When:
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Where: Virtual and Washington, DC
The 20th Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research. Leslie T. Fenwick’s lecture offers a newly excavated history of the implementation of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
It also advances her theory of “cultural elision” to explain how Brown is still (mis)defined. As chronicled in her award-winning book Jim Crow’s Pink Slip (Harvard Education Press, 2022), massive (white) resistance to Brown from 1952 through the late 1970s resulted in one hundred thousand exceptionally well credentialed Black principals and teachers in public schools being illegally fired, dismissed or demoted and replaced on a near one-to-one basis by white educators who were less academically credentialed and less professionally experienced.
Fenwick asserts that the failure to integrate Black principals and teachers into desegregating schools remains the unfulfilled promise of Brown. This failure maintained the segregationists’ control over the nation’s public schools, to the detriment of all students, especially Black students, and resulted in four traumas that continue to stymie the nation’s progress toward racial justice and educational equity.
