Revisionist History - Revisited: Ms. Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Revisionist History revisits an episode from season two and Malcolm tells the story of a phone call that set in motion a collaboration with President Barack Obama, which we'll preview next week. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Michael Lewis here with some exciting news. I have a new audio book coming out on October 6th called Blockers. It's among other things, an inside look at the early days of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, as it's referred to, as told by the public servants it entangled. But it's not just that. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands, and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods,

another delivered the cured of cystic fibrosis, and there was also a security guard. You can pre-order your copy of the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm. That's blockers.com. Pre-order now, and we'll also send you a code for 25% off of all Pushkin titles, including mine like Liar's Poker in the Big Short, through the end of the year. Back in season two of revisionist history, we did a four-part series on civil rights, And the first episode in that series was called Miss Buchanan's period of adjustment. It's still one of my favorite revisionist episodes of all time.

It was about Brown versus Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that desegregated America's schools, and is still today maybe the most famous of all Supreme Court cases. And our episode was about what happened after the Brown decision came down, the heartbreaking consequence that no one anticipated and everyone seems to have forgotten. Anyway, it ran, and about a week later, I got a call on my cell from restricted number. And normally I would never pick up a call from a restricted number, but for some reason I did, and a voice on the other end of the line said, Mr. Gladwell, hold for the president. and my first thought was,

President of what? And my second thought was, wow, this is quite the elaborate spam call. And I was just about to hang up when I hear Malcolm, Barack Obama. Just listen to your episode on the Brown case. I loved it. My wedding and the birth of my two children

are clearly the first, second, and third most memorable moments of my life. But this is a very strong number four. I mean, come on. Malcolm? Barack Obama. Anyway, fast forward a couple years, and Barack Obama's team approached me about doing a project with the president about reconstruction. That tumultuous window after the civil war that you kind of have to understand if you are to understand the story of race and civil rights in America. That project launches next week. It's called Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise. I know I'm biased, but it's really good. And we're going to

bring you a preview of it in this feed next week. But for today, let's go back to where this all began and play for you, Miss Buchanan's period of adjustment. One of my favorite episodes ever, and apparently some other people's favorite episode as well. On the campus of the University of Michigan, there's a gorgeous building called the Rackham Auditorium, built in the 1930s in the classical Renaissance style. And in January of 2004, on one of those cold Michigan days, a woman takes the stage in front of a big crowd. She's in her 60s. Her name is Mrs. Thompson. Good evening. It's indeed a pleasure to be with you this evening here on the campus of the University of Michigan, the home of the Wolverines. Is that right? And I heard you had a game last night and you only lost it

by two points, huh? She tells a funny story about how she was once invited to speak at Nassau and thought she was going to the Bahamas, only to discover that it was Nassau County, Long Island. She talks a little bit about her childhood and her family. Then, right in the middle of her talk, she starts reading a notice of termination sent many years ago to a teacher named Darla Buchanan. Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment next year, it is necessary for me to do. notify you now that your services will not be needed for next year. The students in the auditorium are wrapped. This is not what they expected. But Mrs. Thompson goes on and reads all the way to the end. I think I understand that all of you must be under

considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment. This period of adjustment, remember that line. It's a nice bit of condescension and understatement. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about that euphemism in the letter read by Mrs. Thompson, this period of adjustment.

Not that long ago, Americans set out to do something revolutionary, to change the world. but we botched it. And we didn't want to admit that fact. So we swept the whole episode under the rug and wrote letters to everyone concerned to try and absolve ourselves of the whole business. I believe that whatever happens

will ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concerned. Yeah, right. The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan was written by the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas, medium-sized city in the upper right-hand corner of the state. Like a lot of cities and towns in the United States, particularly those in the south, Topeka had segregated public elementary schools in the Jim Crow era. White children went to neighborhood schools. Black children went to a

separate system of schools scattered around the city with their own black teachers and black principals. In the years after the Second World War, the leading civil rights group of the day, the NAACP, decided to start challenging segregation. Topeka was one of their test cases. They found 13 black families and asked them to go down to their neighborhood white school and try and enroll their children. One of the couples they asked was Oliver and Leola Brown. Oliver Brown worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. Later, he was a pastor. This is Leola Brown, from an interview she gave in 1991 to the Kansas State Historical Society. My husband, Oliver Brown, he was a heavyweight fighter. He used to fight and go.

golden glass. The Browns had a seven-year-old named Linda. The black elementary school she was supposed to go to was called Monroe. To get there, she had to walk seven blocks, often in freezing weather, and cross a busy road, then get on a bus. The local white elementary school was Sumner, just four blocks on the Browns. Linda's playmates from the neighborhood all went there. So one day, as instructed by the NAACP, Oliver Brown took his daughter by the hand, and and walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary. As Linda said, when they got over there, that building looked so big there being a little kid going up to step.

And then when they got ready to talk, they had her sit on the outside of the office. Dad went in and was talking to the principal. You could imagine how uncomfortable the conversation was. Oliver Brown was not supposed to be there. And the principal would have had no idea what to say to him other than, I'm sorry, this is the way it is in Topeka, with little Linda waiting out in a hall.

And she said she could hear the voice just kind of getting a little loud. He said, well, it wasn't him. It was the school board. That was the policy of the school board. He couldn't do nothing about it, you know. He could no way he could not enroll in that school without their approval. All the black families got the same answer. Your child is not welcome.

So the local NAACP chapter sued the school board. Oliver Brown's name was put first, Brown versus Topeka Board of Education. it was bundled with a number of other desegregation cases from all around the country, more than 200 plaintiffs in all, went all the way to the Supreme Court. And on May 17, 1954, in one of the most famous legal decisions in American history, the court ruled in Oliver Brown's favor. The practice of educating black and white school children separately was ruled unconstitutional. It was a unanimous decision.

and had the broadest possible language which should set for rest once and for all, the problem as to whether or not second-class citizenship segregation could be consistent any longer with the law of the country. I'm guessing you were taught about the Brown decision in school or have watched a documentary on it. It's a milestone. But at the same time, it's a strange case. You could fill an auditorium with all the scholars who have a... quarrel with Brown. I mean, just go back and read it. It's supposed to be a ruling in favor of Oliver and Leola Brown and the families of Topeka. But the court actually says something entirely different

from what the black people of Topeka were saying. I went to Monroe School, you're in Topeka from grades 1 through 8. Listen again to Leola Brown's interview with the Kansas State Historical Society. On several occasions, Leola is asked about Monroe, the black school that her daughter had been attending. Leola grew up in Topeka. She went to Monroe as well, and Leola Brown makes it very clear that she loved Monroe. Well, all of it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful. And had it not been for this walking, you know, to school and going so far to school, we possibly never would have, you know, done what we did. Later in the interview, the issue comes up again. The interviewer asked Leola specifically, you didn't want your daughter to go to the way.

white school because the white school was better than the black school. And Leola is adamant, oh no. That never came up. We were getting a quality education at Monroe. We didn't have any bone to pick with our schools as far as education was concerned, nor the teachers. Because they were qualified and they did what they were supposed to do. For Leola and Oliver Brown, the lawsuit was a matter of principal. They didn't think there was anything wrong with the quality of education at Monroe, the all-black school. they just thought that the Topeka school board shouldn't be telling them where they could

or couldn't send Linda to school. Particularly if the only reason the school board could come up with was the color of Linda's skin. Now listen to the argument the Supreme Court makes in the Brown decision. They agree that the Browns ought to be able to send Linda to Sumner, but their reasoning is different. I'm quoting, segregation of white and colored children in public schools

has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The court's conclusion was that segregation was de facto unequal, that simply the act of educating black children separately from white children caused harm, serious harm. The court goes on, segregation with the sanction of law has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children. This was light years away from Leola Brown's position. Leola Brown said that Black-run schools like Monroe were good schools, but as a matter of principle, she ought to be able to enroll Linda at Sumner.

The court said, actually, Monroe was not a good school at all. It can't be a good school because segregation makes it inherently inferior. Leola Brown said, we're fine, we just want some control over our lives. The court said, you're not fine at all. Your educational and mental development has been retarded by your inferior schooling. Now, the court could have said something much more straightforward. How about this? Schools are where people make the connections that allow them to get ahead in the world.

You cannot lock black people out of the place where social power and opportunity reside. That argument would have done the job, right? But the court doesn't say that. In order to condemn the discrimination to Brown's face, the court instead makes the case that black people are psychologically crippled. The historian Daryl Scott wrote a brilliant book a while back called Contempt and Pity, in which he points out that there's been a long history behind this talk of psychological damage. It goes back to the days of slavery.

It's always been incredibly useful for white people to explain the problems of black people as the result of something personal, internal. It makes their problems their fault. If you go even back to the antebellum period, you would see planners who would talk about how they have no sense of family. Now, of course, these are the very people who are selling people's families at the auction block. Right, you know, they're destroying families. But they would justify it in their minds by saying they have no sense of families. Another historian, Charles Payne, makes a very similar argument in his essay,

The Whole United States is Southern, which you should read, by the way, if you ever want to be grabbed by the lapels. Payne argues that in the decades after the Civil War, Southern whites attempt to sell the rest of America on this way of thinking about race. They basically imposed apartheid on the South through brute political and economic force. But they want, I'm quoting Payne,

to frame the issue in a language of separation, customs are a way of life and social equality, language that constructed race in interpersonal and not structural terms. They want to pretend that racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So what does the U.S. Supreme Court do in 1954 in the Brown decision? It buys into the southern way of thinking about race. Leola Brown and the other plaintiffs say, we have a structural problem.

We don't have the power to send Linda to the school down the street. The court says, No, no, no. It's a psychological problem. Little Linda has been damaged in her heart. That may seem like a small distinction. Believe me, it's not. We're still dealing with the consequences. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it helps to explain why personalizing racial discussions is so problematic. It's about a wonderful bit of research done by two political scientists at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding. Grissom and Redding start with a well-known fact.

White students are far more likely to be in gifted and talented programs than black students. If your kid isn't a gifted and talented program, you've probably observed this. Where are the black kids, right? Now you might say, well, that's simply a reflection of the fact that white kids, for whatever reasons, have higher test scores on average than black kids. So Grissom and Redding look at a large national sample of elementary school kids and say, let's equalize for test scores. In other words, let's compare two students, one black and one white, but they both are very high achieving.

This is Grissom. Would that difference in probability that they are identified by the system as gifted, would that persist? And the answer is that it does. In fact, you know, it's still the case that even when you look at two students who are similar on math and reading achievement in elementary school, a white student and a black student, that white student is still more than two times as likely to be receiving gifted services as that black student is. Gifted programs are supposed to be meritocracies, places where the brightest children are given a chance to shine. Grissom's saying that's not the way things work in practice.

And you can go a little further because you can throw other things into the equation that aren't just achievement. You can look at differences in income. The data have how healthy the parent says that child is. We know what age that child entered kindergarten. You know, on average, white students and black students enter kindergarten at different ages because of the phenomenon of red-shirting. White parents are more likely to hold their kids back at the start of schooling than black students are. That doesn't explain the gifted gap.

In other words, you match up bright black kids with equally bright white kids. Then you make sure the two groups are similar in age, class, and the health of their parents. And you still find that the white kids are far more likely to be admitted to, gifted and talented programs. Kind of a puzzle, right? Finally, Grissom and Redding say, look, in many cases, teachers play a big role in which students get into gifted programs. They encourage them, they recommend them. So they think, maybe the answer here lies with not who the child is, but who the child's teacher is. In the overwhelming majority of school districts in the United States, the way that a kid ever gets to be identified as gifted is if someone

in the school, usually a classroom teacher has to look at that kid and say, I think this kid might be gifted. So Grissom does something really simple. He looks at the race of the teacher. And what he finds is that for white kids, there's no effect. It doesn't matter, but not for black students. For a black student, the world looks different. So if I'm a black student and I have a black classroom teacher, the probability that I'm assigned to giftedness in the next year, it looks very much like the probability for a white student. But if I am a black student and I have a white classroom teacher, my probability of being identified as gifted is substantially lower. How much lower? Okay. So for very high-achieving black students, the probability of being assigned to gifted services

under a white teacher is about half the probability as an observably similar black student taught by a black teacher. If you're black, having a black teacher makes a difference, and not just for getting into gifted programs. Having a black teacher raises the test scores of black students, it changes the way black students behave, and

it dramatically decreases the chances a black male student would be suspended. A group of social scientists recently went over the records of 100,000 black students in North Carolina over a five-year period. They found that having even one black teacher between the third and fifth

grade reduced the chance that an African-American boy would later drop out of high school. By how much? By 39%. One black teacher. Now, does this mean that white teachers are diabolical racists trying to hold down black students? No. This isn't conscious discrimination. The point is that teachers have power. They're gatekeepers. They control the classroom. They decide who gets recommended for prizes like gift to programs and who doesn't. They decide who stays and who gets suspended. By directing their attention to a child, a teacher can inspire. By ignoring another or sending him more often to the principal's office, teachers can

discourage. Listen to Leola Brown again about why she liked her elementary school, Monroe, so much. Oh, I loved it. I loved it. The teachers were fantastic. We got a fantastic education there. It wasn't, as I say, this case wasn't based on that, because we had fantastic teachers, and we learned. We learned a lot.

were good to us, more like an extended family, like mothers and so forth, because they took an interest in you, you know, and... They took an interest in you. That's what all the research on blacks and whites and gifted programs comes down to. You need to have someone who takes an interest in you if you want education to work and be fair. They made one serious mistake, which I will have to hold them responsible for. I came across another archive of interviews from the Brown era, Duke University's Behind the Vale Oral History Project. The interview you're hearing is from Richmond, Virginia.

It's with an African-American teacher named Celestine Porter. And she says that once you grant this idea that a teacher is a gatekeeper and that a child needs someone to take an interest in them, then that means integration should have been pursued very differently. They made students do the integration. they should have had teachers first. And they didn't do that. At every one of those white schools, at every one of the black schools,

if they were going to send white children into the black school, they should have white teachers somewhere. If they were going to send black children into the white schools, they should have had some black teachers there. Now, the first people that should have been integrated should have been teachers and administrations first.

But they didn't do that. They moved the children. She's absolutely right. Read the Brown decision for yourself. The court goes on and on about kids, but they have virtually nothing to say about teachers. The word teacher comes up once in the main text and a few times in the footnotes.

That's it. How on earth can you undertake the greatest transformation of public education in American history and barely mentioned teachers? Young people, didn't I know, business being moved first, to have borne the brunt of the segregation process. And it did something to the youngsters.

It did something to them. It made them hate. It gave them a sense of, nobody's here for me. And most of the students that had moved from the black schools into the white situation, we as teachers had been there to nurture them, to help them along, to recognize their difficulties, to work. with them. When they moved into the white situation, teachers didn't know. They didn't know teachers. Teachers were afraid of them. The Brown decision was all about children. The signature

memories of the Brown era are all about black children being escorted into previously all-white schools. We should have been talking about teachers. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IRR radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHAR Pride, Canada, your favorite hits and must-have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists, like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada.

Stream us on your phone. Or listen now at IHartRadio.ca. It's Michael Lewis here with some exciting news. I have a new audio book coming out on October 6th called Blockers. It's among other things, an inside look at the early. days of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, as it's referred to, as told by the public servants it entangled. But it's not just that. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands, and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules.

One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another delivered the cured of cystic fibrosis, and there was also a security guard. You can pre-order your copy of the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm. That's blockers.fm. Pre-order now and we'll also send you a code for 25% off of all Pushkin titles, including mine like Lyres Poker in the Big Short, through the end of the year. About three and a half hours due east of Topeka on I-70, there is a little town called Morbally. Morbally is in the area of Missouri called Little Dixie because it was settled by migrants from the south before the Civil War. There was a lot of slave-owning in Little Dixie. compared with the rest of Missouri, a lot of racial hostility in that part of the state.

And I don't think you can understand what happened after the Brown decision without first understanding what happened in Marbley. In the early 1950s, Morbally had a school system employing around 100 teachers across eight schools. One of those schools was black. It was called Lincoln. Lincoln had 11 teachers. The year after the Brown decision, Morbally integrates. They do that by closing.

to one black school, Lincoln, and busing all the black students there to white schools. After closing Lincoln, the Mobley school system then says, wait, if we combine all the students in Morbily into one school system, we don't think we need as many teachers as we had before. So they say, let's evaluate all the teachers from the two newly combined systems. Keep the best ones, let the mediocre ones go. I think you can see what's coming. They decide to fire every one of the 11. 11 black teachers who used to work at Lincoln.

So the black teachers sue, and they lose. They appeal. They lose again. In 1959, they asked the Supreme Court to consider the case. The Supreme Court says no. Brown is the great victory. Moberly is the great defeat. And they're connected. Let me give you a flavor of the case.

The black teachers say, you can't possibly say that we were the absolute worst of all the teachers in the combined system. we've been evaluated for years by our superintendent and have been given high marks. The white school board counters with, sure, but you were being compared to other black teachers. You need to be compared to white teachers. So the black teachers say,

yeah, but we stack up really well against white teachers. By the way, this was not a stretch. Virtually every profession except teaching was closed to educated African Americans in those years. If you were smart and liked learning in that era, you became a teacher. The court then says, so what? I'm quoting, human capabilities cannot be reduced

to a mathematical formula. Intangible factors such as personality, character, disposition, industry, and adaptability vitally affect the work of any teacher. I think there's one intangible factor missing in that list,

don't you? What could it be? Do you suppose it begins with an R? Forgive me for going on and on about this one obscure case, but you have to get the flavor of it. The plaintiffs say, wait, one of us is a superstar, graduate degrees, qualifications, ratings to the roof. Her name is Mary Ella Timony, and the white superintendent agrees. She's a star. But he says, I'm still not hiring her because, and I'm quoting here from the judge's decision, because she gave the impression

that she considered herself superior to other teachers and was resentful towards authority. Resentful towards authority? You think? She just got fired! The judge simply can't get Mary Ella Timony out of his head. I'm quoting again. It is unfortunate when teachers have an attitude such as this teacher has,

and I do not mean to say that such attitude is limited to any race or color, but when it does exist, it vitally. affects the teaching ability of the individual. She's uppity, an uppity negro. Of course they don't want to keep her. Because they understand the same thing that Leola Brown understands, and all the many academics who have studied

what actually happens to black kids in the classroom understand, which is that educational equality is a function of who holds the power in the classroom. So Mowberley Misery gets rid of its black teachers. And by the way, so does almost everybody else. Across the entire South, black teachers just get fired, left and right. It wasn't something done secretly. It was done right out in the open. There was something like 82,000 African-American teachers in the South before the Brown decision. Within a decade, as the

decision was slowly implemented across the country, about half had been fired. What surprises me is the kind of historical amnesia there is surrounding that issue, that many, many people today who are searching for black teachers have no understanding of the fact that many of them lost their jobs. One of the few scholars who has paid any attention to what happened is Michelle Foster, an education professor at the University of Louisville. Twenty years ago, Foster tracked as many black teachers from that era as she could find. What role teachers did black women play in the South relative to children? They were nursemaids, they were housekeepers, they were domestics. That's the role they played.

You know, every southerner, I meet a lot of others. They say, well, I had a black somebody who took care of them. But that's a mother, you know, that's a little different position. When you're a teacher, you're evaluating, you're judging. Even those who got to keep their jobs told one story after another of humiliation. It was too much. One of the teachers Foster interviewed went for a meeting with the superintendent with all of the other black teachers who were being kept on.

I'm quoting, they were 15 of us and not a single one of them in their as dark as I am, not one. That ought to tell you something. By the way, the remaining black teachers couldn't use the teacher's bathroom. They had to use the children's bathroom. To this day, the ranks of black teachers in the United States have not recovered

from the humiliations and mass firings of the 1950s and 60s. As a percentage, there are far fewer black teachers than there are black students. And when you think back to studies on how important black teachers are for the performance of black students, that's a tragedy.

Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, one classroom after another was purged of its black teachers. And Topeka, Kansas, of course. Topeka made a show of it. They assigned a black teacher to a half-time position at the formerly all-white Randolph School. And then the principal,

a man named Stanley Stalter, had the task of calling up white parents to see if they objected to this one half-time black teacher. And of course they did. Some were adamant. Nope. Some of them had very peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black teacher's room.

That's the principal, Stalter, interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society. Another one said, my child is now 12 years of age. and is beginning her menstrual period and this is not the time of her life to be put in here with a black teacher, a male. Okay. That one topped everything.

There's a limit to how many times a school board is going to try and talk white taxpaying parents out of their fear of placing a menstruating adolescent in class with a black teacher. Far easier just not to hire any black teachers at all. Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment next year in schools for Negro children, it is not possible at this time to offer you employment for next year. If the court should rule that segregation in the elementary grades is unconstitutional,

our board will proceed on the assumption that the majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ Negro teachers next year for white children. I said at the beginning that the woman reading that letter at the conference of the University of Michigan was a Mrs. Thompson. That's her married name. Her first name is Linda. Her maiden name is Brown. Linda Brown, the Brown of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. This is the little girl Oliver Brown tried and failed to enroll at Sumner Elementary School. She was invited to Michigan to speak in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision.

And what does Linda Brown-Thompson do? In the middle of her talk, she interrupts her eyewitness account to remind her audience who bore the cost of integration. Not white people. Black people. I think I understand that all of you must be under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties, an inconvenience which you must be experiencing during this period of adjustment. I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concerned.

Sincerely yours, Wendell Godwin, Superintendent of Schools. Revisionist history is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Seymara Martinez-White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawne Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Scare. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisbrigg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. It's Michael Lewis here with some exciting news.

I have a new audio book coming out on October 6th called Blockers. It's among other things, an inside look at the early days of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, as it's referred to, as told by the public servants it entangled. But it's not just that. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands, and another made sure that politicians and civil servants, played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another delivered the cured of cystic fibrosis, and there was also a security guard. You can pre-order your copy of the audiobook exclusively at blockers.fm. That's

blockers.fm. Pre-order now, and we'll also send you a code for 25% off of all Pushkin titles, including mine like Liar's Poker in the Big Short, through the end of the year.