Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2026
20th Annual AERA Brown Lecture in Education Research: Otherwise Qualified: The Untold Story of Brown and African American Educators’ Professional Superiority
Fenwick asserts that the failure to integrate Black principals and teachers into desegregating public schools remains the unfulfilled promise of Brown and has resulted in four traumas that continue to stymie the nation’s progress toward the conjoined goals of racial justice and educational equity. Brown was not intended to simply mean that African American and White students were to be educated side by side in order to achieve integrated schools. Often overlooked, many legal decisions subsequent to Brown asserted that the criterion for knowing that integration was achieved was the racial integration of district and school leadership and the teaching force.
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