ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces methodological considerations for education historians who study race. CRT grew from a group of critical legal scholars who, beginning in the 1970s but more officially in the late 1980s, openly challenged the limitations they identified in critical legal theory, constraints they argued undermined the legal field’s ability to interrogate the role of race in the legal system. An area virtually untouched by CRT is scholarship examining Black women teachers in newly desegregated schools. Scholars have rightfully underlined the unintended consequences of the Brown decision by demonstrating that many Black educators faced deleterious rates of un- and underemployment once schools desegregated. In the 1970s, as a result of the Brown decision, the school desegregation implementation process finally began there. Mrs. Washington navigated these issues by remaining aware of the heightened surveillance she was under as the only Black woman teacher in the building from 1967 to 1971.
