(Re)membering Trans-Atlantic Creole Pedagogies: Black Fugitive Teachers From the New Orleans Archives

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This interdisciplinary symposium examines transatlantic African and African descendant persons, both formerly enslaved and free persons of color, in the Gulf South who established educational institutions to resist the dehumanizing practices of chattel slavery. While educational histories have focused on African American educational initiatives as part of the northern Anglo-Protestant common school movement, less attention has been given to the Afro-Creole protest tradition in Louisiana which emerged in the confluence of the revolutionary transatlantic. The three papers in this session, drawing on multiple archival sources, provide a parallel history of fugitive teachers that emerged in the multilingual, multicultural creole spaces shaped by a long-standing Afro-Creole activist tradition that sought public education as critical to human equality.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Education and Place, Space, Time

Chair

• Cynthia B. Dillard, Seattle University

Papers

• Afro-Creole Teachers as Exiles: The Haitian Revolution and Public Education in New Orleans, 1809-1841 - Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University

• Orphans, Epidemics, and Expanding Education for Free Children of Color in Pre–Civil War New Orleans - Elizabeth Neidenbach, The Historic New Orleans Collection

• Resisting the Reform-to-Prison Pipeline: Frances Joseph-Gaudet’s Redemptive Vision for Abolitionist Teaching in Jim Crow New Orleans - Amber Neal-Stanley, Purdue University

Discussant

• Cynthia B. Dillard, Seattle University