A Historical Perspective of the Super-Exploitation of Black Women Teachers' Labor

• In Event: Excavating Black Teacher Historiographies and the Necessity of Archival Justice Work in Advancing Educational Equity

Abstract

The concerns of historical and contemporary Black women teachers and their communities must be central to our conversations about modern labor struggles. Black women teachers know all too well the stress of navigating dual labor struggles—advocating for themselves as Black public service workers and on behalf of the predominantly Black students and communities they serve. Notably, Black women teachers make up 76% of the 6.1% of Black teachers in the teaching profession (NCES, 2022). Given that most Black women teachers tend to teach in communities that share their cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Farinde-Wu, 2018), it is not unreasonable to assume that Black women teachers bear the labor of educating Black and brown children while navigating the matrix of domination (Collins, 2000) and anti-Blackness (Dumas, 2016). While much scholarship focuses on how Black women teachers carry a powerful legacy of teaching philosophies and practices that center liberation, anti-racism, and resistance in their classrooms, more dialogue must be had about the super-exploitation of Black women teacher’s organizing and intellectual labor. Thus, to understand the involuntary mass exodus of Black women teachers in the present day and our dire need to retain them, we must “go back and fetch what we need and bring it to this moment…to move forward and (re)member who we’ve been, what we’ve been through, who we are and can become” (Dillard, 2021, p. 10). This paper engages in the process of (re)membering by perusing and drawing from The Colored Teachers Association journals to spotlight the history of Black women teachers with a particular focus on the following research questions:


• How is Black women teacher’s organizing and intellectual labor represented and discussed in The Colored Teachers Associations journals?
• How are historical struggles for liberation and education inextricably linked to the present-day involuntary mass exodus of Black women teachers and the subsequent demands for the recruitment, retention and healing of Black women teachers?

Author

• Jaminque L. Adams, University of Georgia