Discover the Legacy of Black Educators
The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is a freely available digital portal centralizing materials created by professional organizations of African American educators, historically referred to as Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). The primary holdings of the portal are 20th century serial publications by CTAs.
The collection makes public the intellectual, political, and cultural contributions of Black educators during the Jim Crow era through the Civil Rights era. The BTA brings together materials from 70 archival repositories across the United States and makes available for research more than 50,000 pages authored by African American educators.
The project is based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in association with the Monroe C. Gutman Library Special Collections and is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.
View The Archive
The primary holdings include a centralized collection of 20th century serial publications by Black educator organizations. These journals and bulletins document the history of social and political organizing by African American educators who were key figures in various educational struggles, including the push for the equalization of teacher salaries and school resources, desegregation, curriculum reform, and civil rights. The content of these publications spans the range of educational concerns: policy, philosophy, curriculum, pedagogy, as well as the relationship between political issues of the day and classroom experience.
Curated Features
In addition to digitized journals, newsletters, and histories in this portal, we have also curated resources to contextualize the material:
Contributing Communites
The Black Teacher Archive is made possible by the efforts of many. Just as the Colored Teacher Associations utilized networks at the local, regional, state, and national level, the creation of this archive required a national network of archivists, librarians, and historians to locate and digitize the items centralized in this collection. To learn more about the project:
Black Teacher Archive Events
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