The Forgotten Civil Rights Activism of Black Educators

• In Event: Examining the Current State of the Teaching Profession: A Case Study of South Carolina

Abstract

Black educators in South Carolina, like black teachers across the southern United States, shaped the field of education by demanding a fundamental right to a quality education. In the process, they politicized the field of education and the teaching profession, sowing seeds of resistance that transformed the work of professional teachers. Since their founding after Reconstruction, black teachers formed teacher associations like the Palmetto Education Association and utilized them to demand higher salaries, better working conditions in schools, and the right to work during the era of desegregation in the 1970s. The history contained in this essay presentation contextualizes the contemporary lack of diversity in the teacher workforce as it concomitantly illustrates the latent potential of southern teacher associations to serve as bastions of civil rights-based reform initiatives in the burgeoning “Red for Ed” movement.

Black teachers in South Carolina put forth an important platform of the Civil Rights Movement that focused on the provision of quality education, which included gaining access to resources exclusively limited to White schools as well as securing equal funding for segregated Black schools. Teacher associations were a critical part of this struggle, which originated after Reconstruction and continued to shape the classic phase of the Civil Rights Movement after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision.

This essay presentation delineates a constellation of rights that informed the collective agency of Black educators during the nascent stages of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1920s through the era of desegregation during the 1970s. Additionally, this treatise is premised on notions of professionalization posited by Diana D’Amico (2011), Jonna Perillo (2012) and Wayne Urban (2000) to illustrate how the professional labor of educators provided a form of activism not typically associated with the Civil Rights Movement. Its historiography often dismisses notions of teacher professionalism, but issues like improving the working conditions of teachers in segregated schools, creating culturally relevant curricula, attending institutions of higher learning for professional development, making demands for higher salaries, and protecting the due process of embattled teachers during desegregation underscored the work of Black educators as civil rights advocates.

The history of teacher organization in the American South disrupts a narrative of passivity to broaden the conceptualization of civil rights activism to include educators and reimagines our classrooms as inherently political spaces. It also posits that educators organized themselves by following a consistent and coherent agenda of civil rights from the era of Jim Crow through desegregation. Black educators in the South saw their work as political and inherently connected to civil rights. Their subsequent articulation and demand for a right to a quality education contributed significantly to the Civil Rights Movement and the trajectory of public education in South Carolina.

Author

• Jon Hale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author