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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
In 1941, members of the local unit of the Florida State Teachers Association (FSTA) met in Tampa to plan a lawsuit against Hillsborough County's school board for paying African-American teachers less than white teachers. Hilda Turner, who taught history and economics at Tampa's historically black high school, agreed to serve as plaintiff; she was the only one to volunteer. Thurgood Marshall chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s Legal Defense Fund (LDF), assisted Samuel McGill, a Jacksonville attorney, in representing Turner, who filed a complaint in federal court that November. In the fall of 1942, responding to Turner's suit, Hillsborough County school board dropped the race-tiered salary schedule and adopted a “rating” scale that based teachers' pay on a number of factors other than training and experience, including “physical, health, personality, and character,” “scholarship and attitude,” and “instructional skill and performance.” The rating committee charged with classifying teachers placed 84 percent of white teachers in the highest pay bracket, and 80 percent of African-American teachers in the lowest pay bracket. As in other Florida cases, Hillsborough County school board offered the new rating scale as evidence that the district no longer discriminated on the basis of race, an assertion Marshall attempted to challenge at trial. However, in 1943, two years after Turner's complaint was originally filed, the federal district judge ruled that the new salary scale was “fair on its face.”
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