She worked as a research assistant for Charles S. Johnson, Fisk University's first president.
[2] Valien became the only African American to conduct research on school desegregation for the Southern Education Reporting Service, a project co-founded by Johnson and Harvie Branscomb, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University.
[3] She was eventually dismissed from her position after she criticized the way some school districts were responding to Brown v. Board of Education.
[3] Valien authored books about desegregation in St. Louis, Missouri, Clinton, Tennessee and Cairo, Illinois.
With her husband, she published research about the Montgomery bus boycott and interviews with civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr.[1] Valien married Dr. Preston Valien, the chair of the Sociology department at Fisk University.