Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Before we start the show today, I'm wondering if you could do us at the pod here, a solid. MPR is doing its annual survey to better understand how you, our listeners, spend time with podcasts. It's a really quick and anonymous thing that just ask, you know, what shows you listen to, how often, that sort of thing. And it would help us out a ton if you could fill it out.

It's at npr.org slash podcast survey, all one word. That's npr.org slash podcast survey.

And you really, honestly, thank you. But back to book business. On the show today, we've got

this interview with Leslie Fenwick, who wrote the book Jim Crow's Pink Slip, the untold story of

black principal and teacher leadership. In it, she argues that the landmark Browd versus the

Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in American schools

also resulted in the mass firing or demotion of black principals and teachers.

Because in those newly desegregated schools, white parents didn't want their white kids

to be taught by black teachers. And she makes the point to NPR's Michelle Martin that

we can see the ramifications

of this still in the lack of diversity we see in school administration. A lot of short daily

news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR,

we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes.

Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning.

Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR.

We talk a lot about educator diversity and the underrepresentation of blacks and other people of

color in the teaching force.

You know, about 7% of the nation's 3.2 million teachers are black.

About 11% of the 93,000 principals are black and less than 3 percent of the nation's 14,000

superintendents are black. But we've never talked about the history about why this is so. And one of the

things I was trying to do in the book was push against the myth that after Brown and desegregation,

that blacks pursued careers on mass in other fields outside of education,

...