Mapping the Black High School Through Jim Crow and Desegregation

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

Abstract

The Colored Teachers’ Association Journals present a wealth of data, with immense opportunities for the use of historians, genealogists, journalists, and more. In reading through these journals, it becomes readily apparent that the associational life of these organizations is supported not only by a vast network of educators across several generations but institutional networks and Black communities which housed these educators and their students. Recognizing this, this paper seeks to understand what it could mean to reconstruct these intellectual geographies. By geocoding the spatial data preserved within these journals, I have produced a visualization of the institutional networks that supported the organizations. By visualizing spatial data to recreate these intellectual communities, I am hoping to gain some understanding of the movement of ideas within the associations through the communities they served. Overall, the spatialization of these artifacts will allow for crucial historical context in recovering a sense of the many levels of intellectual community at the center of these associations.

Author

• Cassondra Hanna, Harvard University