Abstract
Charl Ormond Williams began her career in education by working her way through the ranks in the rural schools of West Tennessee, from teacher to principal to normal school instructor to county superintendent. Moving, then, from the local to the national stage, Williams served as a notable leader of the cause of women teachers in the National Education Association (NEA) for over a quarter of a century. Williams was neither the founder of a particularly notable progressive school nor was she identified with pedagogical innovation that commonly has been or is referred to as progressive. Yet, her work as a successful, change-oriented rural school teacher and administrator prior to coming to the NEA, her long career as a prominent staff member of the NEA, her links to various women’s groups in pursuit of her NEA activities, her defense of public education as a cornerstone of American democracy, her political savvy and experience as both a lifelong Democrat from the South and a nonpartisan advocate of NEA causes, and her constant devotion to the cause of women as teachers and administrators in the public schools all mark her as a worthy candidate for inclusion in a volume on “founding mothers.”1
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Notes
Mary Hoffschwelle, Rebuilding the Rural Southern Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), pp. 43, 65, 81.
Charl Ormond Williams and Carroll Van West, eds., The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), pp. 1063–64. Crump had helped Williams in supporting African American education. In turn, he and his political machine received substantial electoral support from African Americans in elections. See Hoffschwelle, Rebuilding the Rural Southern Community, p. 81.
The best history of the NEA in its early years, though by no means an adequate one, is Edgar B. Wesley, NEA: The First Hundred Years (New York: McGraw Hill, 1957).
Wayne J. Urban, Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), chap. 5;
Erwin Stevenson Selle, The Organization and Activities of the National Education Association: A Case Study in Educational Sociology (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932), p. 59.
Charl O. Williams, “The Call to Service,” NEA Journal 10 (October, 1921): 135.
Charl Williams, “Tenure—An Important Problem,” NEA Journal 10 (November, 1921): 151–152.
Charl Williams, “The Democratic Awakening and Professional Organization,” Journal of Addresses and Proceedings of the National Education Association 60 (1992): 208–210 (hereafter cited as NEA Proceedings).
Charl Williams, “Actual Results of the Year,” NEA Proceedings 60 (1922): 482–484.
Charl Williams, “The Hope and The Result of American Education,” NEA Proceedings 60 (1922): 378–381; idem, “The Improvement of the Teaching Profession Through Tenure Legislation,” NEA Proceedings 60 (1922): 685–688.
Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT & the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 115.
See David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot, Public Schools in Hard Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), and
Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1921–1940 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972).
Charl Ormond Williams, ed., Our Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: National Congress of Parents and Teachers, 1934); idem, compiler, Schools for Democracy (Chicago: National Congress of Parents and Teachers, 1939).
Charl Ormond Williams, “How Professional Are Teachers?,” Peabody Journal of Education 16 (September 1938): 118.
Willie A. Lawton and Charl Ormond Williams, “National Seminar on Building Stronger Professional Organizations,” NEA Proceedings 78 (1940): 104–105.
Joe A. Chandler and Charl Ormond Williams, “National Seminar on Making the Teaching Profession More Effective Thru [sic] Local, State, and National Associations,” NEA Proceedings 80 (1942): 70.
Charl Ormond Williams, “Field Service,” NEA Proceedings 79 (1941): 876.
Ibid.; Charl Ormond Williams, “Field Service,” NEA Proceedings 80 (1942): 479.
Charl Ormond Williams, “Yes, Mr. Rawlings,” NEA Journal 32 (March 1943): 82.
Charl Ormond Williams, “The Legend of Miss Bonny,” The National Elementary Principal 23 (June 1944): 41–42.
Charl Ormond Williams, “Professional Institutes,” NEA Journal 35 (January 1946): 29.
Charl Ormond Williams, “Background of the Conference,” Proceedings of the White House Conference on Rural Education (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States of American, 3, 4, and 5 October 1944): 27, 28.
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© 2002 Alan R. Sadovnik, Susan F. Semel
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Urban, W.J. (2002). Charl Williams and the National Education Association. In: Sadovnik, A.R., Semel, S.F. (eds) Founding Mothers and Others. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05475-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05475-3_13
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