Postscript: The Demand for Diversity

Harold Smith at Green Pastures Elementary

We have examined schools in seven towns and looked at the lives of fifteen teachers and administrators. The intention has been to offer snapshots that concentrate on the years in which desegregation in Oklahoma was implemented, roughly from 1955 to 1965. These essays offer a sampling, not a survey, yet it would be improper to leave them naked with no clothing fit to face the present, the moment at which in a manner of speaking we have arrived. The sample reveals a series of lost jobs, with the greater part of the narratives ending with a comment to the effect that the faculty member--the teacher or administrator--entered the silence. Common sense tells us that many of those who lost their jobs could have moved out of state to continue their profession, while a larger number could have moved to the giant black schools in Tulsa or Oklahoma City where black faculty members were retained. This was the dominant pattern across the Jim Crow South, as shown in the background works listed in my bibliography. Among these, Michael Fultz sums up the matter when he argues, "In many ways the South moved faster, with more 'deliberate speed' in displacing Black educators than it did in desegregating schools" (52). The result is predictable. Today in the year of our lord 2022, the schools of Oklahoma are largely integrated, but they employ disproportionately few black faculty and administrators. School administrators cry now for “diversity” among the faculty members, but it is a cry that goes unanswered for the simple reason that the professionals who willingly would have supplied that lack have, in the intervening half century, been forced to enter the silence. The silver chain that encouraged the students to follow in their teacher’s footsteps got broken. 

It makes sense that some of the post-Brown unemployed faculty would have moved out-of-state, but most of the neighboring states were as Jim Crow as Oklahoma and would have offered little opportunity. In the pure good of theory, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) could have been an alternative employer and doubtless in some cases it was. What we read about the BIA in Oklahoma Historical Society’s encyclopedia, however, does not encourage even a retrospective optimism. 

Each of the Five Tribes included an African American school at the end of the nineteenth century. The Creek patronized Pecan Creek and Tullahassee missions and various neighborhood schools. The Cherokee operated the Cherokee Colored High School and various neighborhood schools. The Choctaw maintained the Oak Hill Industrial Academy, Tushkaloosa Academy, and various neighborhood schools. The Chickasaw and Seminole had smaller schools. In the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations the promotion and operation of black schools met prejudice and stiff resistance. Otherwise, there was an overall lack of basic educational opportunities for freedmen, which helps explain a dearth of higher education institutions until the turn of the twentieth century (https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=CO026).

What might be seen in retrospect as an opportunity, in fact came to nothing due to tribal resistance. 

An early instance of this resistance is supplied by The Mustang Mail of Mustang Oklahoma in September of 1905:

Mrs. Elma Washington, a negro woman who has been assigned to a place in the Indian service, is here awaiting the result of an appeal to the Indian commissioner, Mr. Leupp. Mrs. Washington took the civil service examination at Little Rock, Ark., and was later appointed to a position as a teacher in the Kickapoo Indian agency school at Wharton, Kansas, at a salary of $540 a year. She claims that when she went there to take up her duties she was not allowed to teach in the institution because she is a negro.

An informant from Johnston County, born in 1945, tells me that two of his black high school classmates were employed by the BIA and then were sent to the Arizona to teach on a reservation, but this is not evidence, just anecdote. It does, however, fit with evidence emerging from the Navajo Boarding School at Chinle in northern Arizona. An article from the Dothan Eagle in Dothan, Alabama, for June 1963, describes the BIA defending its practice of hiring what locals call “too many Negro teachers.” 

The charge was made by Leon Grant, a Gallup businessman who resides in Chinle. . . . Grant said he doesn’t object to Negro teachers on the reservation, but added: “I do, however, object to the number of them.” He claimed there are 27 Negro teachers at the Chinle school along with two whites and three Navajos. 

[Area Director Frederick] Haverland answered that there may be as many as 20 Negro teachers on the staff of 32. “We have no accurate figures,” he said. “This information isn’t available because no question about race is on federal job applications.”

Haverland’s curiosity failed him--he could easily have looked at the faces and counted on his fingers. A better response comes from The Independent Record in Helena Montana, which shows no problem with counting:

The friends of the Negro organizations, too, may push too hard. The Kennedy administration has tried to increase government-job opportunities for Negroes. . . . A case in point seems to have occurred at Chinle Elementary School, on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. The school’s teachers are appointed by the Office of Indian Affairs, under the department of the Interior. Of 30 teachers in Chinle school, 27 are Negroes! 

The number of blacks does seem disproportionate and may well reflect the refusal across the Jim Crow south to hire African-American teachers.

As a researcher living in Japan whose major resources are online, I take advantage an Oklahoman article published in September 2011 reviewing the inductees to the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame. Three figures appear who either have worked with Indians or who inherit Indian blood. Curtis Brackeen, a graduate of Muskogee Manual High School and Langston, taught first in McAlester and then Muskogee. In 1977, Brackeen became a counselor at Indian Capital Vocational-Technical School in Muskogee, and in 1985 the principal. Desegregation didn’t cost him his job.

Also noteworthy is Willie Mae Etheridge, Checotah/Warrior Community, whom we find in the same source as above.  Her tribute reads, “A graduate of Langston University and an educator for 35 years, she made a difference in the classroom and in the Checotah/Warrior Community. As she approaches her 96th birthday, former students remember her passion for teaching and her work in the school and the community. Her warm, inquisitive personality and genuine concern endeared her to the multicultural mixture of Caucasian, Native American, and African American area residents.”

Of indigenous and mixed blood is Eddie Walter Warrior, whose great-grandmother arrived in Indian Territory during the winter of 1836 after crossing the “Trail of Tears” as a slave in the Creek Nation. Warrior, born in 1902, at Warriorville, Indian Territory, was the last member of his immediate family that the Dawes Commission enrolled as a “Creek Freedmen New Born.” From 1967-1979, Warrior served as a Board member of the new Indian Capital Vo-Tech District No. 4. He was the first African American to serve on that Board as its president.

The above is but a sampling. Limitations of time and means prevent me from finding more names to add to this roster, but doubtless they are available and kept their jobs through the turbulent period of desegregation. A better informed (and better funded!) researcher than I could find them. 

Returning now to our chronological sequence, in 1947 Jacob S. Blanchette wrote an MA thesis on the Status of Negro Teachers of Creek County, Oklahoma in which he cited an editorial by Roscoe Dungee from the Black Dispatch for April 1947. I cite Blanchette here because this issue of the newspaper is not available online:

The courageous report of Dr. Harrison recently made to the appropriations committee of the legislature has elicited much favorable reaction. Daily papers have discussed at length the significant statement of the Langston President that since the Negroes of Oklahoma form 7.2 per cent of the population, the coordinating board would be doing the equitable thing if it allotted 7.2 percent of the total appropriation for higher education to Langston University.

The reader may feel surprise at the lowness of the figure 7.2% for the African-American population of the state, but the figure in 2010 was 7.4%. The figure is of course higher for the eastern part of the state and for the inner parts of Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The key to Dungee’s argument, however, so obvious that it doesn’t require statement, is not demographics but Jim Crow: Langston remained the only university in the state open to African Americans pursuing teaching degrees.

President Harrison in that scintillating and informing report relentlessly pressed on to show that the coordinating board instead of performing its democratic duty, was actually allocating to Langston University 2.9 per cent of the total appropriation. Whereas, Langston this year is given around $290,000, if given its rightful share the amount would run close to $700,000. (Blanchette 3)

The effect of the state’s underpayment to Langston College was that African American students wanting teaching degrees were forced to attend out-of-state, thus costing Oklahoma the very class of students that could serve it the best.

The loss of African American students in Oklahoma was paralleled by the loss of teachers. In July 1955 the Seminole Producer ran this UP article not carried by other papers around the state, though it originated in Tulsa:

An attorney said Saturday a questionnaire has been sent to every Negro teacher in Oklahoma to determine how many have lost their jobs as a result of racial integration in public school. We expect to complete the survey in about five days,” Amos Hall of Tulsa, attorney for the State Negro Teachers Association, said. Hall earlier had estimated more than 400 Negro teachers were facing unemployment because of a tendency among school officials to fire Negroes and retain white teachers when segregation ends.

Hall also speaks of federal court suits to be filed to combat the trend, and threatens the arrival of Thurgood Marshall, general counsel for the NAACP. This would not have sat well with Oklahoma officialdom, who wanted to spin the story of a smooth transition.

Hall said [the] purpose of the survey was to establish definitely whether Negro firings represented wide discrimination or merely “normal turnover.” . . . He said each Negro teacher in Oklahoma has been asked to state on the questionnaire how long he had his last or present job, how much schooling and experience he had,  how long he had been a resident of Oklahoma, and whether he owned his home in the community where he taught.

It is significant to observe that the results of this revelatory questionnaire did not appear in the newspapers, at least not in those that have survived in the historical archives. Indeed, the fact that the lead story quoted above appeared in only one state newspaper, an obscure press in Seminole, tells us that Oklahoma officialdom killed the story, with Seminole alone like Job’s messenger escaped to tell us. 

The one qualification I would add here is that these cases did not represent “firings” since the black faculty did not enjoy tenure. They were hired on the basis of contracts, to be yearly renewed (or not) by a decision of the local school board. The easiest way to get rid of unwanted faculty was simply not to renew their contracts. Of the fifteen teachers and administrators whose careers have been explored in the present series of essays, none was fired. One went to California and continued her teaching career and two died of old age at a convenient time, but nobody was fired. Their contracts simply were not renewed. This is what is meant by the phrase I repeated use, he/she “entered the silence.”

Meanwhile, by August 1955, a “New Barrier to Integration” had arisen “in Ranks of Negroes,” according to the Durant Daily Democrat. It too is related to the theme of job loss.

Roscoe Dunjee, Oklahoma City Negro newspaper publisher and an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, voices this fear: “Negro teachers are encouraging Negroes to attend their own schools because they, the teachers, don’t want to lose their jobs. Some Negroes are afraid to attend white schools. I’m afraid the spirit of the Negro, who has been beaten and cowed, is not up to the liberalism of the courts.”

Dunjee said in some communities Negro parent and teacher leaders have formed committees to fight integration in their districts. Ironically, Dunjee said, Negro districts that have constructed new buildings have thrown up an additional barrier.

Dunjee thought it would have been better if Oklahoma City’s new $2 million Douglass high school had never been built. “Negroes will want to attend their own school. It’s the best in town. It’s just like a girl with a new dress.” To the NAACP leaders, this was a mistake. Their aim in destroying segregation was not just just to assure equality of education but to get rid of “segregation in any form” as a social evil.

Desegregation proceeded, and official reports stressed that it was advancing without trouble. In “Schools Integrate Without Incident” The Daily Oklahoman reported in June of 1956: 

Twenty-one of Oklahoma’s 96 Negro highschools closed their doors during the first year of integration, which proceeded without incident. Dr. Oliver Hodge, state superintendent of public instruction, reported to state school officials. He said 146 secondary schools and 129 elementary schools operated with integrated classes during the past year. Not a single instance of trouble over the taking of Negro pupils into white schools was reported . . .

The sentiments of this article are echoed a few months later in the Okemah News Leader, which however places the state’s self-congratulations immediate above a report from Sturgis KY of “an angry, yelling mob of 400-500 Persons” swinging fists as National Guard troops with fixed bayonets escorted “nine Negro youths into the previously all-white Sturgis highschool.” We get the point: things good have been much worse in Oklahoma. (Famously, they would become much worse and that very soon in a neighboring state. In September 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus used the state National Guard to defy the supreme court, forcing President Eisenhower to place the Arkansas National Guard under federal authority and to send in troops from the 101st Airborne Division.)

Even so, a year later the problems pointed to by Dunjee have not gone away. In October 1957, The Black Dispatch reported that the OAT (Oklahoma Association of Teachers) was sponsoring two events. This organization, discussed in the introduction to the present series of essays, was formerly known as OANT, the Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers. The announcement was made by Frederick Douglass Moon, the executive treasurer. The events had a double purpose: one was to provide an occasion for socializing, and the other “to feature a symposium on integration problems relating to teacher employment . . . consolidation of schools, and the future of Negro teachers.”

Problems with black teachers losing their jobs was even admitted by former Gov. Raymond Gary, as reported in The Hugo News for March 1959. The ex-governor had just published a photographic essay in the popular Look Magazine vaunting Oklahoma’s achievements in desegregation. The News quotes from the article: “‘A single first fight was the only violence that occurred when we integrated our schools, he said in a Look magazine article,” and then it cites Gary:

“Our unified schools save us one million dollars a year, as anticipated,” Gary said. “The morale of our students is high.” Gary, a former school teacher himself, said integration had given the state only one problem. “Only about 10 Negro teachers are working in integrated schools,” he said, “and 344 Negro teachers have lost their jobs since individual school boards, with rare exceptions, have not yet seen fit to hire Negro teachers.”

The picture is rosy enough, except for the many African American teachers who find themselves without jobs. 

The problem was not hard to brush over. A Daily Oklahoman article from August 1960, with the upbeat title “School Days Almost Here,” tells us that Oklahoma City students on the east side of the city will find “a total of eight schools with both Negro and white students in attendance.” It mentions two large white high schools and states that one will have “at least eight Negro students” and the other six. “Two other schools that were integrated last year have been converted to all-Negro schools.” The reader must wonder here how converting a formerly integrated  school to an “all-Negro” school responds to the Supreme Court mandate to desegregate. The journalist may be confused. The good news, if such it be, emerges at the end of the article: “Board of education figures show there will be at least 48 more Negro teachers in the school system this fall than were employed last year.” 

On this same upbeat note comes our old friend Dr. Oliver Hodge (whom we met above in 1956), state superintendent of schools. Writing for the Daily Oklahoman in December 1965, he reports:

Criticism that Negro teachers in the south are losing jobs because of school integrations does not apply to Oklahoma. In fact, there is an increase in the number of Negro teachers in the state, he said. 

Education department records show that during the current school year there are 1,464 Negro teachers in the state compared with 1,427 in the 1963-64 year.

With due thanks to Dr. Hodge’s staff of statisticians, what we would like to see is not a comparison between this year and last but a comparison between this year and 1955, before black teachers began losing their jobs. To be fair, Hodge does supply this information, but first he had to give us the sweet news. Now, at the end, comes the sour:

Dr. Hodge said 1,625 Negroes were teaching in the state when the U.S. supreme court ordered integration. The number declined to a low of 1,220 in the late 1950’s and the number has been on the rise since that time.

In other words, the state lost about 400 black teachers in the immediate aftermath of the Court’s mandate. Since the low in the late 50’s, numbers have been increasing but still remain 200 below what they were in 1955.

The next report carried by the major newspapers comes from the NAACP and--without the twisty statistics--naturally paints a picture in less rosy tints. Appearing in the Daily Oklahoman for June 1972, seventeen years after the original Supreme Court ruling, the headline declare the thesis: “Black Teachers Lose Jobs in Integration”:

As an ironic result of integration plans being implemented in many schools in the state, more and more black teachers are being “systematically phased out” and replaced by white teachers, the head of the state NAACP charged Wednesday. In a lengthy interview with The Daily Oklahoman the Rev. Wade Watts of McAlester, president of the Oklahoma chapter of the national organization . . . . admitted he had no statistics to back up his contention. But he said, “I’ve seen this happening personally and this is the pattern I’ve heard complaints about.” In the McAlester system, he said, “We used to have 30 black teachers before integration. Now there’s only six in the system.”

“Systematically” could suggest a conspiracy but in this case it does not. It means merely that when black teachers move on, whether they are transferred or retired, they are replaced with white teachers. No conspiracy is required when “everybody”--i.e., the school boards, where majorities of whites still make the decisions--agrees. 

It is claimed that in most instances the replacement was done quietly. “The way they usually do this is to wait until a Negro teacher gets old enough to retire, then they replace him with a white teacher.

Bob LaGrone, McAlester school superintendent, said . . . that his records show there used to be 17 black teachers employed at all black-schools before integration. Now the school system has six black teachers in the secondary and three in elementary schools, he said . . . The superintendent said he has personally contacted four preparatory colleges asking specifically for black teaching candidates, but has been unsuccessful in luring them to McAlester. 

Mr. Watts claimed many Negro teachers were put in what he termed “less responsible positions” which did not involve teaching a required subject. “We feel like this is just a flat phasing out of the black teachers,” he said. “In many instances, I think this is just a reflection of racism.” His concluding comment certainly hits a sore point, as we will argue below: “Mr. Watts said he felt efforts to integrate children would be shortchanged if there was not a fair representation of minority groups on the faculty.”

Four years later, in September 1996, The Daily Oklahoman printed a follow up to the above article, although this time with a broadly national focus, originating with the UP in Washington DC. The article begins new-journalism style by citing the individual case of an eighth grade science teacher in San Francisco, and then states:

Forty percent of the U.S. public schoolteachers will retire or otherwise leave the profession by the 2003-04 school year, the Education Department reports. The graying of America’s teachers comes at a time when enrollment is rising dramatically with immigrant children and second-generation baby boomers. 

The figure the Education Department gives for the percentage of teachers eligible to retire in Oklahoma by the year 2003-04 is 37.3%. (D.C. shows the highest with 57.9% and Nebraska the lowest with 25.9%.) The article continues:

By the time we restaff the schools in the next 10 to 15 years it will be the biggest overhaul of the teaching force ever in our history. . . . 

Teacher shortages are already so critical that some of the nation’s largest districts have been forced to hire uncertified teachers. A survey released earlier this year of 39 of the nation’s largest school districts cited pressing needs for math, science, special education, bilingual and minority instructors. 

Recruiting New Teachers, a non-profit organization based in Belmont, Mass., released a study in April that says 77 percent of the more than 9,000 teacher aides studying to become professional teachers are minorities.

The projection of figures 15 years ahead of the article’s 1996 publication date takes us to the year 2011, thus very near the present, and at the same time returns us to the question of education for minorities. 

That Oklahoma may have been in more trouble than it knew was indirectly recognized when in February 2002 The Daily Oklahoman ran an article headlined “Black teachers numbers low for population.” February is Black History Month, which the paper acknowledges by opening with a paragraph naming black historical figures that are being perused by students. It then continues dramatically with a reference to the faculty:

Ninety percent of their teachers are white. “It’s a real possibility that (a black) child could go his whole school career now and never see a teacher that looks like him,” said Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “Not to mention that white children might never see a black teacher.” 

In 1998, 17 percent of all elementary and secondary students were black. But only 7 percent of teachers were, according to “Just the Facts: Educators for the New Millennium,” a report by the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute. 

The numbers are increasing from a low point in the mid-1980s. Blacks received more bachelor’s degrees in 1998 than they did in 1987--from 4,183 to 7,567, according to the report. Still, the increase is not enough to narrow the gap between the number of teachers and the increase in the black population.

There would appear to be two issues at stake here. One is that students need to learn about the diverse world in which they live, and that diversity includes racial diversity. The other is that in communities with large populations of color, having role models of color who are classroom teachers is important, a matter to which we’ll return shortly.

In the same article, Segun Eubanks, executive director of the Community Teachers Institute, which aims to increase the number of minority teachers, mentioned a number of reasons for the black teacher shortage:

Twenty to thirty years ago, he said, fewer professions were open to people of color, and teaching became the default profession. Teaching isn’t a high-paying career, nor is it high-status, he said. The lack of pay and status often deters all races from becoming teachers.

Here the present author cannot help a smile. Back twenty some years ago when the United States was sending educational experts to Japan to study the reason for the high rate of success of its schools--the “what American can learn from Japanese education” boom--the big factors the observers typically missed were two: teaching in Japan is a high-status profession and it’s a high-paying one. The reader may wonder who pays for it. The parents pay for the public institutions, K-16, while the national and prefectural governments help pay for the private ones. There is no noticeable teacher shortage and never has been.

But to return to our consideration of the Oklahoman’s article on the low numbers of minority teachers, the one solution proposed may seem radical to the average reader: 

[President of the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington] James Merisotis said the nation might have to do something that could be politically unpopular: spend far more money recruiting black and Hispanic teachers than recruiting whites. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with white teachers teaching students of color,” Merisotis said. “The problem is that when students of color only hear from a racial group other than their own, what those students are getting is a one-way cultural transmission.”

Yet, in a period of rapidly changing demographics, we may be finding ourselves moving toward Merisotis’s suggestions. Especially when one good morning people in America wake to find that the majority of the country is no longer white. With which rough prophecy, I’d like to consider “Emergency-certified teachers” before moving to my concluding remarks.

On Sunday, August 27, 2017, Ben Felder, a staff writer for The Oklahoman, wrote a full page article with the title quoted at the end of the preceding paragraph except that his noun phrase ended with a predicate: “increase diversity.” That is, emergency-certified teachers increase diversity. The word “diversity” may be in the process of becoming a new watch word among educators. It neatly avoids the shadows that accompany words like “liberalism” and “ethnic minorities,” and it rhymes with “cultural pluralism” and “multiculturalism,” themselves once buzz words though now fallen into disfavor with conservatives. 

Felder begins by introducing his reader to Harold Smith, who starts each morning with his 21 Green Pastures kindergarteners by having them dance. At 6 feet 3 inches, he is a Gulliver among the Lilliputian five-year-olds. Smith is 39 years old and wears a blazer and a bow tie with a handkerchief in his jacket’s front pocket, but he knows how to get down to the kids’ eye level when needed. He starts the morning with dance “to burn off some energy that could manifest itself as mischief later in the day,” we are told:

As a black man, Smith is a rarity in the teaching profession, where 88 percent of teachers across the state are white, even though most public school students are not. But in Oklahoma City Public Schools, the state’s largest district where Green Pastures is located, there is evidence that the growth in emergency-certified teachers is bringing more nonwhite teachers to the classroom. Nearly 28 percent of teachers in the Oklahoma City district are not white, compared to 54 percent of the 195 emergency-certified teachers the district has hired, according to district data. Green Pastures’ principal, Kelley Coleman, said relying on emergency-certified teachers . . . isn’t ideal, but she saw it as an opportunity to hire more black males in her school, where enrollment is majority black. 

Coleman says she knew she wasn’t gong to find emergency teachers who had studied the usual teacher-training curriculum, but “I wanted to know if they knew how to respond to children. I wanted to know if they know the community, if they know how to work in this area . . . ” On a schoolwide staff of 16, four of Coleman’s teachers are black men, three of them hired as emergency-certified teachers. “They have passion for their students and their community . . . They just get it,” she says.

Green Pastures is also a high-poverty school where many students face food insecurity, personal trauma and other challenges that can be hard to leave outside of the classroom walls. “Because I grew up in this community, I know a lot of what they are going through,” Smith said. “I am sensitive and I’m patient, because I look at it as if these students are me.”

Statewide, just 4 percent of teachers are black and less than 2 percent are Hispanic, according to teacher demographic data analyzed by The Oklahoman. The lack of diversity among Oklahoma teachers is in line with the national makeup of the profession with 82 percent of America’s public school teachers identified as white, according to the U.S. Department of education.

The lack of color-fit between students and teachers is a recipe for what James Merisotis (above) called “one-way cultural transmission”:

...Multiple studies have found that nonwhite students with  a teacher of their own race perform better on tests and benefit from high teacher expectations. “Teachers of color often have higher expectations for students of color, are more likely to use culturally relevant teaching practices, are more likely to confront racism in their lessons and, yes, also serve as advocates,” former U.S. Education Secretary John King wrote in the Washington Post last year. “But it’s also important for our white students to see teachers of color in leadership roles in their classrooms and communities. Breaking down negatives stereotypes helps all students to return to live and work in a multi-racial society.”

In this respect the role of black male teachers and administrators--the group hardest hit by desegregation--is very important:

A detailed study in North Carolina and Tennessee found that black male students who have a black male teacher in third, fourth or fifth grades are significantly less likely to drop out in high school and are also more likely to pursue a college education. The study’s authors . . . said drop out rates reduced by as much as 39 percent for black male students who had black male teachers in elementary school, highlighting the important foundation that is build for students in early grade levels. 

The statewide teacher shortage has increased the use of emergency-certified teachers, and while it has brought more diversity to Oklahoma City’s classrooms, it’s not a system educators hope will remain in place. The preference would be to see more traditionally trained teachers of color enter the profession, and the Oklahoma City district has programs in place attempting to do that, including its bilingual teacher pipeline program, which helps bilingual teacher assistants become certified teachers.

To enforce his point, Felder brings forward the example of another emergency teacher at Green Pastures:

Charles Thompson has taught off and on over the last several years but was hired last year as an emergency-certified physical education teacher at Green Pastures. . . . Besides bringing a higher level of cultural competency and patience, Thompson said he plays an important role as a black man, especially for students who may not have a father at home. “Some of my students are so eager to learn and they really are receptive to a man teacher because a lot of times these children don’t have father figures in the house,” Thompson said. “A lot of them are missing that, so they kind of gravitate to you as a male teacher, as a role model.”

As has been pointed out earlier, it was the black male teachers and administrators who suffered the major job losses in the first years of desegregation. Under whatever label they are forced to use, it is good that schools like Green Pastures are bringing them back, at least in some measure. It is one of the ironies of the history of desegregation in the United States, that with the student body largely integrated, it is now necessary to integrate the faculty.

One effort in this direction in Oklahoma City is being taken by The Foundation for Oklahoma City Public Schools’ Bilingual Teacher Pipeline Program. A November 2020 article in The Daily Oklahoman explains that this is a “Grow Your Own” initiative that funds college tuition, fees and books for paraprofessionals working in the district: 

There are currently 44 participants, with three (soon to be five) graduates. The Diversity Teacher Pipeline Program is the other arm of the Teacher Pipeline Program and focuses on paraprofessionals of color. There are currently 15 Black participants on their way to becoming certified teachers in Oklahoma City Public Schools.

The rationale for this program is the same as what was explained in the article on the Green Pastures school. 

Research demonstrates that students of color exhibit increases in social and academic outcomes when they have teachers who look like them. Teachers of color tend to hold higher standards for their students of color and exhibit higher degrees of cultural competency.

The cry for more diversity in the public school faculties is one that is heard not only in Oklahoma but nation-wide. It is largely repeated in “The positive effect  of Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers,” published in the Phi Delta Kappan, a professional journal for educators. In its formal scholarly language (replete with footnotes, omitted here), it states:

Studies have also found that interactions between Students of Color and Teachers of Color are related to improvements in students’ academic growth overall . . . ; that teachers have more positive perceptions of the academic abilities of students with whom they share racial affinities . . .  and that teachers who do not share an ethno-racial affinity with Black students are more likely to punish or penalize them for classroom infractions (50). 

Similar articles dot the pages of The Washington Post and other major metropolitan newspapers. Oklahoma is not alone in this struggle, and the summer of 2022 is expected to see the publication of Handbook of Research in Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers (by Gist & Bristol). Still, Oklahoma remains the focus of the present series of humble essays as we attempt a brief summary.

I will close with what I would like to take as an example of what is possible for teachers of color in present day Oklahoma, and this is a woman I first ran across at the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame, and thus a fourth person to consider in addition to the three discussed above. Dr. Anquanita Kaigler-Love, as she now signs herself, was born in 1953. That year postdates the last census open to the public, so it is impossible to say where she was born. As our representative of diversity, it is perhaps appropriate that the facts of her parentage are up for grabs. Online articles give the names of two sets of possible parents, though either or both of them could have been foster parents. On the basis of the 1950 censuses for these possible parents, she could have been born in Grayson Co. TX or Payne Co. OK. 

We are on more certain terms with statements from Kaigler-Love herself. From online documents reporting her statements we learn that some of her childhood years were spent in Germany, where her (foster/adoptive?) father was stationed in the army, and she seems to have lived thereafter in Lawton. That explains some of the diversity of her background: she was an Army brat. She attended Lawton’s Carriage Hills Elementary and graduated from Eisenhower High School. She did her B.A. at Lawton’s Cameron College and thereafter was employed teaching Indian and other minority students in the Lawton school system. In 2016, when she was inducted into the Oklahoma African-American Educators Hall of Fame, she stated that she had been “part of the Lawton Public school District for nearly 40 years”:

She started out in 1974 as a fifth-grade teacher at Carriage Hills Elementary. She then worked her way up to many other roles at various Lawton schools as assistant principal, principal, and ultimately, the district Executive Director of Federal programs, before retiring three years ago. . . . Dr. Kaigler-Love says she's proud to be in the same category as people like last year's inductee, Valree Fletcher Wynn, Cameron University's first African American faculty member. 

Anquanita Kaigler-Love in 2016. With permission.

The reader should join with the author in a quiet rejoicing that there is no need to append the closing epitaph of so many previous essays: after that, she entered the silence. Instead, she entered the circle of appreciation that should be prepared for any dedicated teacher on retirement. We read that Kaigler-Love “retired from teaching three years ago, and spends a lot of her time working as a guest speaker, volunteering at her church, the YMCA and other organizations.” Let these words from Emily Dickinson anticipate her epitaph.

Alpha shall kiss Omega--

We will ride up the hill of glory--

Hallelujah, all hail!

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