Great Teachers in Black History
February is Black History month. The College Football Playoff Foundation is honoring all black educators, and celebrating their life and impact on education. Here are just a few great black educators that you should know, that changed lives and made history.
Ramona Edelin: With her direction, the National Urban Coalition started the "Say Yes to A Youngster's Future" program to provide educational help to black teachers and youth in America, eventually teaming with the Department of Education.
Maxine Smith: Working with the NAACP to desegregate Memphis schools in the early 1960s, Maxine Smith escorted the first black children to attend a desegregated schoolhouse in Memphis
Charlotte Forten: The book Life on the Sea Islands was the story of Forten's time as the first black teacher at a famous mission in the Civil War, and she later worked for the Treasury Department recruiting black teachers.
Alexander Crummell: The first school dedicated to African-American learning was the American Negro Academy, founded in 1897 by Alexander Crummell, a descendant of an African tribal chief.
Jeanne L. Noble: Noble greatly increased our knowledge of the educational experience of black women, authoring The Negro Woman's College Education. Three presidents named her to education commissions.
Fannie C. Williams: Williams was a trailblazer in her nearly 60-year career as an educator. She was the driving force behind the passing of Child Health Day in 1928, and she instituted kindergarten and standardized testing for students long before Louisiana required it.
Benjamin Banneker: Almost 100 years before the Department of Education was created, Banneker proposed in a critically-acclaimed almanac that a secretary be appointed with power "to establish and maintain free schools in every city, village, and township in the United States."
Virginia Randolph: Randolph was synonymous with vocational training, with her distinctive educational style of involving parents,creativity, and common sense.
Booker T. Washington: Probably the most famous black educator ever, Washington founded the teachers' college Tuskegee Institute for blacks in 1881 in Alabama, and was famous for teaching African-Americans to help themselves through education and hard work.
Mary McLeod Bethune: This woman who believed blacks' greatest hope for the future lay with young black women founded a school for African-Americans in Florida and served on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet as an advisor about black issues.
Daniel Payne: Payne founded the first place of higher learning for African-Americans in the U.S., and fought his entire life to prove blacks were perfectly capable of being equal citizens with whites.
Nannie Helen Burroughs: Known for her famous speech entitled "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping," Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in 1909.
Esau Jenkins: In 1954, Jenkins co-founded the first Citizenship School in the South as a place for blacks to be taught to read so that they could vote.
James Edward Shepard: The first state-supported liberal arts school for African-Americans was founded by Mr. Shepard in 1
Hallie Quinn Brown: A lifelong educator and women's rights advocate, Hallie Quinn Brown founded a scholarship for women's education in the 1880s, helping inject women into academia.
Gloria Blackwell: A teacher at Clark University in Atlanta for 20 years, Blackwell was instrumental in the fight to desegregate schools, filing and winning several lawsuits against discriminating organizations.
Septima Poinsette Clark: When she first began her teaching career, she was frustrated that Charleston did not hire black educators. She worked with the NCAAP to petition the city to change its policies. She went on to help run citizenship schools which taught African Americans basic literacy and math so they could pass the test required to register to vote.
Fanny Jackson Coppin: was the first African American principal. Born as a slave, she once wrote to Frederick Douglas in 1876, “I feel sometimes like a person to whom in childhood was entrusted some sacred flame…This is the desire to see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation; no longer to sit in obscure corners and devour the scraps of knowledge which his superiors flung at him. I want to see him crowned with strength and dignity; adorned with the enduring grace of intellectual attainments.”
Bessie Burke: Burke began teaching at Holmes Elementary School and became the first black principal in L.A. in 1918. In 1938, she became a principal at Nevin Avenue School, making her the first black principal to head a racially integrated school.
The content in the above post was curated and originally published through a variety of sources including:
12 Black Educators Who Changed History That We Should All Know About
50 African Americans Who Forever Changed Academia - OnlineCollege.org
Coppin.edu