to recover if a new generation is to diminish the continuing inequalities still extant for the children Brown originally sought to serve.