Black Teachers: A Pedagogy of Organized Resistance

Jesse Hagopian (he/him): On behalf of the Zinn Education Project, we want to welcome everybody back for another session of the Teach the Black Freedom Struggle classes. My name is Jesse Hagopian. I work with the Zinn Education Project, and I’m an editor with Rethinking Schools. I’m joined today by my colleague and comrade, Cierra Kaylor-Jones, executive director of Rethinking Schools. I’m so glad to be working with Cierra on this special class tonight. Today’s class is hosted by the Zinn Education Project, which is coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. We offer free, downloadable people’s history lessons that many of you have used for middle and high school classrooms. The Zinn Education Project has a new lesson on the theme of today’s session, called Legalize Black Education: The Long Fight for the Right to Learn, a lesson I recently wrote to help students understand the attacks on Black education. And this series is also part of our Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, based on the book Teaching for Black Lives that I co-edited with Dyan Watson and Wayne Au.

Now I’m happy to welcome historians Jarvis Givens and Imani Perry. Givens is the author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. If you haven’t read this yet, you’re sleeping, [and] you gotta step up your game a little bit. Please check this out very soon. If you haven’t gotten it, order it today. It will transform the way you understand the history of education in this country. Imani Perry is the author of many books, including the winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, and most recently Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. This one just blew me away, and I can’t thank you enough for writing this Imani. As a blues player myself, this one just really spoke to my soul and was inspiring to read. And you are both co-principal investigators and co-founding directors of the Black Teacher Archive, in collaboration with senior project manager Micah Broadnax. Thank you so much for joining us both.

Imani Perry: Thank you. Lovely to be with you all.

Jarvis R. Givens: Happy to be here.

Hagopian: Yes, it’s great to have you back, Jarvis. We wanted to begin with this incredible website and archive that you all have developed. On the Black Teacher Archive website, you write that the website quote “makes public the intellectual, political, and cultural contributions of Black educators during the Jim Crow era through the Civil Rights era.” I wanted to start by asking you, why is it so important that we make these contributions public right now?

Perry: I’ll just say something quickly, and I’m excited to hear what Jarvis has to say about it, too. There’s so many ways that this is true. There is a conventional story that we tell about the road through the Civil Rights Movement, and also that tends to focus on the story of attorneys and litigation. Then there’s a conventional story we tell about the importance of Black institutions which tends to focus on churches. There’s been this enormous gap in the story that we tell both of Black freedom movements and about Black cultural and institutional life, and that is schools and education. And so this, I think, has become an opportunity for us to fill in a gap in general understanding about Black life and history. We think that actually filling this gap with content could potentially lead to huge transformations in terms of what people understand about where we come from, but also where we might go.

Givens: Absolutely. I think that’s spot on. When it comes to the education context as well, I think it’s really important to lift up the legacy of Black teachers, especially in this moment, where we see so many attacks on education in general, but also especially on social justice teaching in particular. I think that in order to fully appreciate what’s happening in this moment, it requires a historical perspective, both to understand why the opposition is so intense, but also for educators who are trying to do good work, to have an opportunity to ground their practice in a historical tradition and to understand that they’re operating in a tradition that they can look to for inspiration, that they can look to for strategies.

Just to pick up on that point that Imani shared, I absolutely think it’s important to emphasize that the field of education hasn’t really done a good job of appreciating the legacy of Black teachers. But even in the context of how we have taught the history of the Black Freedom Struggle, teachers just really, for so long, kind of fell out of that narrative. Imani is spot on in saying, when we think about, for instance, the achievement of Brown and the achievement of so many of the victories of the civil rights Movement, We think about attorneys OR ministers if we’re going to think about professional groups. But we know that black teachers were the largest professional group when it came to African American communities. When we think about who helped financially sustain so many important Black political and social institutions, it was Black teachers, but also who were the people that helped cultivate the leadership skills and the dreams and so many of the people who led those movements. Teachers have to be accounted for when we tell that story, and we haven’t done a good job of doing that.

Hagopian: I just love that answer, to understand that we wouldn’t have a Civil Rights Movement as we know it without the educators that empowered young people to be part of that struggle. It’s so crucial to learn that history. Not just so you can sound erudite at a dinner party, but because we’re in a struggle right now that desperately needs to center education. The Right has centered the attack on education, and we still haven’t learned the lessons of Black educators back then, and aren’t applying those lessons today. So this is such a beautiful resource. Thank you.

Cierra Kaler-Jones (she/her): Yes, and I’m appreciating also how you’re highlighting the resistance. How there is a story to be told about the resistance, and there’s a blueprint, and that we are part of a historical legacy of freedom fighters in education. And how important that is, especially in dire times right now. So I want to dig a little bit deeper here about the historical context for these teachers associations. What role did they play in the struggle for Black education, the broader Black Freedom Struggle, and what did their writings reveal about what’s really left out of mainstream education history?

Givens: I think one of the important things to lift up here is that we know that when we think about up and through the Jim Crow era, many people have in their minds the story of segregated schooling, the fact that Black folks had Jim Crow, that Black folks attended segregated Black schools. In many ways the narrative that we tell about that story has often been one where we just think about Black folks being excluded, off to the side, and given separate and unequal schools. But I don’t know that we’ve done a really good job of appreciating the institution building that Black folks were always invested in, and that they were always taking part in, not just to build the schools themselves that were in African American communities, but also, with Colored Teacher Associations, they built up professional organizations to support a vision of teaching that they understood to be responsible to the communities that they were a part of.

The earliest Black Teacher Association that we have accounted for emerged in Ohio in the antebellum era. But these organizations really proliferated after the Civil War, particularly during the period of Reconstruction in the late 19th century, as African American education really developed institutionally, particularly across the southern states, where the critical mass of Black folks are. The thing that’s important to lift up is that we don’t just have individual Black teachers scattered all over the place, but we have Black teachers organizing themselves both to organize and resist — because they’re meeting a lot of resistance in terms of the work that they’re doing in their communities — but also because they’re striving to try to not do just anything. But they’re trying to get it right. They’re trying, they’re experimenting with freedom, they’re experimenting with dreams that they have about the kind of world that they’re trying to collectively build. And these institutions are a really important space that they created in order to do that work, where they’re working to form a collective response to the anti-Black oppression that they’re experiencing in the context of U.S. schools. Because where individual teachers may have been vulnerable, these organizations couldn’t be fired or targeted the way individual teachers could be targeted or fired. So this is why these organizations become really important.

It’s important to stress that they’re not just mimicking what white teacher organizations were doing, because I know that you can see in some of the literature that people will write about and say, “Well, because they weren’t included or allowed to be a part of mainstream white teacher organizations, they went and they created their own thing and essentially tried to do the same thing that white teacher organizations or white teacher unions, so on and so forth, were doing.” And that’s actually not true. There’s some elements and similarities in terms of some of the things that they’re doing, but they understand their task to be distinct because of the material realities that they’re experiencing as Black people in the context of the United States, and because of the communities that they’re serving. I think that’s reflective of a lot of important institutions that are taking shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And Imani writes about that beautifully in May We Forever Stand, so I figured I should turn it over to you to say a bit about Black institution building and how these Colored Teacher Associations fit in that larger narrative.

Perry: What’s fascinating is this period that we describe in history as the nadir of American race relations, when the promise of Reconstruction has been denied and you have the period of redemption, the establishment of a Jim Crow order, that this period that is called the nadir, right? The absolute lowest point is actually when there’s this incredible move to build Black institutions, in many ways not dissuaded by Jim Crow, but actually holding fast to the promise of the Reconstruction amendments, is what Black people are doing. There’s this incredible institution building, there’s this incredible moment of Black people writing themselves into history — people who were described as those who had no history, people who were described as having made no contribution to civilization — actually taking the reins of the story that they tell about themselves.

But in addition, and this is what Jarvis was just saying, if we think just about the history of HBCUs, these institutions that were built right after emancipation, in the decades following, they really are overwhelmingly normal schools. At the beginning there’s an entire community of people. Black folks are all trying to go to be educated, but the Black professional class is overwhelmingly educators. So there’s a sense in which the idea of what it means to be educated is deeply connected to becoming educators. There’s this dynamic relationship. So the idea of your responsibility as an educated person is to actually educate others. It’s a kind of each one, teach one ethos that is central to Black culture. So when we talk about how critical these organizations were, we have to think it’s absolutely true what Jarvis is saying, we don’t think about them as parallels to the white teacher organizations. I think we ought to think about them as part of this tradition, an intellectual tradition of Black people. The last thing I’ll say related to this is that literally every prominent Black intellectual you can think of pre-desegregation is somehow affiliated with these organizations and these institutions, and that is an indication of the centrality of Black educators to Black life, Black aspiration, [and] Black freedom dreaming.

Givens: Picking up on that last point that Imani shared there, I think it helps illustrate how important these organizations were.  Imani mentioned so many of these important intellectual and political figures in the early 20th century. So many of them are connected to these organizations in some way, whether it’s Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Black Teacher Organization, James Weldon Johnson, president of the Florida Black Teacher Organization, Ida B. Wells, who was a part of the Black teacher organizations in Tennessee, and the list goes on and on. Even if it’s not for the entire span of their career, these folks are coming through these spaces, and even when they’re no longer teachers, many of them still show up as speakers at events that the teachers are coordinating, or they’re partnering with these teacher organizations in some really important way. Whether that’s Thurgood Marshall or Martin Luther King Jr. who’s showing up and speaking to teachers at some of these teacher organization meetings. So you really get an understanding about how widely integrated these organizations were into the social and political fabric of Black life.

Also, when we think about the intellectual traditions as well, so many of these important intellectual figures are also connected to these organizations in important ways, or they’re the works of important Black intellectuals. I was just looking at a journal earlier today and I’m seeing Sterling Brown’s book being reviewed in the New Jersey Teacher Association Journal for one of the Negro history week celebrations that they were doing. You just see the very broad reach of these organizations, and it’s just amazing to think about the fact that for so long so few of us have had opportunities to really learn and think about the contributions of these institutions and these rank and file teachers all across the country. Which is also the really important thing, that it’s not just about those recognizable figures, but it’s that we appreciate those figures in the context of these larger bodies and communities of rank and file teachers who sustained these institutions because they recognized why they were important.

Hagopian: That was a great addition. That Black teacher people’s history of the rank and file educators who were crucial to movements. And then those rank and file educators threw up leaders. They elevated people who went through the ranks and learned a lot from organizing in those spaces, and then went on to become incredible leaders, like Ida B. Wells. So thank you for raising that up. And, Imani, I just loved the focus you had on each one, teach one, and just how being educated meant educating others.

My Dad just found the obituary for my great great grandmother, who was enslaved in Mississippi, in a Black newspaper in Mississippi. We just discovered that all fifteen of her children were one generation out. She was enslaved and then was emancipated after the Civil War, and her kids, all fifteen, went to college. And my great grandfather became a teacher and a principal and started schools across the South. That’s the context and the history all of us were denied, unfortunately. So, I really appreciate your scholarship.

I’d like to dig deeper into some of the specific organizing campaigns the Archive reveals. The Black Teacher Archive states, “these journals and bulletins document the history of social and political organizing by African American educators, including the push for equalization of teacher salaries, desegregation, curriculum, reform, and civil rights.” So, I was hoping you could highlight a couple of the most impactful organizing campaigns that Black teachers led, and what their contributions meant for the broader Civil Rights Movement.

Perry: I’ll just say quickly that one of the things that we digitized on the site, we have the journals, but we also have the history of the state organizations that were written largely at the turn to desegregation. Every single one of those histories includes discussions of the struggle for equalization of funding. It’s remarkable, because you understand that there’s a national story about that, but there are lots of local stories, and that part of the reason why they’re so powerful is that individual educators had to be named as plaintiffs in these suits. So that meant that was actually a real vulnerability because they’re employed by the state to bring this litigation. It’s also a reminder that to the extent we do think about the history of litigation that led up to Brown initially being largely about equalization, that educators were involved in every single step, which also means that the impact of desegregation, the firing, the loss of jobs of so many Black teachers after desegregation, which is also documented in lots of these state histories.

What’s remarkable is that they are documented not just narratively, but often with data and statistics. The impact of that is you have educators who are involved in this long struggle for equalization, and then the road to desegregation, and then are actually penalized by the society for opening the society up. Again, it’s a critical part of the story, but it’s also yet another indication of the civic engagement of Black educators. There have been a number of books in recent years that have recounted the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in powerful ways. There’s still a book to be written for thinking about some moments like that that focus on the educators as actually the primary organizers in so many. So that’s part of what you get in an Alabama State Teachers Association story, for example, of the campaign to equalize funding, but that organization of educators then becomes central to the process of desegregating the cities in general in Alabama.

Givens: An easy example to give for me is Negro history week. I mean, that’s kind of how I came to this work, trying to document how Carter G. Woodson’s partnership with Black teachers across the country really helped make waves in the context of school by introducing scholarship on Black life and culture in this hostile Jim Crow school context. Certainly we know that Black teachers had always been working to include parts of Black history, whether it be through newspaper excerpts, whether it be through them bringing their own books even when it wasn’t formally a part of the curriculum. We have examples of Black teachers being fired in the early 20th century for doing that kind of work. But when I first started to try to seek out how I can demonstrate that it wasn’t just Carter G. Woodson and these pockets of Black teachers doing this work. The way of documenting that was to go through the records of Black teacher organizations, to go and look at these journals to see are they talking about Negro history week? Well, yes, they are. Then what are they saying about it? And what are they encouraging teachers who are reading these journals to do to observe Negro history week, to write to people in Washington, D.C., or people at Howard University, or to order these books, organize yourselves in study groups and read these texts and figure out how you can make this work digestible for students in the elementary schools and secondary schools, so on and so forth.

We think about Carter G. Woodson establishing Negro History Week in 1926. We’re approaching the one-hundredth anniversary of the first Negro History Week. That’ll be in February 2026. We’ve inherited something that for a long period of time we’ve taken for granted when it comes to Black History Month. But I think many of us in this moment are realizing that we can’t take these things for granted as we’re approaching the centennial of that. But Black teachers are responsible for popularizing Negro History Week before it became Black History Month. Really, through these grassroots campaigns and through organizing these networks that they’re a part of, because of the institutional structure that they have to do this advocacy work.

That’s one of the examples that I often go to, because for me, that was the way that I came to understand and appreciate why these organizations were so important, and I was able to see their impact in terms of the spread of Negro History Week and the literature that became the basis for it, and the organizing that went into that and that evolved into something that we still have around today, that hopefully, we can see in a new light by looking at the background and the labor that went into creating it, especially in this moment.

Hagopian: I’m so glad you raised that history. Cierra and I are on the steering committee of Black Lives Matter at School, and we have Black Lives Matter at School Week, and you can’t understand that national movement of thousands of teachers teaching about intersectional Black identity without understanding Carter G. Woodson and Negro History Week, and that whole movement. So I hope people will dig into that history and help us all celebrate that one-hundredth anniversary.

Perry: Can I make a little plug related to that? The centennial of Negro History Week, but then also fifty years since the transition to Black History Month. One of the things that I think would be meaningful to think about is, what if you have a hundred years, fifty years, what will 2026’s edition be to that tradition? And perhaps we can think about, particularly in your organization, we would obviously be invested in partnering with that idea. To think about what, for the next fifty years, what transition do we need in the particular crisis of this moment for the next fifty years.

Kaler-Jones: Yes, especially as we’re having this conversation, you’re talking about freedom dreaming. And Jarvis mentioned these experiments in freedom, right? How do we continue to do that work, and how do we do it in community? How do we do it together? So continuing on, Jesse and I are just really enthralled with and interested in both of your work. Jarvis, you talked a bit about Fugitive Pedagogy, your book, and you describe Black teaching as an act of covert resistance under systems of racial domination. I share this book with everyone, particularly the story of Tessie McGee. I’m like, “Let me tell you about Tessie McGee.” So, if you could share the Tessie McGee story quickly, because I think that story needs to be shared everywhere. Then also, how does the Black Teacher Archive really deepen or expand your understanding of fugitive pedagogy and practice?

Givens: Thank you for that question. Fugitive Pedagogy, that book that you mentioned, I am familiar with it. So the story of Tessie McGee is a really important story for me, which is why I decided to open the book with it, because that’s a story that I learned about after I had written my dissertation on the story of Carter G. Woodson and his intellectual partnership with Black teachers across the country. I didn’t know of that story. It wasn’t until I came across an audio recording of Tessie McGee’s student recounting his teacher in the 1930s, secretly reading to him and his classmates at the Webster Parish Training School from Carter G. Woodson’s book on what he referred to as his book on the Negro, which he’s referring to The Negro in Our History, the textbook Carter G. Woodson wrote, which was published in 1922.

For me, this story of this teacher secretly reading to her students from this book, even though she’s supposed to be reading from the outline that was provided to her from the local school board for teaching social studies education in the 1930s, that became really, really important for me, because up until that point I was just focusing on the text, like the literal written word of what teachers were doing. They were writing textbooks. There’s this intellectual tradition. And I was just focusing on that, the scripts that were being produced for teachers to take up and implement Negro History Week. But when I came across that story about this student essentially studying his teacher, navigating power in the space of the classroom, I was like, “Oh!” This kind of embodied moment where this teacher is not just reading to them from a text, but she herself is also becoming a text in an important way, where students are learning about what it means to navigate power in the racially hostile context of Jim Crow, Louisiana. When we’re thinking about this particular story with Tessie Mcgee and her students, that became a really important moment for me, because I started to realize that the story that I was trying to tell about Black teachers and making sense of and appreciating the new curriculums that they were developing also required talking about the social history of Black teachers as well. So Fugitive Pedagogy for me became a way of holding those ideas together, that it’s this much longer tradition that can be traced back to the very first traditions in African American letters writing and African American education. When we think about Black people conceptualizing a liberatory model of education.

The first text that we have to look at for these things are the freedom narratives of fugitive slaves, where they’re explicitly talking about Black people pursuing education, and it being a direct pathway to freedom, so to speak. And this kind of trope of the fugitive slave in African American history, and then looking at the way that Black teachers were writing about fugitive slaves and the textbooks that they themselves were creating, and the way that they were navigating power in the context of Black schools, even after they were technically legal, but continued to be met by violent resistance. Fugitive Pedagogy became a way for me to talk about how Black educators in Black communities navigated the oppressive power dynamics in the context of American schooling. How they did that when it came at a curricular level, writing themselves into history, writing new scripts of knowledge to be the basis of a liberatory education. But it also had to do with how they were navigating oppressive surveillance tactics that they were being subjected to. So it literally has to do with them physically navigating some of these oppressive contexts, but also intellectually navigating the very hostile context of the curriculum of American schooling, as well.

The institutions became an expression of fugitive pedagogy, as well. These institutions became an organized response to try and engage in a collective organizing to push forward a larger political agenda. That’s grounded in this much larger liberatory, educational vision. I’m emphasizing those different points because I think, I love the story of Tessie McGee, but I also know that it’s easy to think about her secretly reading from the text, and for folks to only think about fugitive pedagogy as this kind of secret thing that the actions that people are doing in real time, when really it’s also about the intellectual work that they’re doing, as well. That extends from this intellectual tradition, but it’s also about this organizing tradition, as well, that has to do with institution building. All of these things are expressions of this set of really a professional disposition that Black teachers had, that they brought to their work, because they understood the vocation of teaching to be about more than just teaching, reading, writing, and arithmetic. They understood it to be a part of a much larger vision and part of the Black Freedom Struggle.

Hagopian: No doubt. Thank you, Jarvis. That was so great the way you expanded our understanding of Fugitive Pedagogy. A brilliant book. Thank you for that. I wanted to move to Imani’s new book. You recently published Black in Blues, which, as I said, is now one of my absolute all-time favorite books. As a blues musician and educator, I was especially moved by the way you helped us see blue as something vibrant, full of feeling and memory and cultural power. And the way you help us understand that we can’t understand Black people if we don’t understand blue. You write, “While black is our nominal color, even though our bodies range from alabaster to jet, the blues are our sensibility.” Hence the designation made famous by the writer Amiri Baraka in Blues People. Your book made me think of the idea of blues pedagogy, which is something that I tried to write some about in my new book, Teach Truth. Shirley Wade McLoughlin, in her book A Pedagogy of the Blues, writes, “a pedagogy of the blues looks and feels different than the type of education so prevalent today. One of the distinguishing characteristics is the incorporation of testimony in daily work of the classroom.” I’m curious, do you see a relationship between the spirit you uncover in Black in Blues and the spirit of Black teaching preserved in the Black Teacher Archive, and how might the idea of blues pedagogy, one rooted in testimony, creativity, [and] survival, help us imagine this new kind of education?

Perry: I love that connection that you’ve drawn. There’s a couple different ways, I think, to think about this. One of the chapters of the book is on The Original Blue Back Speller, which is Noah Webster’s small book that actually was important for allowing people to teach themselves to read. As a document for autodidacts, what you find in Black narratives, both in the context of slave narratives but also right after emancipation, there’s all these people talking about how precious the Blue Back Speller was for Black people because of the prohibition against literacy, the possibility of learning to read and teaching to read. And there’s just extraordinary stories from Booker T. Washington talking about the Blue Back Speller. George Washington Carver talks about it. There’s this beautiful story of a boy, a 10-year-old who joins the Union Army as a laborer, an enslaved boy, who comes upon on this battlefield Black Union soldiers teaching themselves to read in with the Blue Back Speller.

So part of it, for me, it’s in some ways a precursor to the tradition that we see in the Archive. This idea of, as we talk about frequently, literacy being attached to freedom, but also preciousness associated with the care that’s associated with the documents and documentation that are part of the tradition of Black knowledge production. But there’s this other piece which is more connected to my book, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, which in some sense there’s a kind of parody here, right? Jarvis comes to these materials through writing about Negro History Week, [and] I came to them through writing about “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. They’re apparent in both places where you can find the stories of these practices and these institutions through thinking about these respective interests. But one of the things that I wrote about in the book is Black formal culture and schools being a site for the celebration of Black formal culture. We tend to think about the blues as vernacular culture and schools as formal culture. So formal culture, the places where you’re supposed to act like you’ve been somewhere before, or act right as opposed to the places where you can let loose. But one of the things that’s so beautiful when you look at the pageantry associated with Black assemblies or Negro History Week is that there is this blend of vernacular folk culture and formal culture. In those performances there’s an appreciation of different musical forms and dialects, poetry and the classical, but also the tradition of the spirituals.

So I do think that there’s something there. I hope you continue to write about this, Jesse. There’s something there that is about, even in this sort of formal setting, making sure that there is an appreciation of that which emerged organically out of Black spaces earlier, or even before there’s institution building. And there’s a thread, I think, that we can see carried through. That’s a long-winded way of saying yes, but also, perhaps, that suggests something more about what we do moving into the future. I teach the blues sometimes because I teach African American studies courses at the college level. But to think about what it would mean to offer a curricular blues education in the present landscape. Tracing my first book, I talked about the connection between the blues and hip hop. There’s just so much one can do with that. So I feel like I have less answers and more questions following that question.

Hagopian: Yes. Well, it’ll be fun to keep asking questions together and think about where this can all go. Thank you so much for all that you gave us so far, and we’re going to move into breakout rooms.

[breakout rooms]

Kaler-Jones: Hello, everyone, welcome back! We hope that you had rich discussions. We’re excited to get back to the conversation. Now we want to turn to the Black Teacher Archive website. Could you talk us through how the website is laid out and what some of its special features are? Jesse and I were looking at it, and one of our favorites is the Black Education Timeline. Can you tell us a little bit about that and other tools that you think educators and researchers will find especially useful?

Givens: Sure. It means a lot to hear that you all found the Black Education Timeline to be useful. When we were first dreaming and imagining the website, we were actually in the process of imagining the 2.0 version of the online portal now, and the Black Education Timeline will be a very important part of that, as well. But we didn’t want to assume that people coming to the collection would have the contextual information that’s important to really understand the world that these Colored Teacher Associations are situated within, and the much broader history of the development of Black education, because we know that so many of the narratives that proliferate in the public imagination and also in the context of lots of history books, as well, offer a very impoverished perspective on the history of Black education. So we wanted to offer something that was more nuanced, and that talked about the realities of separate but unequal schooling. [Something] to take seriously that story of material lack, but that also reflected the important long history of resistance, the very important long history of the intellectual and cultural contributions of Black teachers. Which was a part of the story of Black education, as well, so that it’s not just a narrative of deficiency, or a narrative of lack. So that’s why the Black Education Timeline is there. We also figured that’s something that’s become useful not only for teaching and using the Black Teacher Archive in the context of graduate courses that I teach and in college courses, but we knew that there would be some educators who will want to introduce students to some of these primary sources in the context of K through 12 classrooms, as well. And the interactive timeline is just as useful pedagogically across education spaces. So that’s why that curated feature is a part of the site.

I’ll just say briefly, and I’ll allow Imani to jump in, as well, the big thing is that it’s an archive. And so there are over 50,000 pages of digitized materials related to primarily the serial publications of Colored Teacher Associations. These were journals that were published. sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly. Some of them from certain states were bulletins. But these are physical materials that exist all over the country that were digitized, and that are now a part of this digital repository that can be searched. So you can choose to browse either just the journals themselves, which are the bulk of the archive. But Imani mentioned earlier that all of these different Colored Teacher Associations, when they were essentially being forced to integrate themselves out of existence, insisted that the NEA provide support for them to write their histories. And so we also have these printed histories of each of the organizations, which are also digitized, that provide important context on the local organizations in each state. That’s also searchable. You can just search through those particular histories, or you can search through all of the digitized material across the site, as well. Then we also have these micro-histories that we also were able to write based on information that we were able to get just to tell the story of each of the individual organizations across the country, as well. So, those are some of the big components of it. But, Imani, you might want to share a little bit more about just the interactive part of actually searching the material and what that looks like.

Perry: Yeah. One of the things that we did that I think is so important is that because you can do full text searches you can really do a targeted look for information in targeted ways. So, if you want to identify information about what happened in a particular school, you can search that particular school, you can look in a particular location, you can look for questions on what happened, you can look for English classes, you can look for various kinds of events and pedagogical questions, organizations, how they dovetail. But I think the other thing that is really useful potentially for educators, now in particular, is that even if you just browse a single issue of a journal, you get a picture of how these groups organize themselves under incredibly adverse conditions. This is in the context of Jim Crow, this context of a society that is explicitly discriminatory, racially speaking. So there’s an inspiration, I think, that it provides certainly for me as an educator for thinking about how we cannot allow ourselves to be so frustrated and despondent in this moment that we forget that we have this incredible tradition of people who actually built these institutions that were definite precursors to the social revolution of the mid 20th century, in the midst of all this inequality. So it lends itself to lots of different searches and uses.

And part of it is, I think, just to be inside the journals ignites your imagination if you go and just look at different states at particular times. It’s humbling, it’s extraordinary. And we keep saying this in different ways, but it’s such submerged history that you almost can’t imagine the abundance that is, if you haven’t been in the journals, the abundance that is inside them. So I recommend them actually for everybody who’s trying to figure out how to do something meaningful in the present moment, because boy is it inspirational?

Hagopian: Yes, it’s an incredible catalog, and I’m excited to see what some of the teachers in this session do with it, not only in terms of learning lessons for organizing and the struggle, but also how they use these in their classroom to teach kids about the history of Black educators in this country. I had one last question, and we really probably only have like two minutes. So each of you please give us one minute on today’s anti-history laws, what I call truth crime laws, [which] target exactly the education that these teachers fought for. How do you think the legacy of the Colored Teachers Association should inform our response to this backlash today?

Perry: My quick answer would be to read Fugitive Pedagogy.

Givens: Well, thank you for that. But, actually, one of the things I would say is what I really get when I think about the history of these Black teacher organizations is that they’re not only concerned with the response to the threats and the external forces. So I would say that we have to do both. For pragmatic reasons, there has to be a response formulated. But we can’t have a fully liberatory vision of education that’s only based on negation. It can only be about responding to external threats. Striking back is not the only thing that we can occupy ourselves with if we’re actually trying to lay the foundation for an educational model and vision that’s about transcending the current realities, and so on and so forth. It’s not only about the response, but it always has to be about a positive project, as well. We can’t define our educational model against what we’re negating. It has to be something that we’re also positing, that we’re asserting in a set of principles and values that we’re standing on, that we’re imagining is the basis for the education that we want for our communities and for our loved ones. That’s one of the things that I would say. These are folks [who are] aware that they’re having to respond to external threats, but they’re also imagining a world that doesn’t exist. And that’s what they’re teaching towards.

Hagopian: Yes! What a rich conversation. This has been amazing. Thank you both so much. Thank you, Cierra, for helping with this conversation.

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