Jeanes Teachers

Exhibit curated by Brittney Kilgore.

Edits and online adaptions by Erica Buddington.

That question is the origin of the Jeanes Teacher program. When the newly formed Jeanes Fund financed Randolph's expansion from one school to an entire county, her individual practice became the template for a movement. By 1908, that model had reached Georgia — and it would not leave for sixty-two years.

Jeanes Teachers were Black, educated women funded by the Anna T. Jeanes Fund and later The Rural School Fund Inc. to establish health, educational, and financial resources for Black school families in the rural South between 1908 and 1970. The educators who worked on this endeavor evolved over time: a Jeanes Teacher served a single rural school, while a Jeanes Supervisor served multiple districts. What remained constant was the scope of the work.

In Georgia, Jeanes Teachers partnered with the Rosenwald Fund to build over 50 schools and implement curricula that centered on Black education. Their work was documented in journals including The Herald: Georgia Teachers and Education Association Journal and The Louisiana Colored Teachers' Journal, and profiles of both teachers and supervisors appear throughout the Black Teacher Archive.

Jeanes Teachers exclusively served in rural counties. At that time, rural districts were defined as areas with over 70% farmland, where most employment was in domestic labor and agricultural fieldwork. In contrast to urban areas with access to transit systems, water infrastructure, railroads, and hotels, rural communities operated with far fewer resources and far less visibility.

Jeanes Teachers used access to innovative fundraising networks to bring some of those resources into rural Georgia. They rallied allies, wrote letters to white county superintendents, attended local and state meetings, and used every available relationship to gain funding, permission, and materials for the schools they served. The work Jeanes Teachers provided across rural Georgia carried a spirit of possibility into counties where Black children had been told to expect less.

Jeanes Teachers attended local and national meetings to represent rural communities that would otherwise have had no voice at the table. Their advocacy reached school funding decisions, curriculum debates, and resource allocation conversations that directly shaped the conditions of Black education in Georgia.

Scholars including Darlene Clark Hine have described this dimension of their work as operating as "double agents," a framework later applied to Jeanes Teachers specifically to capture the way they moved between Black communities and white county officials, translating needs into requests, and requests into results. They wrote official letters to white state superintendents. They sat in GTEA conventions discussing new initiatives, then returned to rural counties and communicated those changes to parents, community members, and other educators. They used access, not deference, to get what their communities needed.

That dual navigation was not a compromise. It was a strategy. And it worked.

The Herald documented Jeanes Teachers at state conventions, in regional meetings, and in their roles as curriculum writers and reporters. The Georgia Association of Jeanes Curriculum Directors maintained records of their advocacy at every level of the system. Their presence in these spaces was not incidental. It became the mechanism.

Jeanes Teachers were curriculum writers, in-service educators, and instructional leaders. In 1946, Helen A. Whiting's Planning Together, Following Through offered supervisors a framework for teacher observation, recruitment, and training. The Georgia Division of Negro Schools' The Open Road: A Teacher's Guide for Child, Adult and Community Development reflected the scope of what Jeanes Teachers were designing and delivering. Amber Caliver's 1933 federal bulletin, Rural Elementary Education among Negroes under Jeanes Supervising Teachers, documented the reach of the program nationally at a time when its Georgia chapter was already decades deep.

Programs Jeanes Teachers advocated for across Georgia included sewing, gymnastics, well-building, updated reading programs, choirs, and applied fieldwork. They ran study groups, trained teachers toward certification, organized School-Community Days so families could engage with curriculum changes and held commencement programs that encouraged students to continue from elementary through high school and on to college.

From 1908 to 1970, Jeanes Teachers were active in professional organizations beyond their counties. They held leadership in the National Jeanes Teacher Association (NJTA), the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (later the American Teachers Association), Black Greek organizations, local Colored Teachers Associations, the National Council for Negro Women, and district committees. 

These affiliations were not ceremonial. Jeanes Teachers used national networks to access resources, materials, and information they brought back to the communities they served, funding initiatives, school advocacy councils, and rebuilding projects included.

At the national level, Jeanes Teachers served seventeen states across the South. Georgia Jeanes Teachers appeared on the rosters of major national convenings, including the 1949 National Association of Jeanes Supervisors (NAJS) Biennial Convention at Tuskegee Institute and the 1952 State Agents conference with representatives from fourteen Southern states.

Susie Wheeler

Susie W. Wheeler is the organizing force of Bartow County. She built Noble Hill School in 1920, served as a Jeanes Supervisor beginning in 1946, and participated on the National Committee of Georgia Jeanes Teachers. She attended county board meetings to request funding and materials, wrote in local newspapers to build public support, and organized construction projects that changed what was physically possible for Black children in her county.

Her doctoral dissertation from Atlanta University, completed in 1977 and preserved at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, examined the impact of Jeanes Teachers in rural counties. Noble Hill School is now a historic site dedicated to her legacy.