These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers:

1. • How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?

2. • How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?

3. • How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?

4. • Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?