Testing Equality: The National Teacher Examination and the NAACP's Legal Campaign to Equalize Teachers' Salaries in the South, 1936-63

In the middle of the twentieth century, the white elites who controlled public education in the South stood at a racial crossroads. Facing increasingly insistent demands for equality and access from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), political and educational leaders had to choose between accommodation and resistance. Pressure from the NAACP and the courts did bring important accommodations, but in significant, and still unexamined, ways the white South chose to resist. The most durable resistance to the challenges posed by the NAACP's legal campaign came not in the courts or in politics but within educational institutions. While the South's legal and political defense of racial discrimination and segregation ultimately collapsed, resistance inside schools endured. Beginning in the 1940s, shrewd southern elites institutionalized new, more legally defensible forms of discrimination and inequality that continue to define educational arrangements in the region today.