During U.S. school desegregation, education leaders played crucial roles that showcased their capacity to humanize their Black students. Their actions, we posit, reveal their level of racial literacy. Using oral history interviews and archival records, we examined school desegregation implementation through a racial literacy lens. We analyzed school district leadership in 1970s central Texas alongside Black students' resistance to white supremacist and antiBlack domination. We show how a white male leader's difficulty to see, hear, and heed his educational community largely explains Black desegregating students' resistance to sub-humanization. In this, we argue that the way leadership views a community determines how it interprets said community's concerns and the extent to which it can lead and humanize that community. This account adds to critical race research that links identity and education leadership, building on new racial literacy perspectives that situate it on a continuum with hegemonic and counterhegemonic at opposite ends.