Lessons for today from the overlooked stories of Black teachers during the segregated civil rights era

My grandmother’s name was Mrs. Zola Jackson.

As one of the handful of Black teachers in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era of racially segregated public schools, she faced a daunting challenge in providing a first-class education to students considered second-class citizens.

Educated at Rust College, a historically Black school, in the 1940s, she taught in the small city of Hattiesburg for over 30 years from 1943-1975, the majority of which was spent in elementary classrooms at DePriest, the school for Black children.

Before the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board decision that deemed segregated schools “separate and unequal,” the efforts of Black teachers went unheralded, underappreciated and virtually unknown.

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