3 ideas
Beryl Gilroy came to London from British Guiana in 1952 as a trained, experienced teacher, but education authorities rejected her for years, so she worked as a factory hand, domestic worker and clerk. She was eventually hired to teach in a London primary school and later became one of London's first Black headteachers. Her case shows a credential that should have been portable losing its value only because of the race of the person holding it.
Young children's hostility toward a Black teacher repeated, almost word for word, what they had heard at home and in the street. Children do not create racial contempt themselves; they take it from adults and try it out on the nearest target. This means classroom prejudice can be traced to its adult sources and responded to as learned behavior, not as the child's own nature.
Colleagues, headteachers and parents seldom stated their prejudice openly. They showed it through careful courtesy, unexplained rejections, doubts about competence and 'concern' about how parents would react. Reading the polite refusal as the working form of the barrier explains how someone can be kept out while nobody admits to keeping her out.