Colored Teachers and Associations
These professional organizations of Black educators were foundational to the BTA collection.
What are Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs)?
The BTA makes more than this many pages of materials available.
What is 50,000 pages?
The BTA spans educator writings from the Jim Crow era through this movement.
What is the Civil Rights Movement?
She was the first African American to teach in Little Rock, Arkansas, for 70 years.
Who is Charlotte Andrews Stephens?
The BTA includes a Black Education Timeline documenting these over time.
What are key events, cases, institutions in Black educational history?
The first documented CTA is traced to this U.S. region or state.
What is Ohio?
The BTA draws from more than this many archival repositories across the U.S.
What is 70 repositories?
According to archival material, in 1935 Louisiana, teachers organized study groups across grade levels to incorporate this kind of scholarship into classrooms.
What is Black scholarship / Black intellectual work?
Co-founders of the BTA include this Harvard scholar known for work on race, gender, and culture.
Who is Imani Perry?
CTAs’ expansion in southern states mostly took place in this half of the 19th century onward.
What is the late 19th century?
In 1903, CTAs formed a national body first known as the National Association of Negro Teachers, later renamed this.
What is the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (or ATA)?
The BTA is hosted on Harvard’s Curiosity platform, also known as this kind of platform for digital collections.
What is a “digital repository” / “post-custodial archive”
In states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and North Carolina, Black educators used journals to chronicle resistance to this system of mandated separation
What is segregation / Jim Crow education injustice
One co-founder of the BTA, a Harvard professor of education, also explores “fugitive pedagogy.”
Who is Jarvis Givens?
The national body ATA was formed under this earlier name around 1903.
What is the National Association of Negro Teachers?
CTA journals served multiple roles: they documented classroom practice, meeting reports, and this kind of activism.
What is political advocacy or “teacher organizing”?
Phase II of the BTA expansion includes improving this aspect of the portal (user-friendly features, etc.).
What is usability or user experience?
The BTA reveals that Black educators under segregation were both “teachers” and these — using pedagogy actively to contest inequality.
What are political actors or activists?
This Black educator and historian worked closely with Black teachers and is linked to BTA’s origins.
Who is Carter G. Woodson? (often cited in connection)
In 2023, Harvard publicly launched the BTA, celebrating its opening with this kind of event forum.
What is the Askwith Education Forum?
Unlike some white counterpart teacher groups, CTAs had this policy around membership.
What is no racial restriction on joining?
The BTA’s design philosophy emphasizes reciprocity — returning value back to these.
What are contributing institutions / local archives?
Some journals were published at the national level as official organs — the primary publication of an organization — documenting leadership, debates, and this.
What are meeting reports or constitutions or pedagogy debates?
In one archival instance, North Carolina Recorder printed a column by this teacher at Gumberry School in Northampton
Who is Bernetta H. Pullen?
A 2024 grant phase for the BTA distributed substantial funding from this foundation.
What is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation?