African American Women Educators' Legacy of Community Engagement: An Analysis of Septima Poinsette Clark

• In Event: 64.020 - Of, by, and for the People: Educational Work With Past and Present Black Communities

Abstract

While community engagement appears to be a relatively new phenomenon in the field of education, African American women educators have had a long legacy of linking education to community engaged activism (Johnson, 2000; Johnson, 2014; Loder-Jackson, 2015). The intersecting structures of race, class, and gender oppression positioned African American women educators, such as Septima Poinsette Clark, the subject of this presentation, into a lifetime of community engaged activism for the educational, economic, and political advancement of African Americans. Specifically, Clark’s writings and correspondences reveal poignant ideals regarding her thinking on education, race, and community engaged activism. Clark was clear about the need to engage in educative work that would give rise to self-improvement, educational success, and Black empowerment. Thus, for Clark, education became intertwined with community engagement. There has been numerous scholarship on Clark’s work as an adult literacy educator that provides descriptive or biographical information of her work. Yet, there has not been a critical analysis of her unpublished work that unpacks her thinking about education and community engaged activism, specifically during the beginning of her career as an educator and activist. This presentation will depart from previous work on Clark by providing a critical analysis of Clark’s intellectual thoughts on education, race, and community engagement. Specifically, I am concerned with how she conceptualized race and education and how her ideas influenced her educational perspectives and community engagement, during the early years of her teaching, long before she became an adult literacy activist.

I use womanist thought as a theoretical framework to unpack and critically examine Clark’s ideas on education and community activism because womanist thought allows for a more nuanced and complicated understanding of how the interlocking structures of oppression contributed to the disenfranchisement of African Americans in education during the Jim Crow era—the time frame of Clark’s work. This framework provides a paradigm that draws on Black women’s critical thoughts and activism regarding oppression and resistance to it. I will employ a historical method that draws upon the primary sources from Clark’s archival papers. Specifically, I will examine her unpublished archival writings and correspondences, in efforts to explore her ideas about education and community engaged activism. Clark’s legacy of struggle to transform society and to educate and empower African Americans provides us with an inspiring story and a model that contemporary community engaged activists, who are committed to a socially just democratic society, can adhere to.

Author

• Karen Ann Johnson, University of Utah