Famous African American Teachers

Introduction: Dr. Charles K. Ross, Director, African-American Studies
The University of Mississippi

Africans, delivered to America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, brought with them a commitment to education. This desire for learning caused them to be placed in the difficult position of forcibly learning English but not legally being taught how to read and write. Although caught in this paradox, African Americans such as Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Mary Jane Patterson, and Booker T. Washington all had significant educational accomplishments.

Several African Americans received degrees from white institutions of higher learning during the 19th century and historically black colleges were formed beginning in 1837 with the establishment of Cheyney State Training School in Pennsylvania.

With the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, African Americans in the South found themselves retrenched to land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, legally stripped of the right to vote, and socially segregated. Against this backdrop, education became the leading tool in the fight for equal rights politically, economically and socially. The individuals featured during Black History Month by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning represent and epitomize some of the many accomplishments, contributions, and achievements by African American teachers.

Mary Eliza Church Terrell (1863-1954) was born in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation and has been called the living link between the historical Emancipation and the modern Civil Rights eras.

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, but because of the lack of educational opportunities, was sent to live with family friends in Yellow Springs, Ohio and attended school there. After attending public schools in Ohio, she graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio in 1884. She then went abroad for two years and studied French, German, and Italian languages in Europe. During Oberlin’s centennial celebration in 1933, they awarded Mary an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Mary taught for a year at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio and then moved to Washington, DC to teach M Street High School where she met her husband Robert Heberton Terrell who was also teaching there at the time. Robert earned several degrees from Harvard University and Howard University Law School. He went on to serve four successive 4-year terms as a municipal court judge in Washington, DC, by Presidential appointment.

Mary Eliza Church Terrell founded the Colored Woman’s League, which later became the National Federation of Colored Women and was elected as its first president in 1896. She presented many lectures and articles denouncing segregation. She was appointed to the District of Columbia’s Board of Education in 1895, its first nonwhite board member. Mary was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was active in education, the women’s movement, and segregation both nationally and internationally.

"A white woman has only one handicap to overcome, a great one, true, her sex; a colored woman faces two-her sex and her race."

References:

http://www.tnstate.edu/library/digital/terrell.htm accessed on February 12, 2008.

Archives: Teachers featured earlier this month
John Robert Edward Lee
Sarah Mapps Douglass
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
Mary Smith Peake
Peter Humphries Clark
Mary McLeod Bethune
William Leo Hansberry
Inez Beverly Prosser
W.E.B. DuBois
Hallie Quinn Brown
Father Patrick Francis Healy
Charlotte Forten Grimke
Harper Councill Trenholm