The purpose of this paper was to initiate a conversation among scholars, educators, citizens, and policymakers over the vital question of what happened to Black teachers outside of the South as a result of the "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling and subsequent desegregation efforts. As a history of Black teachers before and after Brown shows, there is no simple answer to this question. A very long history of racial discrimination, segregation, and exclusion of Black teachers in Northern public schools means that Black teachers were catastrophically underrepresented across the region by 1954. The gains made in the two decades after Brown are heartening, yet very limited in scope. This history encourages educational reformers to take seriously the problem of Black teacher underrepresentation in the past and today, which is inseparable from the larger struggle for racial equality and meaningful integration in our public schools.