What a Moberly court case in 1955 tells us about teacher diversity today

MOBERLY — Mayme Williams sat in the lobby of the Country Villa apartments in Moberly, reminiscing about the all-Black Lincoln School in the early 1930s, when the city’s public schools were still racially segregated.

At 97, Williams still remembers her childhood years at the Lincoln School: her friends, the walk to school from her family’s rural farmhouse, a song her first-grade teacher taught her. She remembers the connections she and other students had with their teachers in Moberly’s close Black community — one was also her piano teacher — and she remembers how good her teachers were at their jobs.

“The teachers were there to teach us,” Williams said. “They did their job well done.”

Williams’ son, James, who is in his 70s, recalls his mother talking about them, too — about how well-qualified and well-educated her teachers were.

Their qualifications, demeanor and race were at the heart of a lawsuit brought in 1955 by Naomi Brooks and seven other teachers at the Lincoln School after they were not hired to teach in Moberly’s newly integrated public schools. All of Lincoln’s 11 teachers and administrators were passed over, even though merging the Black and white schools meant more white teachers were hired.

Brooks and the other teachers sued then-Superintendent Carl Henderson and the Moberly Board of Education for $32,000, or more than $375,000 in 2024 dollars.

The case, which the teachers ultimately lost, points to an unintended consequence of how the integration of public schools happened after the 1954 landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education.

“There wasn’t this idea of bringing Black teachers, Black administrators on board as well, and it is something that impacted the nation,” said Brittany Fatoma, an adjunct professor in the University of Missouri’s College of Education and Human Development.

This didn’t happen only in Moberly. Thousands of Black teachers and administrators lost their jobs because of one-way integration, costing African Americans huge sums of money across the country. The way integration played out also provides one explanation for the shortage of teachers of color in the United States today.

“This happened over time,” Fatoma said, “and we’re seeing the impact where we’re struggling now.”

For the first half of the 20th century, public school systems were guided by Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation laws at the local level and provided the legal justification that states used to build segregated school systems.

Then came Linda Brown, an African American girl living in Topeka, Kansas, who was prohibited from attending a less-crowded white school a few blocks from her house. She had to attend the all-Black school across town.

In 1951, Brown’s father, along with other parents, sued Topeka’s board of education. The Browns and the other plaintiffs took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, 70 years ago this year, they won. A year later, Chief Justice Earl Warren instructed states to begin desegregation plans “with all deliberate speed.”

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, Missouri Attorney General John Dalton issued an opinion declaring the state’s laws allowing segregation in schools were unenforceable, and the sometimes slow process of integration began. The Moberly district took action in 1955, closing the Lincoln School and moving the students into formerly all-white schools.

“This happened a lot across school integration in the 1950s and ‘60s,” said Joseph Nichols, an associate professor in St. Louis University’s School of Education. “One of the ways that districts tended to handle it was they just closed the Black schools and sent kids to the white schools, which, you know, made integration a one-way street.”

This erased the rich history of these formerly all-Black schools, said Nichols, who is researching the Moberly case as well as the broader implications of how school integration was handled. It hindered Black teachers from being able to support and advocate for their Black students — and it led to Black teachers like the Lincoln School’s Naomi Brooks losing employment.

Less than a month after Brown v. Board, the Moberly Board of Education appointed a committee to study desegregating schools at the end of the 1954-55 school year.

Moberly Superintendent Carl Henderson recommended that none of the 11 educators at the Lincoln School have their contracts renewed — although more than a dozen white teachers were hired in May and June of that year, according to newspaper stories that ran at the time in the Moberly Monitor-Index.

In addition to Brooks, the other plaintiffs were H.D. Tymony, Turner Washington, Betty Jean Johnson, Yutha Hughes, Hazel Moore, Lotus Harris and Ella Mae Pitts. They alleged the defendants “adopted a policy, rule, or regulation whereby they hire only persons of the white race as teachers in said district (and) that the defendants … refuse to hire or rehire persons of the Negro race as teachers in the district.”

One of the attorneys representing the teachers was NAACP’s Robert Carter, who also helped represent the Browns in Brown v. Board. Another attorney on the teachers’ team was Lee Swinton, who became the first African American to serve in the Missouri Senate.

The following trial coverage appeared in more than a dozen newspaper articles in the Monitor-Index and Moberly Evening Democrat:

When Carter asked Henderson why no Black teachers were rehired to teach in integrated schools, Henderson said that he didn’t know exactly why but that regardless, he believed the best teachers for the jobs were hired.

Comparisons of the training and education of white and Black teachers, however, showed that “in some cases the (Black) teachers had more training or more experience, or both, than the white teachers with whom they were compared.”

Henderson said the Lincoln School teachers may have had comparable training in terms of hours, but not in terms of the caliber of training. He also said Black teachers did not absorb their training. Carter, meanwhile, questioned whether Henderson thought their training was inferior because they attended Lincoln University, a historically Black university in Jefferson City.

Henderson also cited “intangible factors” as reasons no Black teachers were rehired after integration, including personality. For example, he said that Lotus Harris’ “general attitude was not too wholesome” but that she was allowed to continue teaching at the Lincoln School because there were “no (sic) too many Negro teachers available superior to Mrs. Harris.”

Regarding another teacher and plaintiff, Yutha Hughes, Henderson said she should only have been allowed to teach in segregated schools because he “wouldn’t have rated her as highly in an integrated school.”

Henderson said that hiring Black teachers would have meant firing white teachers, and he didn’t see a justification for that.

The Lincoln School Parent Teacher Association protested the Moberly board’s decision in a letter to the Monitor-Index’s editor.

“The Lincoln School PTA records with regret the action of the Moberly School Board in dispensing with the entire staff of the Lincoln School. It was thought that the move to integrate would include the entire system and not only part of it,” PTA president Mrs. Forrest Smith Jr. and secretary Mrs. Ruby Martin wrote.

In the end, the 8th District Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Brooks and her colleagues. They appealed, but the Supreme Court refused to hear it.

The appeals court judges officially ruled that it was sheer coincidence that only Black teachers were laid off when integration happened, but Nichols said that at least one of the judges believed the district’s reasoning didn’t pass the sniff test.

“Even the judge who ruled against Naomi Brooks was like, ‘I’m pretty sure there was some racial discrimination taking place there,’” Nichols said. “He said, ‘We can see that the result is unusual and somewhat startling. In the usual situation, considering the number of applicants involved, one would suppose that a fair application of standards would result in the reemployment of some of the Negro teachers, he said, but it didn’t.’”

Nichols said Brooks v. Moberly was one of the few civil rights cases NAACP attorneys lost — Carter would go on to win 21 out of 22 cases he argued before the Supreme Court — and he believes the loss’ consequences for Moberly deserve more attention from scholars.

“During the civil rights movement, the civil rights activists had just a ridiculous success rate in the court system, right?” Nichols said. “I mean, it’s impressive how successful they were, but on occasion … they lost the case. I’m not sure that we’ve done enough digging into what happened when they lost the case.”

Had the layoffs occurred and the lawsuit been filed in the mid-1960s, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that guaranteed equal employment opportunities for minorities, the case likely would have had a different outcome, Nichols said.

Additionally, had integration been handled differently — if some white students from Moberly Junior College been enrolled at the Lincoln School, for example — there would not have been such a large displacement of Black teachers, he said.

Nichols quoted a report referenced in the Urban Review journal, “For Black Educators: Integration Brings the Axe”, which said that from 1954 to 1970, the amount of money Black educators in Missouri lost as a result of post-integration displacement totaled more than $18 million in 1970 dollars.

After they were not hired by the Moberly district, some of the teachers traveled to find work in places that would take them.

Barbra Horrell, a Columbia resident who attended the formerly all-Black Douglass School when Columbia schools were segregated, recalled having teachers who drove the more than 30 miles from Moberly to teach. Two were Lotus Harris and Turner Washington.

Mayme and James Williams had never heard about the Lincoln School teachers suing for discrimination. But they acknowledged that matters of segregation, and integration, were rarely discussed in their world.

“We didn’t speak on it,” Mayme Williams said. “Blacks had their way. Whites had their way.”

Brenda Oliver, another Lincoln School attendee, had Brooks as a teacher.

“Naomi Brooks was a young, smart teacher that taught me at Lincoln,” Oliver wrote on Facebook.

Oliver spent her senior year of high school at the newly integrated Moberly Junior College. Oliver was among the first Black students to integrate Moberly’s formerly all-white public schools in the fall of 1955.

“It was more or less a shock, going from an all-Black school, all-Black teachers, to nothing but white teachers,” she said. “I was pretty disappointed because I didn’t get to complete my senior year at the Black school.”

Oliver knew about the lawsuit, but only because of a few newspaper articles she read.

“Finding anyone my age or younger that remembers anything specific about the court case … good luck,” Oliver said.

One of the traditions in Moberly’s Black community were Lincoln School reunions. Every August, for decades, Williams and other Lincoln School graduates gathered at the site of the old school, in front of railroad tracks and close to Moberly’s Black churches. Eventually, Oliver became in charge of organizing the reunions.

After integration, the Lincoln School became the Bradley School, named for celebrated Gen. Omar Bradley, who grew up in nearby Clark and later lived in Moberly. After the Bradley School closed, Ameren Union Electric Co. bought the land for an operating center. In the 1990s, the reunion tradition faded away as alumni lost interest or died.

The evaporation of teaching positions for Black educators because of the way some school districts handled integration helps explain why, nationally, teachers of color comprise less than a quarter of educators, according to education policy journal Education Next.

In her doctoral thesis, Brittany Fatoma, from MU’s College of Education and Human Development, cited research that said teaching used to be perceived in the Black community as a respectable profession that allowed for upward socioeconomic mobility. But when integration occurred, and school districts bused Black children to white schools instead of redistributing students evenly, few Black teachers and administrators were integrated as well.

This resulted in thousands of Black faculty losing their jobs or not being hired upon applying, according to a 2004 History of Education Quarterly article by University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor Michael Fultz. Fultz, who is affiliated with UW’s Department of Educational Policy Studies, also wrote that displaced educators’ fear of retribution and unwillingness to report their displacement makes achieving an accurate count of displaced Black educators difficult. This displacement was most prevalent in small towns and rural areas.

Fultz’s article, “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown,” cited a 1970 National Education Association report that read, “What is happening … is not integration; rather it is disintegration — the near total disintegration of Black authority in every area of the system of public education.”

This “disintegration of Black authority” meant teaching was no longer perceived as a way to achieve socioeconomic mobility in the Black community, Fatoma, who has also researched this phenomenon, said. Black people began to look toward other career paths, starting a trend away from teaching that persists today and is compounded by the common perception that teaching is not a lucrative profession.

“The closing of Black schools (and) laying off of Black teachers does contribute to our gap in the number of Black teachers,” Nichols said. “So I think that history is real and it continues to build on that foundation.”

For Black students like Brenda Oliver and Mayme Wiliams, having teachers who were part of their community and were friends with their parents meant having teachers who were singularly invested in their education.

Black students who were sent to formerly all-white schools didn’t have mentors who were as attuned to what was going on in their communities, Oliver said. She emphasized the importance of the Lincoln School to Black residents in Moberly and Black residents in surrounding areas that didn’t have their own all-Black schools.

“I believe that having a Black teacher is instrumental in our child’s development … as a Black person,” Oliver said. “When you go to a school and you don’t see anybody representing your race, I think it has an effect on you.”

This story first appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online. 

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