The curriculum that Booker T. Washington High School provided reflected the thinking of Black educators who understood that their students needed to know both the formal principles of American democracy and the specific history of Black American resistance to the gap between those principles and the reality their students lived in. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were not abstract historical figures in this curriculum; they were examples of what individuals had done in the face of systems designed to oppress them.
The teachers at segregated Black schools in the South in the 1950s occupied a specific professional position: they were members of an educated professional class whose professional options were substantially limited by segregation. They could not teach at white schools. Their professional advancement was constrained by the segregated institutional structure. The energy and capability they brought to their work in Black schools was in part a product of the same constraints that shaped their students’ lives.
The quality of Colvin’s education is documented by her ability to make a constitutional argument at fifteen. The teachers who provided that education deserve acknowledgment as part of the context in which what happened on March 2, 1955, became possible.
## The Economics of Segregation and Its Victims
The segregated bus system in Montgomery was not only a system of racial humiliation; it was also an economic arrangement that transferred value from Black riders to a system that treated them as lesser citizens. Black Montgomerians paid the same fare as white passengers but received inferior service and were subject to rules that white passengers were not. They subsidized a system that demeaned them.