About The Project

Materials in this collection are a resource for scholars, current educators, and genealogists, because they offer critical insight on the history of African American education, civil rights organizing, Black pedagogical practices and intellectual history, as well as the words and deeds of both popular and lesser-known teachers, school leaders, and community educators.

This project has many beginnings. Professors Givens and Perry wrote about Colored Teachers Associations in their individual scholarship before working together on the Black Teacher Archive. Building on the research of Professors James Anderson, Michael Fultz, and Vanessa Siddle Walker, which contextualized the significance of CTAs and their unique challenges, Givens and Perry both recognized the need to preserve and make more widely accessible the records of these organizations. Professor Theresa Perry, having had separate conversations with both Givens and Perry on the subject, organized a lunch meeting on April 15, 2018, at the Le Meridian Hotel, during the American Educational Research Association’s Annual Meeting in New York City. The meeting included James Anderson, Jarvis Givens, Imani Perry, and Theresa Perry, and its purpose was to discuss the possibilities for an archive on Black education and, particularly, the need to locate and preserve the records of Colored Teachers Associations.

Following this meeting, Jarvis Givens and Imani Perry secured support from the Radcliffe Institute on Advanced Study to hold a seminar for “Archival Imaginings and the History of Black Education in the U.S.” in September 2019, bringing together a group of eighteen historians, education scholars, and archivists to explore the feasibility of such a project. At this seminar, it was determined that the first phase of such an effort would be to collect, catalogue, and digitize a complete collection of CTA journals, which would form the basis of the Black Teacher Archive. In the summer of 2020, the project was awarded funding from the Mellon Foundation to develop the portal.

In the fall of 2023, the Black Teacher Archive portal 1.0 was launched and made openly available on the internet. Making use of local Harvard technology, the team heavily relied on Harvard Library Digital Collections Discovery. Over 70 institutions contributed digital reproductions of journals and histories of colored teacher associations.

This collection is a non-custodial archival project. The material that forms is this digital collection exists in print and is stewarded in manuscript archives, rare books and periodical collections. The aims of the first phase of this project were to locate, digitize, and provide access to the dispersed material in a centralized repository. We contacted about 150 institutions in search of Colored Teacher Association journals and were fortunate to have the contributions of nearly over 90 archival repositories. We estimate before the BTA, about 230 CTA journals were digitized, this collection includes closer to 1,750 digitized journals. We developed flexible workflows to accomplish digitization including funding institutions to perform the labor in-house, enlisting a digitization vendor, utilizing local state library digitization hubs, and temporarily borrowing materials for Harvard Imaging Services to digitize. Gutman Library has committed resources to provide long term stewardship to the digital reproductions produced for the project.

What’s more, beyond this technical specifics, the creation of the BTA mimics the networked world of Colored Teacher Associations, a collection of professional groups that existed across the country, while working in close collaboration to develop a unified educational agenda that was responsive to the needs of black students, educators, and communities. Just as the Colored Teacher Associations utilized networks at the local, regional, state, and national level, the creation of this archive required a national network of archivists, librarians, and historians to locate and digitize the items centralized in this collection. The portal, in its form and creation, seeks to memorialize this collective work of Black teachers.

After launching the portal in 2023, the Black Teacher Archive was awarded a Spencer Foundation small grant and received continued support from the Mellon Foundation. The project has sought to further expand the collection curatorial scope to include public ephemera documenting Colored Parents and Teachers Associations and improve representation of the items from boarder southern states, as well as improve the project website. In collaboration with Harvard Arts & Research Computing the Black Teacher Archive team developed this iteration of the portal - a custom website with improved search functionality, digital exhibits, curricular material, and more.