Experts Say Getting More Teachers of Color in Classrooms a Necessity - Higher Education

Experts Say Getting More Teachers of Color in Classrooms a Necessity - Higher Education: When a group of education researchers, practitioners and activists gathered at Howard University in April to address the lack of diversity in the nation’s teacher workforce, Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick reminded her audience that such a time had already been foreshadowed.

Nearly 60 years ago, Thurgood Marshall first “warned that Black teachers would lose their jobs to racist displacement as the nation’s schools were integrated,” said Fenwick, dean of the Howard University School of Education. Marshall, in 1955, was serving at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when he reported on the impending plight of these teachers. The year before, Marshall had argued and won the landmark desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education that opened up classrooms and education to Black children.