This article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of…

This article examines the workings of Hampton Institute's external relations program to show how the school developed loyal supporters and donors. By 1900, Hampton was the wealthiest school for African Americans, and its philosophy--stressing vocational education and forsaking political equality--was at its most influential during this time,…

This paper explores trends in summer and intermittent teaching practices among African American students in the post-Civil War South, focusing on student activities in the field, the institutions they attended, and the communities they served. Transitioning out of the restrictions and impoverishment of slavery while simultaneously seeking to…

This article examines Black parents' efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the…

The Black Appalachian educational experience during the civil rights era has largely been obscured by mythologies of invisibility and regional racial innocence. The narrative in this article counters these myths through the stories of Black Appalachians who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s in Jenkins, a southeastern Kentucky coal town. It…

In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs--one-day school boycotts-- to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black…

In the second half of the twentieth century, the ranks of Black teachers and school administrators declined precipitously. Today, less than 7 percent of American teachers are Black. This loss has had a number of consequences for schools and communities, but perhaps especially for Black students. As recent research has found, Black students benefit…

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a "negro" as a teacher of "white youths." Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual…

This paper examines an "experimental" program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)--who…

This essay reviews two books on Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund and places them within the historiography of the Fund. "Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South," is a biography written by Peter M. Ascoli. The book entitled "The Rosenwald Schools of…

This article features Ruth Wright Hayre, Philadelphia's first black high school teacher and principal whose work at William Penn High School for Girls became a model for counseling and motivation programs at other majority-black high schools in Philadelphia, expanding educational and career opportunities for thousands of "able" students.…

Samuel Chapman Armstrong is well known for establishing Hampton Institute, the institution most involved with training black teachers in the South after the Civil War. It is less known that he was born in Hawai'i to the missionary couple Reverend Richard and Clarissa Chapman Armstrong. His parents were members of the Fifth Company of missionaries…

Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois were two of the most prominent African-American educators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, they both envisioned a broad education tailored specifically to the critical intellectual and vocational needs of the entire black community. In this essay, the author examines common themes…

Recent historiography has documented the singular contributions made by women to racial uplift and progress during the Jim Crow era. In these endeavors, women's contributions were greatly shaped by race, gender, and class. Given the feminization of education in the United States during this time, it is not surprising that their "race work" was for…

The history of public higher education for African Americans in Florida provides an excellent opportunity to examine American institutional and political dynamics. Following World War II, Florida public higher education expanded dramatically, while at the same time, state leaders maintained racial segregation well after "Brown v. Board of…