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professional advancement or other white collar jobs were limited.

Thus, a teaching position in the District's public schools was a ticket in the black community for inclusion in the upper reaches of society. Howard's Williston Lofton wrote in the early 1940's: "In the colored community of Washington, the public school teachers form the most stable part of the upper class."17 Many blacks assumed the values usually associated with this social stratum. Constance Green attributes such class-consciousness and black class values to the particular perspective that black educators had in their teaching responsibilities. While white teachers focused on the average or below-average student, blacks believed "their first obligation was to the most able..."18--the above-average and gifted. Attention to the slow learner, the miscreant, or the non-motivated student would be at the expense of the gifted or the student willing to learn. Given a society of racial discrimination and limited opportunity, educational energies must be directed to the promising and motivated pupils. Thus, a kind of Darwinian philosophy--the survival of the fittest--characterized black education:

...while nothing in official reports acknowledged such a philosophy, it was a natural point of view in so class-conscious a community as colored Washington, where teachers, themselves occupying an enviable 
place in the social structure, would understandably want to preserve it intact.19