ABSTRACT
Many of the mainstream Black social reform movements that followed the Emancipation Proclamation have demanded access to equitable public schooling in some capacity. In the years leading up to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, these demands often included separate but equal school facilities. The popularity of separate but equal as both a legal and social philosophy in Black communities should not be understated. The social mobility bag has been secured for some Black people in some desegregated settings. But the human and professional toll prophesied by early 20th-century Southern Black teachers has devastated the Black educational infrastructure. For many, trauma is apparent in the historical insistence that Black children’s wholeness was only accessible through the forms of schooling designed to serve middle-class white children and sustain white supremacy. The conditions of pre-Brown school segregation probably did contribute to a robust and painful awareness of Black people’s structural inferiority in the United States.
