Education for the Next Generation: Nellie Rathbone Bright

• In Event: Deepening the Discourse on Black Educators’ Experiences and Pedagogy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

This paper will examine the life history of Nellie Rathbone Bright, an African American woman who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, became a celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer, and worked as a teacher and administrator in Philadelphia’s segregated public schools. In the 1920s, Bright taught in Philadelphia’s all-black public schools, and eventually, became the principal of the all-black Joseph P. Hill School in Germantown during the Great Depression. As the principal of this school, Bright actively encouraged her students and teachers to conduct local ethnographic studies about the challenges that African Americans faced in the Jim Crow north. Inspired by Du Bois’s pioneering study and called to action by Eleanor Roosevelt, Bright joined a cadre of educators across the nation engaged in localized survey-style community studies. Bright led her students on a door to door survey documenting the housing and working conditions of black residents in her community to demonstrate how racial inequality and injustice operated in Germantown’s African American community. This paper examines her action-research project and illustrates how she used her educational practice to challenge racism in her school community.
This paper links two intersecting bodies of scholarship: the history of American education and African American history (Baldwin, 2007; Doughtery, 2004; Douglas, 2005; Fairclough, 2001; Gaines, 1996; Grossman, 1991; Hicks, 2010; Leloudis, 1996). My work draws on the insights and methodologies that these works offer and contributes to them by situating Bright’s educational practice against the social and political context that influenced her work. Even though her life story is largely absent from the scholarly historical record, Nellie Rathbone Bright connects these moments in time—the migration of African Americans from the South, the massive employment that black Philadelphians experienced during the Great Depression, and the commitment she demonstrated to giving her students access to educational resources and knowledge in a deeply segregated school system. Finally, this paper will draw on the contributions of history of gender and sexuality to understand how Bright’s position, as a woman, shaped her work an exemplary educator and civil rights activist (Hicks, 2010; Mitchell, 2004; White, 1999). This study uses a variety of historical sources, including archival collections, such as the Nellie Rathbone Bright collection held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; newspaper collections, such as The Philadelphia Tribune; and other scholarly and poetic works that Bright published in journals, such as Opportunity and Black Opals.

Author

• Erika Kitzmiller, Harvard University