“The Fourteenth Amendment … is meaningless if it does not apply to all children from the first day they enter the public schools … Segregation in the field of education is the denial of education itself.”

So wrote AFT legal counsel John Ligtenberg in an October 1952 amicus curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief supporting the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, the historic U.S. Supreme Court case that challenged segregation in America’s public schools. The court’s May 1954 Brown decision struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites and set in motion the toppling of the elaborate apartheid system known as Jim Crow that separated Southern blacks from Southern whites in schools, workplaces, buses, hotels, restaurants and movie theaters.

Brown was a proud moment in AFT history. Though virtually alone among teacher organizations in filing amicus briefs (three over the long course of the case), the AFT was in the company of 18 other organizations. Journalist Carl Rowan gives a partial roster in his biography of Thurgood Marshall, the courageous NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund lawyer who was lead counsel in Brown: “Taking a stand against Jim Crow were the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress… the American Federation of Teachers, the American Veterans Committee. … Marshall had lined up some very powerful friends.”

Although Brown was a shining hour, it wasn’t an isolated incident in the AFT’s history of fighting discrimination. In the early 1900s, when many trade unions closed their doors to black workers, the AFT chartered its first two African-American locals: Armstrong-Dunbar High School and Howard University, both in Washington, D.C. Howard was the first AFT higher education local. From its early welcome of African-American members, the AFT would go on to play an active role in the legal battle against segregation and the key events of the civil rights movement.

African-American teachers and pupils in the 17 Southern and border states where segregation was law faced terrible conditions: ramshackle one- or two-room schoolhouses with 40 children to a classroom and out-of-date textbooks. In the 1952 AFT brief supporting Brown, Ligtenberg cited a 1944 survey showing that the national median expenditure per standard public school classroom unit for white children was $1,160, compared to $476 for black children. That contrast was much greater in parts of the South.

Most black teachers in the South—the overwhelming majority of whom were women who had attended historically black colleges—were highly qualified. But in Southern school districts and many Northern ones as well, these teachers were paid far less than their white counterparts. In 1928, only 12 years after the union’s founding, AFT delegates passed a convention resolution calling for the equalization of black and white teacher salaries. The union also called for an end to discriminatory district hiring practices. Drawn by the AFT’s unwavering opposition to segregation, many black teachers and professors joined the federation, including locals at Virginia’s Hampton Institute and Tennessee’s Fisk University.

A typical example was the black teachers local in New Orleans (at that time, teacher unions in most of the South were segregated). In 1937, after the New Orleans school board restored a 1933 pay cut only to white teachers, black teachers chartered their own AFT local. In a few years, with the help of the national AFT and Thurgood Marshall, the local won salary equalization.

STANDING UP FOR INTEGRATION

At the time the AFT was putting race at the top of its agenda, few American whites saw racial equality as a pressing issue. As historian James T. Patterson comments in Brown v. Board of Education : A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, “Periodic Gallup polls since 1935 had asked people what they considered to be the ‘most vital concerns’ of the day. Until 1956, no more than 4 percent ever answered race relations.”

Many trade unionists of the day argued that “forcing” integration on locals was a guaranteed way to lose membership overnight. Disregarding these naysayers, the AFT was fighting in the 1950s to fully integrate its own ranks, an effort championed by the union’s black leaders (including AFT vice president Layla Lane of New York and New Orleans’ Veronica Hill) as well as some white vice presidents. In 1953, the AFT adopted an amendment to its constitution barring the issuing of new charters to locals that discriminated on the basis of race. It also created a special committee to work with segregated locals to advance the integration process.

At its 1956 convention, the AFT passed a resolution expelling segregated locals. Eight Southern locals that refused to eliminate “for whites only” from their constitutions were forced to surrender their charters. In the next two years, more locals left or had their charters withdrawn, including AFT affiliates in New Orleans, Fulton County, Ga., and Chattanooga, Tenn. The naysayers had been right: The union did lose members overnight: 7,000 of its 45,140 members. The largest single loss was in Atlanta; Local 89 withdrew its 1,855 members in December 1956. The AFT had made a choice: The union was not willing to grow by allowing prejudice among its ranks.

SOME TEACHERS SUFFER AFTER BROWN IS IMPLEMENTED

Where schools were integrated (in cities such as Baltimore, Louisville, Ky., and Wilmington, Del.), black teachers and principals sometimes suffered an ironic form of discrimination: district firings due to a perception that white parents would prefer white educators for their children. While it’s difficult to estimate how widespread this occurrence was, African-American teacher and AFT member Phyllis Murray, whose family roots are in Prince Edward County, Va., recalls teacher relatives traveling to North Carolina to obtain work after Brown-related firings. The Brown Foundation for Educational Excellence and Equity has documented that, when Kansas schools were integrated, African-American teachers who had taught fewer than three years lost their jobs.

Such entrenched discrimination portended a bleak outlook for achieving integration through judicial means alone. After such early successes as the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of 1955-56 and the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth lunch counter sit-in of 1960, a grass-roots civil rights movement began to gain momentum. And—just as it had been in the court battles for equality in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s—the AFT was on the frontlines.

MARCHING, TEACHING AND TESTIFYING

Encouraged and supported by the AFT and its affiliates, hundreds of AFT members took part in voter registration drives in the South, and thousands attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. (In 1965, New York City’s United Federation of Teachers [UFT] president Albert Shanker would march with King for voting rights in Selma, Ala. Shanker would later become president of the AFT.)

One little-known role AFT members played in the civil rights effort was in staffing “freedom schools.” In 1959, Prince Edward County, Va., the site of one of the original Brown cases, closed its schools rather than integrate. For four years, the county’s 1,700 black children received no public schooling. Then, in 1963, a privately funded effort, the Prince Edward Free School Association, was created to provide them an education. The AFT was an early supporter of the program. In the summer of 1963, scores of AFT members from the UFT and other locals went south to teach these students, setting up makeshift schools in churches, community centers or any available space. More union volunteers staffed the freedom schools throughout the next year, until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Prince Edward County to reopen its public schools in 1964.

Through 1969, the Freedom Schools program expanded to other states, encompassing more than 12,000 students. Freedom schools were a key part of the Freedom Summer of 1964, when hundreds of volunteers traveled to Mississippi to register African-American voters and desegregate public facilities.

The activism of the early 1960s culminated in key legislative victories: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the same year, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The AFT joined with the AFL-CIO and other labor unions to lobby for these crucial laws. In August 1963, testifying before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, then-AFT president Carl Megel made the case that school integration would be a meaningless victory if blacks were not given the job opportunities that should follow upon educational achievement: “Incentives for learning lie in the knowledge that employment doors will be open for all. … As educators, we would like to teach in schools where all the students would graduate with equal opportunity for success.”

A CONSTANT BATTLE

Thorny questions about the true reach of Brown continued to face the courts—and U.S. school districts—long after the legislative victories of the mid-1960s. Initially, the Supreme Court followed a pattern of judicial activism, ruling in 1968 that schools must integrate in areas including the assignment of teachers and students, faculty hiring and transportation. In 1971, the court upheld the use of race-based busing, touching off bitter controversy in districts across the country.

Then, almost as quickly as the high court had embraced this activism, the court began to back away from it in decisions such as Milliken v. Bradley, a 1974 ruling which determined that a federal court could not impose the merging of city and suburban school districts to achieve integration.

Perhaps because the U.S. Supreme Court failed to fully implement Brown in the decades after the decision, and partly due to de facto segregation related to housing patterns, pressing issues involving equal educational opportunity remain. A January 2004 study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project shows that there has been a major increase in de facto segregation in many districts where court supervision of the desegregation process was ended in the past decade. Just as troubling are recent studies demonstrating the persistence of an achievement gap between African-American and white students. In response, the AFT is devoting its energies to ensuring equal educational resources for disadvantaged schools and students, with the ultimate goal of closing the achievement gap.

After the Brown decision was read on a quiet May morning in 1954, author Ralph Ellison wrote to a friend, “What a wonderful world of possibilities [is] unfolded for the children.” Clearly we are a long way from realizing the “world of possibilities” that Ellison foresaw. But the determination the AFT and its members brought to the fiercest battles of the civil rights movement in the last century will surely be brought to this great challenge of the new century. For a union that has marched, litigated, lobbied, taught and fought on behalf of civil rights for all Americans, Brown was only one step, although a great one, in a journey that is not over yet.