Revisited: Ms. Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bushkin.

• 1:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Back in season two of Revisionist History, we did a four-part series on civil rights. And the first episode of 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.

• 2:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 3:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Anyway, fast forward a couple of 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 Ms. 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,

• 3:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  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?

• 4:24Speaker 05

  And I heard you had a game last night, and you only lost it by two points, huh?

• 4:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  Dear Miss Buchanan, due to the present uncertainty about enrollment next year, it is necessary for me to notify you now that your services will not be needed for next year.

• 5:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  The students in the auditorium are rapt. This is not what they expected. But Mrs. Thompson goes on and reads all the way to the end.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  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.

• 5:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  This period of adjustment. Remember that line. It's a nice bit of condescension and understatement.

• 5:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

• 5:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  This episode is about that euphemism in the letter read by Mrs. Thompson, this period of adjustment.

• 6:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concerned.

• 6:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, right.

• 6:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  The letter of termination to Darla Buchanan was written by the superintendent of schools in Topeka, Kansas, the capital of Kansas, a 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

• 7:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  My husband, Oliver Brown, he was a heavyweight fighter. He used to fight in Golden Gloves.

• 7:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 from 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 walked her over to enroll at Sumner Elementary.

• 8:17Speaker 06

  As Linda said, when they got over there, that building looked so big there being a little kid going up steps. And then when they got ready to talk, they had her sit on the outside of the office. Dad went in, was talking to the principal.

• 8:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 the hall.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  And she said she could hear the voices kind of getting a little loud. And he said, "Well, it wasn't him, it was the school board. That was the policy of the school board, and he couldn't do nothing about it, you know. He could no way, he could not enroll Linda in that school without their approval."

• 9:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 schoolchildren separately was ruled unconstitutional.

• 9:40Speaker 07

  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.

• 10:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  I went to Monroe School here in Topeka from grades one through eight.

• 10:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 10:51Speaker 06

  Wow, it was wonderful. I tell you, it was wonderful. And had it not been for this walking, you know, school and going so far to school, we possibly never would have, you know, done what we did.

• 11:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Later in the interview, the issue comes up again. The interviewer asked Leola specifically, "You didn't want your daughter to go to the 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."

• 11:23Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  For Leola and Oliver Brown, the lawsuit was a matter of principle. 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.

• 11:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  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."

• 12:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 is 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."

• 13:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 13:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 were justified in their minds by saying they have no sense of families.

• 14:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  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've 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.

• 15:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  They want to pretend that racial conflict is just a psychological problem. So what does the US Supreme Court do in 1954 in the Brown decision? It buys into the Southern way of thinking about race.

• 15:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 15:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 is in 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,

• 16:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  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, 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

• 17:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 17:37Speaker 07

  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 than black students are. That doesn't explain the gifted gap.

• 17:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 18:25Speaker 07

  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.

• 18:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 18:50Speaker 07

  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 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.

• 19:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  How much lower?

• 19:17Speaker 07

  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.

• 19:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 will be suspended.

• 19:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 20:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 gifted 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.

• 20:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Listen to Leola Brown again about why she liked her elementary school Monroe so much.

• 20:52Speaker 06

  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 and they were good to us. More like an extended family, like mothers and so forth. Because they took an interest in you, you know.

• 21:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 21:27Speaker 05

  They made one serious mistake, which I will have to hold them responsible for.

• 21:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  I came across another archive of interviews from the Brown era, Duke University's Behind the Veil 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.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  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 schools, they should have had 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.

• 22:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 mention teachers?

• 22:56Speaker 05

  Young people didn't know business being moved first. They were having on 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 the teachers. Teachers were afraid of them.

• 23:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 23:51Speaker 00

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• 24:28Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 25:09Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 25:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  About three and a half hours due east of Topeka on I-70, there is a little town called Morbly. Morbly 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 Morbly. In the early 1950s, Morbly 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, Morbly integrates.

• 26:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  They do that by closing the one black school, Lincoln, and busing all the black students there to white schools. After closing Lincoln, the Morbly school system then says, "Wait, if we combine all the students in Morbly 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.

• 26:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  They decide to fire every one of the 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.

• 27:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  You need to be compared to white teachers." So the black teachers say, "Yeah, but we stack up really well against white teachers." And 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?

• 28:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 Timoney." 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.

• 29:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  The judge simply can't get Mary Alatimini 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.

• 29:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  So, mobily 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 were 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.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the few scholars who has paid any attention to what happened is Michelle Foster, an education professor at the University of Louisville. 20 years ago, Foster tracked as many Black teachers from that era as she could find.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  What role did 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 Southerners, 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.

• 31:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  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, "There were 15 of us, and not a single one of them in there 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.

• 31:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  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

• 32:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  parents to see if they objected to this one half-time black teacher. And of course, they did.

• 32:29Speaker 07

  Some were adamant. Nope. Some of them had very peculiar reasons for not wanting this child in the black teacher's room.

• 32:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's the principal, Stalter, interviewed by the Kansas Historical Society.

• 32:46Speaker 07

  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."

• 33:07Speaker 07

  That one topped everything.

• 33:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's a limit to how many times a school board is going to try and talk white, tax-paying 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.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Dear Ms. 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.

• 34:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  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. I believe that whatever happens will ultimately turn out to be the best for everyone concerned. Sincerely yours, Wendell Godwin, Superintendent of Schools.

• 35:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Mia Labelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and C. Omara Martinez-White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 35:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  We spend hours deciding what to buy, but there's a split second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agentic commerce is testing that moment more than ever. And that's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of purchase and seller protection, all of which make sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open: Built for All Business. Visit paypalopen.com. Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply.

• 36:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  See paypal.com/risk-management for details. A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why teams trust 4imprint. With thousands of high-quality customizable products like premium apparel, drinkware, tech, and more, it's easy to create a gift that feels meaningful and on-brand. And with 4imprint's expert support and their 360-degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive exactly as intended.

• 37:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Explore gifting with confidence at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, for certain. For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a Whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner, and he said, "Oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes." And he was right. I've worn one ever since. Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning, and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long-lasting battery, and now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me.

• 38:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Whoop is a winner. New members can try Whoop with a 30-day free trial before committing to a membership. That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.