In this essay, Vanessa Siddle Walker invokes the voices of black educators who challenged the diluted and failed vision for an integrated South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating school desegregation. Through collaboration and activism, these educators fought against the second-class integration implemented in the southern states and instead advocated for true equality and empowerment for black children entering integrated schools. Walker demonstrates that these educators’ critiques are strikingly applicable to the present U.S. educational system, as they highlight our country’s failure to provide educational equity despite decades of debate about its necessity and reforms to address the injustices. She advises President Obama’s administration to incorporate these original visions of black educators in efforts to craft and advance a new vision for integration and racial equality in schools.

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Vanessa Siddle Walker is a historian whose research has focused on the schooling of African American children in the segregated South. Her recent work examines the network of educational activity that undergirded the development of African American school communities. Her newest book, Hello Professor (2009), focuses on the leadership of black principals in the Jim Crow South.