Black Mondays

The Memphis School Crisis of 1969 concerned the racial imbalance of the controllers, providers, and recipients of the education system in Memphis City Schools. In September of 1969, the Memphis Chapter of the NAACP sent a letter to the Memphis City Schools Board of Education citing fifteen demands to advance the standing, role, and education of colored people in the public education system. African American children made up fifty-three percent of the student population, yet there were no African American Board members, and few African American teachers. The NAACP wanted the School Board to rezone to ensure more diversity in schools, open top administrative and Board positions to be filled by African Americans, increase the hiring of black teachers, redistribute teachers and staff to create a racially balanced workforce in every school, and create courses and use textbooks that specifically reflected African American culture and contributions to society. To ensure that the Board would take their demands seriously, leaders within the NAACP—Maxine Smith and Laurie Sugarmon—devised a strategy that came to be known as Black Mondays. This strategy consisted of multiple organized marches, school walkouts (by both black teachers and students), picketing, a selective buying campaign, and perseverance through both unproductive and disrespectful meetings with the Board.

Each Monday in the month of October, the NAACP called the black community to not buy from certain stores, for black teachers to stay home from work, and for black parents to keep their children out of school. This strategy aimed pressure the city economically and socially for change. At this time, school systems in the state of Tennessee were given federal funds according to their average daily attendance (ADA) numbers. A weekly absence of potentially half of the student body would significantly affect the ADA figures, and thus reduce the amount of federal funding received. Black Mondays were responsible for more than 244,000 student absences in the month of October. This campaign however was controversial within the black community for a number of reasons. Primarily, taking children out of school when their right to education had been fought for in the first place was quite counter productive, and for each day the child was out of school, they had the potential to fall behind in classes. Participation in the marches and protests led to firing, discrimination, and police brutality from the greater white community. In the end, negotiations with the Board ended in November. Promises were made that the next two vacancies in the Board would be filled by African Americans, the Board would be restructured to give Blacks an equal chance to be elected, an African American assistant superintendent would be inducted, and any student, teacher, or parent involved in Black Monday would not be penalized and all lawsuits would be dropped.

Sources:

-Maxine Smith, “Report of Executive Secretary: October 8, 1969-November 4, 1969,” Tennessee Electronic Library Volunteer Voices, http://idserver.utk.edu/?id=200700000001641.

-Sherry Hoppe and Bruce Speck, Maxine Smith’s Unwilling Pupils: Lessons Learned in Memphis’s Civil Rights Classroom (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007).