Abstract
From the 1880s through the 1920s, the adage, “As is the teacher, so is the school,” was commonplace in the rhetorical repertoire of African American educators in the South. The essence of its meaning lingered throughout the period of de jure segregation. Its expression encompassed vital themes related to the need and demand for a “sound professionalism” among the expanding number of African American teachers in the region. Its significance flowed from a self-evident logic implicitly understood, and fundamentally contested, by both black and white southerners: the “fate of the race” depended on its schools; the quality of those schools depended on the quality of the teachers they had; and the quality of the teachers depended upon their character, dedication, and professional training. Ambrose Caliver, the first African American research specialist hired by the U.S. Office of Education, reduced the issues to a single sentence, “In the hands of the Negro teachers rests the destiny of the race.”1
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Notes
Ambrose Caliver, “Some Problems in the Education and Placement of Negro Teachers,” Journal of Negro Education 4 (January 1935): 99. See also, “Radio Address of President Trenholm,” The Bulletin 12 (December 1931): 11; Silas X. Floyd, “The Teacher and Leadership,” National Note-Book Quarterly 2 (April 1920): 3;
W. T B. Williams, “Higher Education for Negroes in 1950,” in Proceedings, National Association of Collegiate Deans and Registrars in Negro Colleges, Eighth Annual Session, March 7–10, 1934, 92.
Ronald Butchart, “‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World’: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,” History of Education Quarterly 28 (Winter 1988): 361.
Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
Robert C. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);
Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen”s Education, 1862–1875 (Westport: Greenwood, 1980).
See also, Sandra E. Small, “The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen’s Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes,” Journal of Southern History 45 (August 1979): 381–402.
W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 638;
Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Octagon Books, 1966).
J. W. Alvord, Third Semi-Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, January 1, 1867 in Freedmen”s Schools and Textbooks, vol. 1, ed. Robert C. Morris (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 36.
Robert C. Morris, “Educational Reconstruction,” in The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, ed. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 150; emphasis in original.
James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 5.
Kathleen Berkeley, “The Politics of Black Education in Memphis, Tennessee, 1868–1881,” in Southern Cities, Southern Schools: Public Education in the Urban South, ed. David Plank and Rick Ginsberg (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 202. Jones make a similar point concerning the situation in Georgia in the late 1860s, “black parents wanted their children to learn to read and write, but would not and could not yield them up irrevocably to the northern teachers.” See her Soldiers of Light and Love, 111.
Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1–32; John Alvord, Eighth Semi-Annual Report on Schools for Freedmen, July 1, 1869, in Freedmen’s Schools and Textbooks, vol. 1, ed. Robert C. Morris (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 5;
Betty Mansfield, “That Fateful Class: Black Teachers of Virginia’s Freedmen, 1861–1882” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, 1980), 194.
Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction, 1–2, 96–97; Dorothy Sterling (ed.), We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1984), 261–263;
Kay Ann Taylor, “Mary S. Peake and Charlotte L. Forten: Black Teachers During the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro Education, 74 (Spring 2005): 124–137.
See Ambrose Caliver, Education of Negro Teachers (National Survey of the Education of Teachers, vol. 4). U.S. Office of Education, Bulletin #10. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1933); Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, 263–83.
Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1–32; Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction, quoted on 127; Washington, quoted in DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 641–42; Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Ronald E. Butchart, “Recruits to the ‘Army of Civilization’: Gender, Race, Class, and the Freedmen’s Teachers, 1862–1875,” Journal of Education 172 (Fall 1990): 76–87, quote on 78;
Butchart, “‘We Best Can Instruct Our Own People’: New York African Americans in the Freedmen’s Schools, 1861–1875,” in African American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, 1861–1900, ed. Donald G. Nieman (New York: Garland Press, 1994), 31–53. Similarly, Burchart’s study of the freedmen’s teachers from Oberlin College revealed that approximately one-quarter of the teachers who participated were African American, although black students had never been more than 5 percent of the school’s enrollment body.
See Burchart’s “Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861–1917,” History of Education Quarterly 42 (Spring, 2002): 1–17.
See also Butchart, “Remapping Racial Boundaries: Teachers as Border Police and Boundary Transgressors in Post-Emancipation Black Education, USA, 1861–1876,” Paedgogica Historica 43 (February 2007): 61–78. On the discrimination faced by African American teachers employed by the aid societies, see for example,
Linda M. Perkins, “The Black Female American Missionary Association Teacher in the South, 1860–1870,” in Black Americans in North Carolina and the South, ed. Jeffrey J. Crow and Floa J. Hatley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 123–36;
Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 261–63.
See, “An Appeal,” The Freedman”s Torchlight 1 (December 1866), unpaged in Morris, ed., Freedmen”s Schools and Textbooks; Morris, Reading, “Riting, and Reconstruction, 13–14, 116–19; James M. McPherson, The Negro”s Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 133–42;
Patricia A. Young, “Roads to Travel: A Historical Look at the Freedmen’s Torchlight—An African American Contribution to 19th Century Instructional Technologies,” Journal of Black Studies 31 (May 2001): 671–98.
Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Half a Loaf: The Shift from White to Black Teachers in the Negro Schools of the Urban South, 1865–1890,” Journal of Southern History 40 (November 1974): 565–94;
Michael Fultz, “Charleston, 1919–1920: The Final Battle in the Emergence of the South’s Urban African-American Teaching Corps,” Journal of Urban History 27 (July 2001): 633–49.
Marcia Elaine Turner-Jones, “A Political Analysis of Black Educational History: Atlanta, 1865–1943” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1982);
Philip Racine, “Atlanta’s Schools: A History of the Public School System, 1869–1955” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1969);
Davison Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, “Negro Boycotts of Jim Crow Schools in the North, 1897–1925,” Integrated Education 5 (August–September 1967): 57–68; “Springfield, Ohio, Defeats Segregation School Move,” Crisis 26, no.1 (May 1923): 25; Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville: The New York School Strikes of 1968 ed. Maurice Berube and Marilyn Gittell (New York: Preager, 1969).
See R. R. Wright, “The Possibilities of the Negro Teachers,” AME Church Review 10 (April 1894): 459–70;
Martha W. Owens, “The Development of Public Schools for Negroes in Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1900” (master’s thesis, Virginia State College, 1947); Rabinowitz, “Half a Loaf,” 579;
Lena Jackson, “Intelligent Leadership,” The Broadcaster 9 (January 1937): 29;
T. W. Turner, “What the Colored Teachers of Baltimore are Doing for Their Race,” Colored American Magazine 13 (July 1907): 36;
Josephine Silone Yates, “Lincoln Institute: An Ideal Professional Training School for Negro Teachers,” Colored American Magazine 12 (January 1907): 26–31. On the extracurricular obligations of African American teachers,
see Michael Fultz, “African American Teachers in the South, 1890–1940: Powerlessness and the Ironies of Expectations and Protest,” History of Education Quarterly 35 (Winter 1995): 401–22.
Roscoe Conkling Bruce, “The Stimulus of Negro Teaching,” Colored American Magazine 17 (July 1909): 13–14.;
Michael W. Homel, Down from Equality: Black Chicagoans and the Public Schools, 1920–1941 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984);
Judy Jolley Mohraz, The Separate Problem (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979);
W. E. B. DuBois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Journal of Negro Education 4 (July 1935): 328–35.
Vincent P. Franklin, The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979);
Vincent P. Franklin, “The Persistence of School Segregation in the North: An Historical Perspective,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 1 (Winter 1974): 51–68;
Jack Dougherty, More than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
Jack Dougherty, “‘That’s When We Were Marching for Jobs’: Black Teachers and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (Summer 1998): 121–41;
Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Adah Louise Ward Randolph, “A Historical Analysis of an Urban School: A Case Study of Northern De Facto Segregated School: Champion Avenue School, 1910–1996” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1996).
See also, Linda Marie Perkins, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865 – 1902 (New York: Garland Press, 1987);
Sulayman Clark, “The Educational Philosophy of Leslie Pinckney Hill: A Profile in Black Educational Leadership, 1904–1951,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1984);
John B. Reid, “A Career to Build, a People to Serve, an Purpose to Accomplish”: Race, Class, Gender and Detroit’s First Black Women Teachers, 1865–1916,” in ““We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible””: A Reader in Black Women”s History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1995), 303–20;
August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, “Early Boycotts of Segregated Schools: The Alton, Illinois Case, 1897–1908,” Journal of Negro Education 36 (August 1967): 394–402.
Lawrence Cremin, Traditions of American Education (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
On black principals’ involvement in attempts to secure libraries in pre-World War I years, see Eliza Atkins Gleason, The Southern Negro and the Public Library: A Study of the Government and Administration of Public Library Service to Negroes in the South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941);
Cheryl Knott Malone, “Accommodating Access: ‘‘Colored” Carnegie Libraries, 1905–1925” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1996).
On multiple urban needs, see Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
See Adam Fairclough, “’Being in the Field of Education and Also Being Negro … Seems … Tragic’: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 87 (June 2000): 65–91, on the “deeply ambiguous” position of black teachers as community leaders;
see also Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
See Eleventh Census of the United States, 1890, Population, Part 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1895, cxviii and cxix; James Blodgett, “Report on Education in the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890” (Washington, DC: GPO, 1893), Table 6, on page 51;
David Blose, Statistics of the Negro Race, 1927–28, U.S. Office of Education, Pamphlet No. 14, (Washington, DC: GPO, December 1930);
David Blose and Ambrose Caliver, Statistics of the Education of Negroes, 1929–30 and 1931–32, U.S. Office of Education, Bulletin 1935, #13 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1936).
For literature which analyzes major aspects of the broader context, see Robert A. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950: An Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971);
Pamela Barnhouse Walters, David James, and Holly McCammon, “Citizenship and Public Schools: Accounting for Racial Inequality in Education in the Pre- and Post-Disfranchisement South,” American Sociological Review 62 (February 1997): 34–52.
See Carroll Miller and Howard Gregg, “The Teaching Staff,” Journal of Negro Education 1 (July 1932): 196–223;
W. E. B. DuBois, The Common School and the Negro American (1910; reprinted in Atlanta University Publications New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 7. Although conditions improved in the 1920s and 1930s, overcrowded classrooms for black students and teachers persisted. According to Miller and Gregg, if the 47.1 average of pupils per teacher in the black elementary schools of the South in 1929–30 was to be reduced to the white pupil-teacher level of 34.3, an additional 17,190 African American teachers would need to be hired. If the national norm of approximately 30 pupils per teacher was to be reached, then more than 26,000 African American teachers were needed.
Ann Short Chirhart, Torches of Light: Georgia Teachers and the Coming of the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 2–3;
Ann Short Chirhart, “‘Better for Us Than It Was For Her’: African American Families, Communities, and Reform in Modern Georgia,” Journal of Family History 28 (October 2003): 578–602.
Valinda Littlefield, “I Am Only One, But I Am One: Southern African-American Women Schoolteachers, 1884–1954” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003), 127, 139.
See also, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women”s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Linda M. Perkins, “The History of Blacks in Teaching: Growth and Decline Within the Profession,” in American Teachers: History of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: MacMillan, 1989);
Linda M. Perkins, “The National Association of College Women: Vanguard of Black Women’s Leadership and Education, 1923–1954,” Journal of Education 172 (Spring 1990): 65–75;
Linda M. Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the Self-Determination of African-American Women in Higher Education,” Journal of Negro History 81 (Spring 1996): 89–105;
Sonya Yvette Ramsey, Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
See Christine Woyshner, “Black Parent-Teacher Associations and the Origins of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, 1896–1926,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), April 2000;
Christine Woyshner, “The PTA and Desegregation: The Case of Alabama, 1954–1970,” paper presented at AERA, April 2007.
See also, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989);
Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1993);
Darlene Clark Hine, “’We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: The Philanthropic Work of Black Women,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 70–93.
Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Dorothy C. Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990);
Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895–1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989);
Sharon Harley, “Nannie Helen Burroughs: The Black Goddess of Liberty,” Journal of Negro History 81 (Spring 1996): 62–72; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.
James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 402–3; Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction, 100–103;
W. E. B. DuBois, ed., The College-Bred Negro (1900; reprinted in Atlanta University Publications New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 12–14.
Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction, 92; U.S. Commissioner of Education, Annual Report, 1891–92 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1892), 864–65, 1234–37;
Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 31–47.
See also, Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2005);
James Fraser, Preparing America”s Teachers: A History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007).
Robert Sherer, Subordination or Liberation? The Development and Conflicting Theories of Black Education in Nineteenth Century Alabama (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1977), 6–7; Edmund O’Neal, “The Rise and Development of State Teacher Training for Negro Elementary Teachers in Alabama” (master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1939), 28–30.
Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study of Cotton and Steel (1939; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969), 105–10; “Special Preliminary Announcement for 1949–50”: page 3, H. Councill Trenholm Collection, box 21, College Program/Reports, folder 9, Alabama State University Archives and Special Collections (hereafter ASU Archives), Montgomery, Alabama.
See Louis R. Harlan, Booker T Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), 166–68; Sherer, Subordination or Liberation? 10–13, 27–28; “The Diamond Jubilee Anniversary,” page 1–2, ASU Pamphlets, box 1, ASU Archives; H. Councill Trenholm, “Some Background and Status of Higher Education for Negroes in Alabama,” 1949 ASTA Association Yearbook, Harper C. Trenholm Collection, box 23, folder 3, ASU Archives.
“In Memorial Tribute to its Fourth President,” George Washington Trenholm Collection, box 1, folder 1, ASU Archives; Naomi Webb, “The Life of George W. Trenholm,” The State Normal Journal 1 (March 1928): 22–23, ASU Pamphlets, box 2, ASU Archives; “Notes: Improving the Rural Teaching Force Through Teachers Institutes,” Harper C. Trenholm Collection, box 5, ASU Archives.
See Felton G. Clark, The Control of State Supported Teacher-Training Programs for Negroes, Contributions to Education #605 (Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1934). Clark misses six institutions, three teachers colleges and three municipal colleges.
See also, Patrick J. Gilpin and Marybeth Gasman, Charles S. Johnson: Leadership Beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003);
Marybeth Gasman, “Rhetoric vs. Reality: The Fundraising Messages of the United Negro College Fund in the Immediate Aftermath of the Brown Decision,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (Spring 2004): 70–94;
Joy Ann Williamson, “‘This Has Been Quite a Year for Heads Falling’: Institutional Autonomy in the Civil Rights Era,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (Winter 2004): 554–76;
Callie L. Waite, Permission to Remain Among Us: Education for Blacks in Oberlin, Ohio, 1880–1914 (Westport: Praeger, 2002);
Margaret Smith Crocco and Cally L. Waite, “Education and Marginality: Race and Gender in Higher Education, 1940–1955,” History of Education Quarterly 47 (Spring 2007): 69–91.
Carter G. Woodson, The Rural Negro (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), Table 11, page 214.
“Examinations for Colored Teachers in Virginia,” Southern Workman 38 (April 1909): 196; John M. Gandy, “Fifty Years of Professional Growth of Negro Teachers in Virginia,” Virginia Teachers Bulletin 15 (January 1938): 9–10; “To the State Board of Education, Richmond, Virginia,” W. T B. Williams Collection, box 10 Misc. Reports, Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, AL; An Educational Study of Alabama, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin 1919, no. 41 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1919), 380, 399.
Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial Normal School Bulletin, 3 August 1914, 62–63; George W. Brooks, History of the Tennessee Education Congress, 1923–1967 (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1975), 11–14.
For the most comprehensive study to date on the Rosenwald schools and on black teachers’ contributions, see Mary S. Hoffschwelle, The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).
Michael Fultz, “Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The ‘Displacement’ of Black State Teachers Associations, 1954–1971,” unpublished paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 2007; Vernon McDaniel, History of the Teachers State Association of Texas (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1977);
Gilbert Porter and Leedell Neyland, The History of the Florida State Teachers Association (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1977);
Thelma D. Perry, History of the American Teachers Association (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1975);
Darlene C. Hine, “Black Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890–1950,” Journal of American History 89 (April 2003): 1279.
J. Rupert Picott, History of the Virginia Teachers Association (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1975), 221–22.
Michael Fultz, “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown: An Overview and Analysis,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (Spring 2004): 11–45;
Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration,” The Journal of American History 91 (February 2004): 43–55;
Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Carol F. Karpinski, “Bearing the Burden of Desegration: Black Principals and Brown” Urban Education 41 (November 2006): 237–76.
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
Vanessa Siddle Walker, “Valued Segregated Schools for African American Children in the South, 1935–1969: A Review of Common Themes and Characteristics,” Review of Educational Research 70 (Fall 2000): 253–85.
See also, David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
Adah Ward Randolph, “The Memories of an All-Black Northern Urban School: Good Memories of Leadership, Teachers, and the Curriculum,” Urban Education 39 (November 2004): 596–620;
Michele Foster, Black Teachers on Teaching (New York: New Press, 1997).
Barbara Shircliffe, “‘We Got the Best of that World’: A Case for the Study of Nostalgia in the Oral History of School Segregation,” Oral History Review 28, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2001): 60;
Jack Dougherty, “From Anecdote to Analysis: Oral Interviews and New Scholarship in Educational History,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 712–23.
There is no comprehensive history of the Jeanes supervising teachers (1908–1968), although both then-contemporaries and present-day historians generally consider them as exemplary models of engaged African American educators during the era of de jure segregation, epitomizing dedication to the improvement of black schooling through a combination of in-service and community-building activities. For informative overviews, see Valinda Littlefield, “‘To Do the Next Needed Thing’: Jeanes Teachers in the Southern United States, 1908–1934,” in Telling Women”s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women”s Education, Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 130–45; Littlefield, I Am Only One, But I Am One; see also Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 160–65, for a discussion of how Jeanes teachers worked to turn the initial industrial education component of their work “into a self-help endeavor.”
See, for example, Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (Washington, DC, American Council on Education, 1941);
Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934);
Charles S. Johnson, “The Negro Public Schools: A Social and Education Survey,” Section 8 of Louisiana Educational Survey (Louisiana Educational Survey Commission, 1942).
Charles Thompson, “Negro Teachers and the Elimination of Segregated Schools,” Journal of Negro Education 20 (Spring 1951): 139.
Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
See also, Vanessa Siddle Walker, “Organized Resistance and Black Educators’ Quest for School Equality, 1878–1938,” Teachers College Record 107 (March 2005): 335–88.
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Fultz, M. (2008). “As Is the Teacher, So Is the School”: Future Directions in the Historiography of African American Teachers. In: Reese, W.J., Rury, J.L. (eds) Rethinking the History of American Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610460_4
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