When Integration Cost Black Teachers Their Jobs
The displacement of Black teachers in Missouri post-Brown
When most people think about Brown v. Board of Education, they think about students. But, as states moved to dissolve their dual school systems (merging their traditionally Black and traditionally white schools together), they had to do something with the teachers who staffed the classrooms in each of these systems.
Many local boards of education—especially in rural areas and in border states—closed their Black schools and laid off their Black teachers as they integrated their schools.
In a new report I co-authored with Alyssa Ignaczak published by Saint Louis University’s PRiME Center, we trace the consequences of this response to Brown. Alyssa and I document what happened to Missouri’s Black teachers between 1954-1970. While integration in Missouri expanded school access to Black students, it displaced thousands of Black teachers—especially in rural and small-town districts across the state.
Missouri’s Voluntary Desegregation
When the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Missouri’s state constitution required separate schools for Black and white children. Nevertheless, a couple of months after the Court’s ruling Missouri Attorney General John M. Dalton pointed out that the state’s constitutional requirements for segregated schooling could no longer be enforced. As such, many local boards of education began voluntarily desegregating their schools.
Albert P. Marshall of the HBCU Lincoln University, writing in 1956 at the beginning of Brown’s implementation, believed that integration might come quickly. Missouri “has been one in which the Constitutional law of the United States has been respected,” Marshall wrote, which might explain “the average citizen’s willingness to accept the Supreme Court decision on education.”
Missouri’s voluntary movement toward integrated schools, however, does not mean that desegregation went smoothly. Many school districts—especially in areas where there weren’t very many Black students—simply closed their Black schools and laid off their Black teachers as they complied with Brown.
This displacement of Black teachers in Missouri post-Brown was the focus of our PRiME Center report.
A Shrinking Black Teacher Workforce
Using data compiled by the Southern Education Reporting Service, we tracked changes in the percentage of Black teachers employed in Missouri’s public schools. We compared this percentage to the percentage of Black students who attend those schools. The numbers tell a stark story.
During the 1957-1958 academic year, the state of Missouri had racial parity between the percentage of Black teachers (approx. 10%) and Black students (approx. 10.2%).
The next academic year (1958-1959), as many rural and small town local boards of education integrated their districts by closing their Black schools and laying off their Black teachers, the percentage of Black teachers employed in Missouri’s classrooms dropped to approx. 7.7% while the percentage of Black students stayed close to 10%—creating a racial parity gap that only increased as Missouri continued integrating its schools.
By the 1965-1966 academic year, the percentage of Black teachers hovered around 7.9%; whereas, the percentage of Black students in Missouri public schools had increased to 13.2%.
In addition to the data from the Southern Education Reporting Service, Alyssa and I reviewed several reports from the 1960s-1970s to get a broader sense for how integration affected the Black teacher workforce in Missouri. A report by John W. Smith and Betty M. Smith, for example, found that 2,230 Black teachers were displaced across the state—which cost their communities approximately $18,042,930 (in 1973) or about $132.2 million in today’s (2026) dollars.
Why This History Matters
The displacement of Black teachers was the result of individual and community-based prejudices. But that’s not all it was. It was also about institutional choices.
Integration cost many Black teachers their jobs (31,584 across the seventeen southern and border states, according to some estimates) because of the way in which racial prejudice was built into structures and systems: about how school boards defined integration, whose jobs they protected, whose expertise was treated as disposable, and whose schools were deemed most valuable.
Black teachers were more than just teachers staffing classrooms. As I told a journalist from St. Louis Public Radio:
There were a number of losses that occurred, because oftentimes people had to seek other employment… it’s easy to measure income; it’s more difficult to measure the mentorship, the kind of spiritual leadership that some of these individuals may have participated in at their local church communities, and I think that is something that is hard to get back.
Missouri’s experience reminds us that early or voluntary compliance with Brown did not necessarily mean equal outcomes. In many cases, white resistance to integration simply took on bureaucratic and administrative forms of expression through the closure of historcially Black schools, the non-renewal of contracts of Black teachers, and with hiring practices and desegregation processes that maintained white control over classrooms.
This history also shows us why we can’t rely solely on the courts or the law to help us create a more inclusive way of living together. As I pointed out in that St. Louis Radio feature on this research:
There are limitations to what courts can do when it comes to questions of racial justice and equity. We, as a society, have to do a better job of engaging in community-based conversation about what those questions are and how we work through them, because that’s where you really create a democratic society that extends justice, equity, and opportunity to everyone.
In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into individual small towns in Missouri, provide more details about some of the displaced Black teachers, and discuss how these early decisions shaped the racial composition of the teaching workforce beyond the post-Brown era.
More to come soon.
References
Carroll, Boyd F. “Dalton Rules State May End Segregation in Schools at Once.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. July 1, 1954.
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Fultz, Michael. “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown: An Overview and Analysis.” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2004): 11-45.
Henderson, Andrea Y. “Missouri Lost Thousands of Black Teachers after Integration, and the Issue Persists. St. Louis Public Radio. October 13, 2025.
Nichols, Joseph R., and Alyssa Ignaczak. Displacement of Black Teachers in Missouri Post-Brown, 1954-1970. Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRiME) 7, no. 22.
Smith, John W., and Betty M. Smith. “For Black Educators: Integration Brings the Axe.” The Urban Review 6, no. 3 (1973): 7-12.