African American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas by Johnny E. Williams

Author:Johnny E. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Teacher Salary Equalization Movement

In 1942, African-American Arkansans began their struggle for equal education when the Arkansas Teachers Association (ATA), an African-American teachers association founded in 1898, filed a suit against the Little Rock School District seeking the equalization of African-American and European-American teachers’ salaries. Sue Cowan Morris (later known as Sue Cowan Williams), chairperson of the English department at Dunbar High School and a member of the Little Rock Classroom Teachers Association (an ATA affiliate), agreed to be the plaintiff for the lawsuit despite the fact that doing so caused her dismissal from her position. The court case Sue Morris v. The Little Rock School District was tried in U.S. District Court. The court ruled that the school district had not discriminated against African-American teachers in fixing salaries (Patterson 1981:90). When Morris appealed the court’s decision to the U.S. Eighth District Court of Appeals in the fall of 1943, the superintendent of the Little Rock School Board refused to renew her teaching contract (Patterson 1981:90). His actions did not stop Morris from pressing forward with her appeal, which resulted in the District Court of Appeals reversal of the lower court’s ruling in 1945, ordering equal pay scales for schoolteachers.

According to several respondents who were members of the Arkansas Teachers Association during the struggle for equal salaries, religious culture was vital in promoting and sustaining their commitment to organizational goals when opposition was fierce. Though the Arkansas Teachers Association was not a religious organization, respondents suggested that “it opened all its meetings with prayers [and] there were people in the [ATA]—a special group of ministers, and they participated but they were just regular participants, and did not sign out as religious leaders…. [E]verybody in [the organization] belonged to the church.”

Pattillo-McCoy stresses the importance of religious practices such as prayer in creating collective goals expressed in the content of social action (1998:770). During periods of adversity, individuals like Sue Morris pressed forward with group goals because the bonds of friendship and family solidly grounded her in movement social support networks that urged her on (Kirk 2002:40). Hence, failure to carry through with group goals—in this case, ATA litigation—is tantamount to deserting one’s friends and family (Bainbridge 1997:135). One respondent, who became an ATA litigant in the struggle for teacher salary equalization in 1952 when school districts throughout Arkansas either could not or refused to raise funds necessary to comply with the District Court of Appeals salary equalization order, maintained that his interactions with religious individuals in his family and church “gave me a strong sense of right and wrong. And I felt—for example, that a teacher that was my counterpart in the white school, back in the 1950s was making $100 a month more than I was… I just felt that was wrong. And the teacher organization and church… felt it was wrong too.”

He continued: “In the earlier times—and I suppose now also—the church was one of the few institutions that was basically owned by blacks, controlled by blacks. It’s an institution where you can gather and be free to express yourself.

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