Teaching Black History
For Educators Who Want to Understand Where This Work Comes From
Teaching Black History: A Living Tradition
Long before Black History Month became a national observance, many African American educators incorporated knowledge of Black life and culture into their curricula. Despite laboring in underfunded, segregated schools, they organized Negro History Week celebrations, typed and handwrote original lesson plans, and they passed these materials hand to hand. The Black Teacher Archive helps document this story.
This page is an invitation to encounter the tradition and repurpose it for our own time.
"It seems to me that the heroic tradition of black history as it was developed and sustained by black memory workers is one that is desperately needed in this moment--I think there is much to be learned from this tradition that paved the way for Black History Month."
—Dr. Jarvis R. Givens
From the Archive: How They Did It
Negro History Week Programs from the Classroom
Starting in 1926, Black teachers across the country organized Negro History Week observances tailored to their specific communities. These programs reveal the pedagogical ingenuity behind what, from the outside, could look like a simple celebration. Teachers sequenced readings, arranged student performances, incorporated local history, and used the week as an anchor for yearlong historical inquiry.
What to look for: Whose names appear on these programs? Who was asked to speak? What parts of Black history were centered, and what does that tell us about the community's own sense of what needed to be remembered?
Teacher-Created Curriculum and Instructional Materials
Because Black history was excluded from most standard textbooks, many Black teachers developed lesson plans on “Negro History” and “Negro Literature” and some even published textbooks. The BTA holds examples of teacher-created lesson plans, reading lists, and classroom handouts developed independently, often in conversation with Carter G. Woodson's work through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History as well as other knowledgeable scholars (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane D. Shackelford, and more) through the professional networks of Black teachers.
What to look for: How did these teachers decide what to teach? What sources did they draw on? How did they adapt national narratives to local contexts, or challenge dominant narratives using the evidence available to them?
Meeting Agendas, Correspondence, and Professional Networks
Teaching Black history was a collective effort. Teachers shared materials at conferences and across schools and districts, wrote to scholars for source recommendations, and they organized through professional associations to build what no single school could build alone. Such communication is reflected in the BTA and it shows the infrastructure of a Black pedagogical community, an interconnected network of scholars of the practice, all of whom made such curricular interventions possible.
What to look for: Who was in conversation with whom? What were teachers asking for? What were they offering? How did professional networks function as a community of practice for curriculum development?
Reflection Prompts for Educators
These prompts are designed for use in professional development, team meetings, or individual reflection. They are rooted in what the archive reveals, and meant to move from simply encountering the historical matter to using them as a bridge to reflect on present-day practice.
For Administrators
- The teachers in this archive often worked without institutional support and sometimes against institutional resistance. What conditions are you creating that make creative and intellectual work possible for educators in your building? What conditions are you still working to change?
- Negro History Week began as a community-organized practice before it was ever a school mandate. What does it mean for your school or district to be a steward of that tradition?
For Teachers
- Many teachers in this archive taught Black history at professional risk, in places and times where it could cost them their jobs (and sometimes their physical safety). What does it mean to teach this content from a position of relative security? What responsibilities come with that?
- Carter G. Woodson argued that the way Black history was taught, or not taught, was itself a form of harm. What is at stake for your students in how you approach this content? What do they lose if it is done poorly, and what might they gain if it is done with care and great intentionality?
- The archive shows us teachers who used every available resource: borrowed materials, community partnerships, newspapers, and oral traditions to build curriculum. What resources exist in your community that you have not yet brought into your classroom?
The BHM100 Academic Portalis a contemporary curriculum resource developed in the tradition of the Black memory work you have been exploring here. Aligned with primary sources from the Black Teacher Archive and grounded in Jarvis R. Givens' scholarship in I'll Make Me a World, BHM100 offers four high school project modules for grades 9–12. Each project is designed to help students encounter Black history not as a month-long obligation, but as an ongoing intellectual practice.
The four projects invite students to mine archives, build community calendars, use historical knowledge as a tool for present-day analysis, and conduct oral history interviews with community members. In each case, students are not just learning about Black memory work. They are practicing it.