Leslie T. Fenwick, professor and dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education, and dean in residence at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, will deliver the 2023 Brown Lecture in Education Research. Learn more
About the 2023 Lecture - "Otherwise Qualified: The Untold Story of Brown and Black Educators’ Professional Superiority"
Fenwick’s lecture offers a newly excavated history of the implementation of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It also advances her theory of “cultural elision” to explain how Brown is still (mis)defined. As chronicled in her award-winning book Jim Crow’s Pink Slip (Harvard Education Press, 2022), massive (White) resistance to Brown from 1952 through the late 1970s resulted in one hundred thousand exceptionally well credentialed Black principals and teachers in public schools being illegally fired, dismissed, or demoted and replaced on a near one-to-one basis by White educators who were less academically credentialed and less professionally experienced.
Fenwick asserts that the failure to integrate Black principals and teachers into desegregating schools remains the unfulfilled promise of Brown. This failure maintained the segregationists’ control over the nation’s public schools, to the detriment of all students, especially Black students, and resulted in four traumas that continue to stymie the nation’s progress toward racial justice and educational equity. Fenwick concludes with recommendations to overcome this history.
Registration for the lecture is open.
The Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research is designed to feature the important role of research in advancing understanding of equality and equity in education. The Lectureship was inaugurated in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court took into account scientific research in issuing its landmark ruling. Each year a distinguished scholar notable for producing significant research related to equality in education is invited to give a public lecture in Washington, D.C.
Past Brown Lectures in Education Research Webcasts Available