Famous African American Teachers
Introduction: Dr. Charles K. Ross, Director, African-American StudiesThe 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.
Mr. Washington was born on the Burroughs tobacco farm, the son of a slave mother and a white father from another farm. Treated as a slave because of his mother, he carried books to school for one of the Burrough children. It was illegal to educate slaves but that changed with the end of the Civil War when he was nine years old. As free blacks, Washington’s family moved to West Virginia where he worked in a salt mine while attending school late in the day.
At 16, he went to Virginia to attend Hampton Institute, arriving broke and in a dismal state from walking much or all of the 500 miles there. Immediately he began to work to pay his way. Hampton Institute was managed by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong who “believed in work, study, hygiene, morality, self-discipline and self-reliance - in large amounts.” A primary goal was to train black teachers and that they should learn a trade as well. Washington appeared to learn the lessons of Armstrong well and applied many of the same principles to Tuskegee Institute which he founded.
Washington’s early positions in education were as a teacher in Tinkersville, West Virginia and as a teacher at Hampton Institute. In 1881 Armstrong recommended Washington as the new principal of the forming Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. At Tuskegee, money was always an issue. Washington went on frequent speaking tours to raise money, and depicted a very conservative approach in achieving racial equality. He appears to be the first black man invited to dine in the White House. It is for this conservative approach that he was reviled by some who wanted a much more vigorous approach on this track. It was a pragmatic approach for a man who needed to raise money from wealthy white to support the Institute. Late in his life, he did attack racism and in particular the depiction of blacks in the film “Birth of a Nation.”
About himself, Washington wrote, “There was no period of my life that was devoted to play. From the time that I can remember anything, almost every day of my life has been occupied in some kind of labor.”
And about slavery, he wrote, “From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.”
References:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/bowa/btwbio.html accessed February 18, 2008.
http://www.ushistory.net/washington2.html accessed February 16, 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
Mary Church Terrell
Alexander Twilight
John Hope
Euphemia Lofton-Haynes