In August 1954, three months after the Brown decision, the editors of the Pittsburgh Courier, under the preview of Alexander Rivera Jr., administered a three-question poll to the three-hundred members in attendance at the American Teachers Association’s (ATA) national conference meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. The ATA, founded in 1904 to offer African American teachers a means to discuss ways to increase the number of high schools for African American students, improve their quality of instruction, and help talented students attend college, represented 16,500 African American teachers in seventeen southern and Border States. As much as possible, the editors and Rivera Jr. were “interested in learning the true feelings of a representative cross-section of” African American teachers.
As critical as this information was in creating a foundation that builds on the implementation of public-school integration, the survey also proved insightful for what it did not reveal. The survey was not designed to answer questions concerning equal school funding or collecting data on the status of African American education. While these were important issues, Rivera Jr. understood the critical concerns of this period to be the legal maneuvering and political wrangling Southern states would incorporate to avoid implementing the SCOTUS’s Brown decision.
Rivera Jr.’s reporting over time, made clear that neither he nor the Pittsburgh Courier were fearful or reluctant in confronting the moments, and times in American history that proved both detrimental and beneficial to African Americans.