by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier
Clashes with the White power structure are normally told during Black History Month. A celebrated clash is when Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine integrated Arkansas’s Central High School.
Bates became the president of Arkansas’s NAACP in 1952.
Two years later the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, and in 1956 Bates challenged Little Rock’s school board to integrate immediately. This clash garnered national and international attention and forced President Dwight Eisenhower to federalize Arkansas’s National Guard to protect the Black students.
Bates was able to challenge Little Rock’s school board because the NAACP had established a formidable presence in Arkansas, a presence the NAACP lacked decades prior. But all of that changed in 1942 when Sue Morris made it her mission to equalize Black and White teachers’ salaries in Little Rock School District.
By 1941, White elementary school teachers in Little Rock made $526 per year while Black elementary school teachers made $331. White high school teachers made $856 per year while Black high school teachers made $567. That summer the school district increased teachers’ salaries, but the increase widened the gap between Black and White pay. Naturally, this infuriated the Black teachers who petitioned Little Rock’s superintendent of school for equal pay the year before.
The Black teachers believed the pay disparities violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection and due process under the law and obtained a local lawyer.
Sue Morris was chosen to head the lawsuit because of her outstanding teaching credentials. The local lawyer contacted the national headquarters of the NAACP and asked for assistance. The NAACP’s special counsel, Thurgood Marshall, was thrilled about assisting the teachers in Arkansas. Marshall’s mother was a school teacher. He had childhood memories of the discrimination Black teachers faced and took equalizing teacher pay personally.
The local White community took the lawsuit personally as well. They condemn the Black teachers for asking for more money while the nation was making sacrifices in preparation to enter World War II and questioned the Black teachers’ loyalty to the United States. The school district took it personally and refused to renew Sue Morris’s teaching contract, i.e., she was fired for filing the lawsuit.
The school district claimed no racial discrimination existed concerning teachers’ salaries. Their attorneys stated teacher pay was determined by special training, ability, character, experience, duties, services, and accomplishments. In other words, Black teachers were inferior to White teachers in areas that had nothing to do with skin color. This argument allowed the school district’s attorneys to get around the issue of racial discrimination and justify the Black and White pay disparities.
In 1944 the judge ruled in favor of the school district.
The following year Sue Morris’s case was heard at the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, Missouri. The appeals court found that over a period of almost twenty years Black teachers entering Little Rock’s school district were routinely paid less than the White teachers solely based on racial factors and not merit. The most egregious action discovered against the school district was between 1941 and 1942 when a surplus of funds was secretly distributed unequally between Black and White teachers.
The appeal judges found in favor of Sue Morris and the NAACP. The Little Rock school district had to abandon its discriminatory teacher pay policy. This victory only equalized pay for teachers in Little Rock, not the rest of the state.
But it was a start that got local activists across the state to believe in the NAACP’s philosophy of radical change. In 1945 the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches was established.
In 1952, Sue Morris was reinstated to teach.
And when it came time to integrate Central High School, Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine were eager and willing to clash with the White power structure because Sue Morris taught them equality was possible in Little Rock.
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