A Different Brown Story: Black Teacher Recruitment to Navajo Reservation BIA Schools During the Desegregation Era

Abstract

The 70th anniversary of the Brown decision provides an opportunity to shed light on the story of Black educators who were recruited to schools on the Navajo Nation after being fired in the transition to desegregated schooling. With the support of the Navajo Tribal Council, the 1954 Navajo Emergency Education Program established funds to create additional schools throughout the Navajo Nation. Contacted through Black newspaper and magazine advertisements and direct recruitment, hundreds of Black teachers, displaced from schools throughout the South, ended up at schools like Chinle Boarding School. We share one former student’s story and contextualize it within the broader Brown historiography.

Keywords

Black education desegregation historical analysis Indian education Indigenous peoples teacher education/development

In fall 1963, Betty Yazzie began formal Western schooling on the Navajo Nation¹ in northeastern Arizona. She was 8 years old when her mother enrolled her in kindergarten at Chinle Boarding School, a federally funded Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school in the central part of the Navajo reservation. Betty’s first teacher was a tall, heavyset Black woman from the Deep South, one of the hundreds of Black teachers who were recruited to teach on Diné Bikéyah (the ancestral homeland of the Diné, the People) after the desegregation of schools in the United States that led to the mass firing of thousands of Black teachers.

Throughout the 1960s, Betty and her loving grandparents and mom lived with and off the land. Betty recounted how her family maintained strong family ties in a traditional Navajo hooghan, a circular, eight-sided dwelling constructed of mud and logs, on the Colorado Plateau of the Four Corners region. They resided 8 miles north of the Round Rock Trading Post, near two massive sandstone pinnacles towering into the sky, 800 feet above the canyon floor. Sagebrush, rabbitbrush, juniper trees, and other desert plants that covered the landscape were used as food and medicine by Betty’s family. Their homestead was surrounded by a dibé bighan (sheep corral), a chaha’ooh (three-sided shade house made of logs), and a łeehogeed (storage dugout where food is stored and cooled). They cared for over 200 sheep and goats, which provided food, textiles, and income. Most days, they prepared and enjoyed meals together under a chaha’ooh. Betty’s grandparents owned and frequently used a tsinaabąąs (wooden, horse-drawn wagon) to travel to the local trading post to purchase or trade goods. These traditional Navajo lifeways were part of Betty’s daily livelihood.

Growing up without siblings, Betty learned from the women in her family to respect and live the traditions of her culture. Each day, she wore an ankle-length, calico-printed, three-tiered cotton skirt and a velveteen blouse with pleated sleeves. She embellished her attire with silver bracelets and a triple-strand, turquoise-beaded necklace. Every morning, she made her tsiiyééł (a Navajo hair bun) using a white yarn. She only spoke Diné bizaad (the People’s language) and was raised by Navajo cultural teachings that have been passed down through generations.

Betty’s grandparents and mom only knew of one type of education for American Indian children in the early 1960s when Betty reached school age: a boarding school system that erased the heritage languages, cultures, and identities of American Indian children. They did not want their lone grand/child to be civilized and Christianized in the manner of dominant White culture, so they kept her at home to learn the traditional Diné ways of life. After Betty’s grandmother passed away, a family member encouraged Betty’s mom to send her child to school to learn the values of mainstream society. That interaction led to Betty’s enrollment at Chinle Boarding School, one of the relatively new schools set up as a collaboration by the BIA with the support of the Navajo Tribal Council as an alternative to the horrible boarding school system with which Betty’s family was familiar.

Betty’s first learning experience outside her home was devastating. She was forced to wear plaid skirts with black and white saddle shoes to “fit in with [her] classmates,” whose appearances reflected an ideal modern American (B. Yazzie, personal communication, January 18, 2025). She was separated from her family and placed in one of the dorms, leaving her confused because she was told to speak only English and not Diné bizaad. In addition, she was nervous about establishing a relationship with her Black teacher because she had never seen a Black person before during the few years she lived on Diné Bikéyah.

In the classroom, Betty spent the first few months of school reading her teacher’s lips to try to understand English. Additionally, she would stare at her teacher’s complexion, wondering how the 50-year-old woman developed dark skin. One day, she finally gained the courage to ask her teacher for help, and she received it. From that day forward, Betty’s experience in school changed for the better. She became the class leader and the teacher’s helper, distributing and collecting assignments and school supplies and assisting in the role of teaching. Her teacher incorporated Diné bizaad and áda’ooł’įįł (culture) into her lessons. When Betty acquired an adequate understanding of the English language, the teacher sought her help to translate colors, shapes, and numbers into Diné bizaad. During the holiday season, Betty’s teacher encouraged the class to dress in their traditional Navajo attire and practice cultural songs and dances. Grandparents and parents came to watch the performances and appreciated the Black teacher’s whole child approach to educating Navajo youth.

Outside of class, Betty was constantly bullied by students in the upper grades because she was the oldest and tallest student in kindergarten. She said students called her “beginner nééz” (tall; B. Yazzie, personal communication, April 9, 2024). Her teacher noticed the bullying and stopped it, making Betty feel safe and protected by her Black teacher. At the dorm, Betty participated in after-school activities led by her teacher and other Black teachers. She noted that nearly half of the teaching staff at Chinle Boarding School were African American and that they would visit the boys’ and girls’ dorms several times a week to interact with and tutor students or learn the Diné bizaad from students. Both Black and White teachers lived in teacher housings on campus, but “White teachers would spend a year or two at the school and then leave, and new White teachers would come” to replace the ones who left (B. Yazzie, personal communication, February 1, 2025). Black teachers remained at school much longer. They immersed themselves in the life of the school-community and found themselves earning the respect of Navajo children, their families, and the community.

The 1954 milestone Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court ruling held the law of “separate but equal” unconstitutional; nevertheless, in most American Indian communities at the time, this landmark case was viewed as an event that would not directly impact American Indians (Prucha, 2005). Even today, few are aware of the historical connection between students like Betty and her beloved Black teacher—and the thousands of similar stories like them. Thus, the purpose of this article is to shed light on this lesser told story of the history of desegregation, tracing the stories of some Black educators who were recruited to BIA schools on the Navajo Nation after losing their jobs in the transition to desegregated schools.

The Experiences of Black Educators in the Wake of Brown

Although the era of desegregation in general and the Brown decision in particular has received significant attention over the last 70 years, it is only relatively recently that a fuller picture of the pervasive, massive firing of Black teachers and administrators during this era has emerged (Ethridge, 1979; Fenwick, 2022; Fultz, 2004; hooks, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Tillman, 2004). There is a twofold explanation for why the picture of widespread Black educator loss has, until relatively recently, remained incomplete. The first is that desegregation itself unfolded sluggishly due to a lack of enforcement and widespread “massive resistance” deployed across the South by local actors who had no intention of complying with the Supreme Court ruling (Fenwick, 2022; Kluger, 1975; Tillman, 2004). The second reason this issue remained under the radar for so long was teacher hiring (and firing) remained a local issue under the purview of the local superintendents and school boards (Ethridge, 1979; Fenwick, 2022; Tillman, 2004), making the gathering of accurate and consistent data from districts a persistent challenge until in 1971, when the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Equal Education Opportunity held hearings on the loss of Black educators and the federal government began keeping these statistics. Ethridge (1979) reflected that “the nation was shocked” by the early raw data numbers released that showed a projected loss of nearly 32,000 Black teaching positions as a result of desegregation between 1954 and 1972. According to Fenwick (2022), an additional 2,235 Black principal positions could be added to these teacher projections. Complicating matters were the many Black educators who were never technically “fired” but were demoted, forced to retire, moved to soft money (i.e., grant-funded and/or nonpermanent) positions that were later eliminated, or otherwise pushed out of their original positions (Fenwick, 2022).

Although the story of Black educator firings may not have been widely known, the impact of Black educators before and after Brown has been long substantiated; this fact only makes their loss that much more devastating. Fenwick (2022) picked up a narrative that others before her had laboriously documented, that Black teachers were the heart of Black schools. Anderson (1988) established how during and after slavery, the Black community equated education with liberation, painstakingly building school buildings across the South and hiring teachers—often at their own expense through a process he called “double taxation”—so that their children could be educated. Givens (2021) detailed the extensive contributions of Black teachers to these efforts, and Siddle Walker (1996) painted in vivid detail a portrait of one such school community. As numerous scholars have noted, Black teachers and administrators were more credentialed and experienced as a group and compared to White teachers specifically (Anderson, 1988; Fenwick, 2022; Givens, 2021; Siddle Walker, 1996, 2001; Tillman, 2004). We have not recovered from the loss of these Black educators both in terms of real numbers and with respect to their impact in the classroom. We could never replace the actual numbers of Black educators that were lost during desegregation but have also never come close to the numbers of Black preservice educators who had been entering the profession prior to Brown (Fenwick, 2022). Furthermore, this tremendous loss still does not capture the contributions to “instructional delivery, curriculum authorship and content, school culture, and educational policy and practice” their lack of presence precludes them from making to our educational environments (Fenwick, 2022, p. 134), not to mention the other related racial opportunity costs these students incur in these White-normed school spaces (Venzant Chambers, 2022). Likely owing to the special value the Black community placed on education historically, Black teachers made and continue to make important and specific contributions to all areas of the educational infrastructure. Although the numbers of Black teachers have been lessened because so many were pushed out of the profession, we have strong empirical evidence about the impact of their presence in the classroom. Put simply, “Black teachers matter” (Blazar, 2024, p. 450) for academic outcomes not just for Black students but for all students (Bristol & Martin-Fernandez, 2019; Redding, 2019). Put in this contemporary context, these historical losses are simply incalculable.

The question remains, however, now that we can begin to contemplate the scale of the loss of these qualified Black educators: Where did they go after they were fired? According to Fenwick (2022),

No one really knows for sure, but scant records indicate that older Black principals and teachers went into involuntary retirement. Some remained in the ‘integrated system’ serving under less-qualified Whites. Some maintained positions in federal desegregation programs until the ‘soft money’ ran out. Some joined HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] as education faculty and administrators. Others found jobs outside of education, if at all. Many who suffered from derailed careers were unable to transcend the circumstances or go elsewhere. (p. 134)

Although we may never have a full picture of what happened to all these talented Black educators, we may know what happened to some whose stories intersected with a community who was also in the midst of a long-standing, complicated fight for full educational opportunities: the Navajo Nation.

As noted previously, although the Brown ruling was not originally noted among the Navajo people as particularly relevant to their community, it soon became so when the unfortunate displacement of tens of thousands of exceptionally qualified Black teachers in the South offered a potential opportunity for rapid employment in their BIA schools (Johnson, 2018; McCarty, 2018). On the Navajo reservation, there were very few Native teachers, and the BIA had extreme difficulty getting White teachers who were not prejudiced to teach Navajo children and were quick to see the potential opportunity. Indian service agents from the BIA collaborated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to recruit Black teachers from the South (Johnson, 2018; Yurth, 2021). By 1959, 75 African American teachers were recruited to teach in BIA boarding schools near Gallup, New Mexico, and the Central Agency of the Navajo Nation (Johnson, 2016, 2018). One of the schools where Black teachers were placed was at Chinle Boarding School, where just a few years later, little Betty would be starting her kindergarten year and met one of those famed Black teachers who had arrived in Chinle from Virginia.

Federal Involvement in Navajo Education, 1946–1969

Prior to 1945, on- and off-reservation boarding schools were the only formal Western schooling configurations made available to Navajo children by the federal government. These schools, however, were immensely “unpopular with most Navajo parents” (Acrey, 1988, p. 267), including Betty’s mom and grandparents, as noted earlier. Since the 19th century, boarding schools were constructed by federal officials and Christian organizations with the primary purpose of assimilating and acculturating Indigenous peoples (Spring, 2022; Two Bears, 2022). To address the state of schooling for Navajo people, among other concerns, Tribal Chairman Chee Dodge led a small delegation of Tribal Council members in May 1946 to Washington, DC. Chairman Dodge’s delegation demanded improved schooling opportunities for Navajo children so they could, in Dodge’s words, “compete with other children” in the rapidly industrializing postwar U.S. labor economy (Boyce, 1974, p. 172). Some U.S. senators contested Chairman Dodge’s request to uphold Article VI of the 1868 Treaty requiring schooling for all Navajo children, citing budgetary constraints. Dr. Willard Beatty of the Bureau of Indian Education, though, was able to work with leaders at the Department of Interior to hire Dr. George Sánchez to conduct a survey of Navajo education to provide the federal government with a deeper understanding of Navajo schooling needs (Boyce, 1974; Coombs, 1962; Sánchez, 1948; Szasz, 1999; Thompson, 1975). Dr. Sánchez’s (1948) report revealed that 75% of school-aged Navajo children (approximately 18,000 children) were not attending school. His report strongly recommended that the federal government establish a series of school districts with community elementary day schools and one high school per district at a cost of $90 million (Sánchez, 1948).

After Secretary of Interior Julius A. Krug visited the Navajo personally in 1948, he wrote a report titled, The Navajo - A Long Range Program for Navajo Rehabilitation. Although he essentially reiterated Dr. Sánchez’s (1948) findings from 2 years earlier, Krug’s report circulated through Washington, DC, quickly, and his suggestions were codified as Public Law 474 in 1950 (Boyce, 1974; Thompson, 1975). With the law, the 81st Congress appropriated $25 million over a 10-year period for school facilities. This was significantly less than Dr. Sánchez recommended, but that amount aimed to “give the Navajo Tribal Council greater control over the expenditure of tribal funds” and to “provide better educational opportunities,” according to President Harry Truman (Truman, 1950; Thompson, 1975). By the end of 1953, “three school construction” projects were completed, “five new trailer schools” were established in addition to the one that was previously set up as a test case, and school attendance increased significantly (Evans, 1954; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1954).

By 1954, the Navajo Tribal Council “was fully convinced of the essential nature of schooling as a preparation for successful living,” according to Robert W. Young, assistant to the general superintendent of the Navajo Agency in the BIA. On March 3, 1954, according to Young’s official government recording of Navajo government affairs, the Tribal Council “adopted a resolution authorizing the Commissioner [of Indian Affairs] to take whatever steps might be necessary, in his estimation, to accomplish the objective of universal education for the [Navajo]” (Young, 1961, p. 17). What followed under BIA Commissioner Philleo Nash was the Navajo Emergency Education Program (NEEP), which was a somewhat rushed but nevertheless successful project to get Navajo children into schools and “upgrade school staff . . . guidance programs, and classroom teaching techniques” (Acrey, 1988, p. 275).

These federal efforts behind the NEEP were not entirely benign. Under the guise of releasing American Indians from federal paternalism, the U.S. Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 180 and Public Law 280 in August 1953, two bills intended to liquidate tribal land, withdraw federal support, eliminate tribal sovereignty, and assimilate Indians as rapidly as possible. These so-called Termination Acts occurred alongside efforts to permanently relocate Native Americans from reservation homelands to urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago. Notably, the acts distinguished between “predominantly acculturated” and “predominantly Indian” tribes. Because the Navajo Nation fell into the latter category, extraordinary resources were deemed necessary to reeducate and “acculturate” Diné society before Congress could terminate their tribal status and withdraw federal support (Blackhawk, 1995; LaGrand, 2005; Wilkinson, 2005, p. 66). Although it took decades for Navajo governance to grapple meaningfully with “the roots of [colonial] entanglement” in education, year over year, from the 1950s through the 1960s, the Navajo Tribal Council’s Education Committee and local communities, such as Rough Rock, exerted sovereignty by instituting culturally grounded education and democratizing schooling for Navajo self-determination within the Navajo Nation (Greyeyes, 2022, p. 32).

The Recruitment of Black Teachers to BIA Schools on the Navajo Nation After Brown

With the opportunity for expanded educational options opened for several thousand new pupils came a need to hire many new teachers. Teacher recruitment for the Navajo reservation, never easy, had been exacerbated thanks to the post-WWII baby boom and national teacher shortage. During the war, the BIA had relaxed Civil Service requirements in order to bring English-speaking Navajo women and men into the head of the classroom, but suspending the requirement of a 4-year college degree was not enough to overcome the shortage (Thompson, 1975). Moreover, many White applicants harbored malignant racial prejudices that adversely affected their performance (Olson, 1950). As a result, BIA officials gradually expanded recruitment efforts to include a long-overlooked pool of potential applicants, African American individuals.

Johnson (2016) remains a foremost authority on the history of education of Black and Indigenous communities in the United States during this period, particularly documenting the connection fostered as a result of desegregation. For example, Johnson documented how beginning in August 1948, the Navajo Agency headquarters sent notices to various Black newspapers via the Associate Negro Press to advertise about the need for teachers. The advertisements did not stop there: Notices about the vacancies in teaching positions in the BIA schools began appearing in post offices and on HBCU campuses across the country. These early interventions yielded some success because by 1951, the Civil Service registers had yielded 13 African American teachers on the Navajo Nation. The new demands of the NEEP, however, presented an unprecedented challenge for Robert M. Patterson, the Navajo Area’s chief personnel officer. He needed to hire over 250 teachers before the fall 1954 school year. He received help from a newly chartered branch of the NAACP in Gallup, New Mexico (Johnson, 2016).

Johnson (2016) also outlined the ways Black regional newspapers in the Southwest published articles immediately after Brown with headlines spotlighting resistance to desegregation across the South and also the idea that Black teachers may not fare well in the aftermath. However, by contrast, African American teachers already in Diné Bikeyah had job security. The Supreme Court ruling did not apply to segregated federal schools for Native Americans, and teachers in the Civil Service system could count on federal enforcement of nondiscrimination policies unavailable to their counterparts in state employment. The Gallup NAACP, therefore, had no trouble securing qualified applicants among friends and colleagues back home in Jim Crow country (Johnson, 2016). In a single year, the civil rights organization assisted the Navajo Area Office in locating and recruiting “some 75 new Negro teachers at schools on the Reservation” (Johnson, 2016, p. 315).

The Brown decision and Robert Patterson’s decision to recruit Black educators had significant demographic repercussions. By 1959, the Navajo Area employed 122 African American teachers—for context, the agency employed 157 White teachers but only six American Indians instructors. By 1963, the number of African American teachers on Navajo had risen to 209. Reservation officials estimated that “at least eighty percent of our Negro employees have been hired as a result of direct recruitment” (Johnson, 2016, pp. 339–340). Robert Patterson’s personnel team knowingly used federal nondiscrimination policy to capitalize on the deteriorating conditions for African American teachers in the South and Southern border states. As his office reported in 1961, Southern school systems no longer employed African American teachers in most public schools while simultaneously, HBCUs continued to orient Black alumni “toward careers as teachers because opportunity, while restricted, is better in education than in the various other professional fields” (Johnson, 2016, p. 320). Patterson’s office therefore began directly targeting Black campuses for recruitment. Not only were these candidates better trained and qualified than many White applicants, African American recruits did not share the same racial prejudices (Johnson, 2016, p. 341). In addition to their familiarity with serving as racial role models, what distinguished Black teachers from their White peers was the experience of racial oppression, of knowing that the world outside the schoolhouse devalued their students, a world that questioned their very humanity and fought to keep them in a subordinated place in U.S. society (Anderson, 1988; Givens, 2021; Siddle Walker, 1996).

In 1961, the Navajo Area Office conducted a survey of African American educators. Among the 153 employees surveyed, the organization identified only three who lagged behind their White peers on performance reviews, with the majority progressing at or above “average” pace (U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1961). Yet even the “average” Black employee could also prove remarkable. Beulah Henderson Liston offers a glimpse at how Black women contributed to their new homes in Navajoland. Originally from North Carolina, Liston worked in Tohatchi Boarding School after graduating from Columbia Teachers College in the late 1950s. She served as president of the Gallup NAACP for over 10 years, supporting Black, Hispanic, and Native people against discrimination in housing and services. Across the span of her career, she conducted a study at a federal training center in the Navajo Area, studied language revitalization programs in Hawai‘i, and started the bilingual and special education programs at Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah. In her performance rating as department head at Chuska-Tohatchi Consolidated School, from August 1984 to June 1985, she received an overall rating that “exceeded performance standards” (National Personnel Records Center, 1974).

The experiment with African American teachers in Navajo schools proved so successful that when the BIA established its first national teacher recruitment office in 1967, it appointed Patterson’s personnel team to run the operation. The four full-time teacher recruiters included Leroy Bogan, an African American from Wichita Falls, Texas, who had taught in Indian Service since 1953 (Johnson, 2016). When asked why so many Black teachers ended up in Navajo schools during the 1950s and 1960s, Bogan later responded: “That wasn’t what they wanted to do. They were forced into it. They had to have a job, they couldn’t get one anywhere else. And a lot of them didn’t probably grow up with Navajo in their hearts” (personal communication, July 17, 2012). Bogan’s clear-eyed assessment speaks to the reality of how the BIA ultimately profited from the economic terrorism enacted through so-called “massive resistance” to desegregation after Brown. A career in Indian Service offered an opportunity for fair employment, but many teachers would likely have preferred to work in their home communities.

Within Diné Bikéyah and across Indian Country, African American educators left a complicated legacy. On the one hand, many students appear to have shared the positive impressions that Betty Yazzie carried with her. For example, Robert Johnson, a cultural specialist at the Navajo Nation Museum, stated “for some reason, when we went to a boarding school, we were more comfortable having a Black teacher in a classroom” (personal communication, August 4, 2011). Yet others, like Diné poet Laura Tohe, carry painful memories to this day. In her poem, “Our Tongues Slapped Into Silence,” Tohe recounts her first-grade teacher, Miss Rolands, slapping the hands young pupils with a ruler as punishment for speaking their native language. In the poem, Miss Rolands was “an alien in our world”; “a black woman from Texas, who treated us the way her people had been treated by white people”; and an agent of the U.S. government’s termination policy. “Utter one word of Diné,” Tohe wrote, “and the government made sure our tongues were drowned in the murky waters of assimilation” (Tohe, 1999, pp. 2–3). Tohe offers a reminder that although Black educators could sometimes soften the boarding school experience, their presence did not and could not fundamentally alter a colonial institution designed to undermine Diné sovereignty and eradicate Indigenous lifeways (Ewing, 2025; Iverson, 2002; Lomwawaima & McCarty, 2024).

Still, many African American teachers learned to love the Navajo Nation and hold its people in their hearts. Since 1954, Cleveland Miller had been principal at Chinle Boarding School, where Betty Yazzie found protection from bullying. Miller had attended Morehouse College at the same time as Martin Luther King, Jr., so when his superiors spoke of their duty to “perform for an underprivileged class of people,” these words likely resonated within him more powerfully than with White faculty members who had not experienced Jim Crow oppression. As his Black colleague Glover Rawls put it, “I thought my people had problems till I arrived here. The Navajo is really the underdog” (“Plight of Navajos Shown by Survey,” 1951). Miller worked in Chinle for over 30 years and became a beloved fixture of the community. When he retired in 1980, the veteran educator observed, “Most people retire and go back home, but I am retiring and leaving home, because Chinle is my home” (“Retirement Marks End of an Era,” 1979).

Conclusion

In the same year the U.S. Supreme Court rendered their decision in Brown, the NEEP—seemingly unrelated—was put in place and would end up having important consequences for both the Black and Navajo communities (U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 1969, p. xiii). Black teachers were able to continue in the profession in which they had trained and advanced. At the same time, the Navajo Nation found a community of educators who understood the oppression and marginalization they had experienced and continued to experience in their interactions with the U.S. government. The relationship was not perfect—certainly, examples exist of encounters going awry. However, as Betty’s story suggests, many, although not all, students found in these Black teachers powerful allies and advocates who grew to develop mutual love and concern. Although we hope to have brought new audiences to this important history, we also know we have only scratched the surface of this critical work and look forward to continuing to document more stories of these powerful Black educators and the Diné/Navajo and other Indigenous students they taught.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Oliver George Tapaha

Nathan Tanner

Terah Venzant Chambers

Notes

Authors

OLIVER GEORGE TAPAHA, PhD, is an assistant professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 351 Education (mail code 708) Champaign (UIUC Campus Mail), IL 61820; otapaha@illinois.edu . A citizen of the Diné/Navajo Nation, he brings his experience as a K–12 educator on the Navajo Nation to his research on Indigenous-centered, culturally responsive education and leadership.

KHALIL ANTHONY JOHNSON, JR., PhD, is an associate professor of African American studies at Wesleyan University, Center for African American Studies Room 229, 343 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459; kajohnson01@wesleyan.edu . He specializes in the intertwined histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous people in North America, with emphases on U.S. settler colonialism, education, and counter-hegemonic social movements.

NATHAN TANNER, PhD, is an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Nevada, Reno, William J. Raggio, Mail stop: 0299, 1664 N. Virginia Street Reno, NV 89557; nathantanner@unr.edu . Dr. Tanner is a non-Native settler scholar of education history, education leadership and policy, and Native American and Indigenous studies, specializing in archival, oral history and community-based research methodologies.

TERAH VENZANT CHAMBERS, PhD, is a professor of educational administration at Michigan State University, 408 Erickson Hall; 620 Farm Ln East Lansing, MI 48823; terah@msu.edu . Her research interests include post-Brown K–12 education policy and urban education leadership.

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