Black Women Educators Research Articles

<em>Unearthing and Bequeathing Black Feminist Legacies of</em> Brown <em>to a New Generation of Women and Girls</em>

On May 18, 1955, one year after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) Supreme Court decision and only days preceding her death, Mary McLeod Bethune bequeathed to her race combination of moral virtues and prophetic exhortations penned as My Last Will and Testament (Bethune-Cookman University, n. d.; Loder-Jackson, 2010). In light of Brown 's ambitious aim to dismantle Jim Crow, the intransigent system of racial apartheid in public that was legally undergirded for decades by the infamous separate-but-equal doctrine of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court case (Kluger, 2004; Patterson, 2001), Bethune's bequeathal of a thirst for education and a responsibility to our young (BethuneCookman University, n.d., para. 8 & 15), in particular, implied unique stewardship obligation for Black women educators. Black women educators' majority representation in U.S. Southern allBlack schools entailed weighty professional charge for them to prepare Black children to negotiate nascent interracial society (Tillman, 2004a, 2004b; V. S. Walker, 2009). Yet, at the dawn of Brown Black educators anticipated that they would be placed between proverbial rock and hard place (Fultz, 2008, p. 67) as they bore the overwhelming burden of: integrating White schools that were hostile to them and their students; being torn away from Black schools and communities where they were often revered; and witnessing the wholescale dismantling of Black schools and teachers associations that anchored them both professionally and communally (Fultz, 2004, 2008; Gray, Reed, & Walton, 1987; Perry, 1975; Rodgers, 1975; Tillman, 2004a, 2004b; V. S. Walker, 2009, 2013a, 2013b).As Plessy's pernicious separate-but-(un)equal mandate persists in 21st century public education, if Bethune was alive she would be dismayed by how many of these prophetic concerns materialized and jeopardized the educational legacies she bequeathed. Nonetheless, Bethune's legacies are perpetual, as she was arguably the foremost Black American woman educational leader of the early 20th century (McCluskey & Smith, 2001). In an effort to shed light on the collective intellectual thought and struggles of Black women educators during this era, this article exposes the link to Bethune ' s legacy by uncovering the overshadowed contributions of three of her lesser-known contemporaries who lived long enough to participate in Brown's enactment. Marion Thompson Wright was university educator, scholar, social worker, and journal editor whose ground-breaking research on educational disparities in Newark, New Jersey in the 1930s and 1940s was indispensable to Brown's social science arguments (Wright, 1941, 1944, 1953, 1954). Ruby Jackson Gainer was schoolteacher, teachers' union leader, and Black teachers association member in Birmingham, Alabama, who fought for teacher salary equalization as part of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) pre-Brown legal strategy in the 1940s, and also advocated for the integration of the National Education Association (NEA; Gainer, 1947). Mamie Phipps Clark was an early childhood educator, humanitarian, and scholar in Washington, D.C., who was the brainchild of and collaborator with her husband, Kenneth Clark, on the renowned 1930s and 1940s doll studies that proved indispensable to Brown's enactment (K. B. Clark & M. P. Clark, 1939, 1940, 1950; M. P. Clark 1939; McLean, 2005).Brown was incomparable to Supreme Court cases that preceded it, particularly in its reliance on social science research and novel set of legal precedents, including the teacher salary equalization cases, which were strategically adjudicated by the NAACP expressly to dismantle Plessy (Kirk, 2009; Kluger, 2004; McNeil, 1984). Wright, Gainer, and Clark helped initiate this foundational research and litigation, but their legacies were eclipsed by Brown 's pantheon of race men, namely Thurgood Marshall and Kenneth Clark, who dedicated their lives to fighting for racial justice on behalf of Black people (Banks, 2010; Carby, 2000; Roach, 2004). …

Turning Adversity into Opportunity: A Black Womans Journey into Academia

This article is a contribution to the stories of black women educators in schools and higher education institutions in South Africa as we have responded to a variety of challenges in our journeys into academia. It is an auto-ethnographic account in which I have borrowed concepts from sociology to help me analyse my experiences in two educational fields or contexts (a high school and a university) which have contributed to the constitution of a habitus characterised by resilience1 and assertiveness2. In this auto-ethnography I focus on the challenges I have faced, how my habitus has informed the choices I have made in response to these challenges and how, as I have tried to figure out what actions to take I have been able to survive in the sometimes trying circumstances presented by the fields. My story is in three parts: (i) my experiences as a Zulu First Additional language teacher in a previously white suburban high school in which there were no materials available for teaching Zulu at this level; (ii) my largely positive experiences as a student in a B Ed Honours degree programme which enabled me to respond to some of the challenges of this high school teaching context;(iii) my experiences as a lecturer in the Wits School of Education with responsibility for teaching (successively) Zulu Additional Language and ICT in Education courses, while also undertaking research in the latter area – experiences in which the support of a mentor has played a key role. I conclude by making explicit the impact of the interactions between my habitus and the experiences I have had in the two fields as I have made choices that have contributed to my on-going development as an academic. Keywords: habitus; field; options; resilience; assertiveness

A forgotten sisterhood: pioneering black women educators and activists in the Jim Crow South

A forgotten sisterhood: pioneering black women educators and activists in the Jim Crow South

A world of their own: a history of South African women's education

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorised the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students' experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women's social roles harboured by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education--introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

Hope and Despair: Southern Black Women Educators Across Pre- and Post-Civil Rights Cohorts Theorize about Their Activism

Framed by theoretical perspectives on Black Feminist Thought, the life course, and the Generation X/Hip-Hop generation, I present findings from a subset of 10 Black women educators in Birmingham, Alabama who participated in a larger life story project. The participants, who came of age professionally across the pre- and post-civil rights movement (CRM), describe divergent and convergent social and historical contexts that shaped their professionalization, as well as their relationships with and perceptions of Black students and parents. Participants across generation theorize that teaching and leading are activist practices in their own right, which entail clandestine support and silent protest, intergenerational bridge-building, and debunking the myth of Black inferiority. Post-CRM educators, in particular, expressed ambivalence about their urban students’ futures. I conclude that multigenerational perspectives should figure more prominently in the scholarship on Black education in the US South. This emphasis could spark new directions and strategies for linking successive generations of Black educators, thereby maximizing opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and collaboration for transformative change in urban education.

Of Victorianism, Civilizationism, and Progressivism: The Educational Ideas of Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois, 1892–1940

Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois were two of the most prominent African-American educators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, they both envisioned a broad education tailored specifically to the critical intellectual and vocational needs of the entire black community. They also participated in international affairs, attended and worked together at some of the same conferences and meetings, and shared a belief that education should encourage blacks to place their situation and struggles within a global context. In developing their educational ideas, they both addressed a wide range of educational issues (black women's education, education of the black masses, and the history curriculum in black schools) that spoke to the universal as well as the local realities of black life in America. At the core of their educational thought was their belief that social advancement would result in equality for blacks.

‘There’s salt‐water in our blood’: the ‘Middle Passage’ epistemology of two Black mothers regarding the spiritual education of their daughters

The author examines the discourses and practices of two Black women educators regarding the spiritual education of their daughters. Their daughters attended an independent African‐centered community school in a large Midwestern city. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted as part of a larger ethnographic study exploring the education of Black girls in two ethnocultural settings. The participants’ parental pedagogies critiqued mainstream educational practices as well as revealing the creative improvisations lived at the intersections of dominant and non‐dominant cultures. The author argues that Black mothers’ pedagogies reflect to a ‘Middle Passage’ consciousness. The author also exhorts more critical analyses of often disregarded discourse as a way to work toward transforming Black education.

A Culturally competent intervention of education and care for black women with type 2 diabetes

This article reports on the development and pilot feasibility testing of a culturally competent intervention of education and care for black women with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Using a one group, pretest posttest quasi-experimental design, the intervention was tested with a convenience sample of 25 community black women with T2DM. The conceptual basis, process, and content of the intervention as well as the feasibility and acceptability of study materials and methods are described. Significant improvements from baseline to 3 months were observed in measures of glycemic control, weight, body mass index, and diabetes-related emotional distress. The findings suggest that a culturally sensitive intervention of nurse practitioner diabetes care and education is beneficial for black women with T2DM, resulting in program attendance, kept appointments, improved glycemic control and weight, and decreased diabetes-related emotional distress.

"Maintaining a Home for Girls": The Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919-1950

This essay examines the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (IFCWC) campaign to operate a house for African American women at the University of Iowa from 1919 to 1950. (1) It seeks to add to a growing body of literature which focuses on African American philanthropy and collective black economic enterprises. An examination of the experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa and the IFCWC Home campaign offers an interesting case study that builds on recent research work on African American Women's philanthropy. (2) The IFCWC's economic enterprise developed because between 1913 and 1946, the University of Iowa barred African American students from campus and some student activities. The experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa are unique for two reasons: 1) the house they occupied was one of a few dormitories in the nation owned and operated by a formally organized group of African American women; and 2) the campaign to maintain the IFCWC Hom e provided mostly middle-class African American women students with the organizational, intellectual, and leadership skills necessary to become the next generation of black women activists. In general, the experiences of African American college women at predominantly white coeducational institutions in the early twentieth century are unique because white women often had the guidance and support of white women administrators and/or faculty. (3) African American women, on the other hand, had to look outside the university for such mentors and role models. The question remains then, how did the alliance with the IFCWC help to keep students connected to the African American community; and how did the community respond? How did limited employment prospects that resulted from race and gender prejudice help to bring about a sharply focused movement to make a college education available to a number of Iowa's young African American women? I contend that the IFCWC prepared African American women at the University of I owa to assume positions of leadership in organizations such as the IFCWC, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a host of other local and regional civil rights organizations. (4) Upon graduation, these women also assumed responsibilities in their local communities in their effort to the race. This work places African American women's lives at the center of inquiry in a preexisting historiographical paradigm which often excludes them through a preoccupation with African American men and white women. A few scholars, such as Linda Perkins, Elizabeth Ihle, Jeanne Noble, and Ellen Lawson, have completed various studies on African American women's higher education. Other scholars, such as Amy Thompson McCandless, offer thorough and insightful comparisons of the southern white and southern black women's education in the twentieth century. Outside the works by this small group of historians, the experiences of college educated African American women have been marginal. Particularly missing from current studies is any examination of African American women in the midwest. (5) Although African American women's historiography has recently focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, these works avoid any elaborate discussions of African American women's history in midwestern states west of the Mississippi River su ch as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. (6) To be sure, this study is not only specific to Iowa, but to African American women who attended the University of Iowa. I contend that racism did not paralyze these women's struggle for equality. They transformed their experiences with racism into a call for social activism, racial uplift, and service to their communities. (7) As Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw and other scholars point out, although African Americans agreed on the ideal of uplift they did not always agree on what types of behavior were appropriate. …

Mate availability, women's marriage prevalence, and husbands' education.

"We predict that marriage prevalence and husbands' education for Black women [in the United States] vary directly with mate availability. We also predict that marriage prevalence and husbands' education will be lower for Black women with less than a high school education than for other Black women. We test these predictions using data on marriage and husbands' education for a national sample of individuals and data on aggregate-level marriage prevalence and husbands' education for a sample of large metropolitan areas. The results support our predictions, and they help to explain how low mate availability for Black women helps to create and maintain an underclass that is disproportionately composed of less-educated Black women and their children."

Mate Availability and the Transition to Unwed Motherhood: A Paradox of Population Structure

This study examines the influence of mate availability and other factors on the transition to first marriage and first premarital birth in the US. Linked data were obtained from the 1989 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the census. This study builds upon the theories proposed by Guttentag and Secord Wilson and Becker. The few studies of the impact of mate availability on nonmarital fertility show contradictory findings. Findings show that during 1979-88 64% of White respondents and 42% of Black respondents married before a first birth. 8% of Whites and 38% of Blacks experienced a premarital birth. Caution is urged in interpreting findings for Blacks due to data limitations on the mate availability measures. The results of discrete-time event history models reveal that White women had a higher probability of marrying before first birth than Black women and that Black women had a higher probability of having a premarital first birth. Black women had fewer eligible mates than White women e.g. fewer Black males were employed and there were fewer available Black males in high schools attended by Black women. Logistic models show that maternal education a Catholic religious affiliation and school enrollment significantly delayed entry into marriage prior to first birth for White women. Employment and cohabitation increased the probability of marrying before becoming a mother. Maternal education for Black women significantly decreased the risk of marrying and employment and cohabitation significantly increased entry into marriage. Among White women maternal education a two-parent family background respondents school enrollment employment and education significantly reduced the risk of a premarital birth. Cohabitation increased the risk of a premarital birth. Among Black women a two-parent family background school enrollment and education significantly reduced the risk of a premarital birth. Mate availability increased both the risk of marriage and nonmarital childbearing. The percentage of employed males did not affect the risk of a premarital birth among White women. The supply of males in high school increased the probability of a premarital birth among Black women.

Women's studies: a guide to information sources

Part 1 General material: reference sources biographical information women's studies. Part 2 Women in the world: international perspectives on women. Part 3 Special subjects: the arts and media black women education, history, law and politics lesbians literature and language mind and body science, mathematics and technology society and the environment spirituality, mythology and religion travel, leisure and sport women in the labour force men's studies.

Black and Latina womens' AIDS related knowledge, attitudes, and practices.

As part of a larger study designed to provide an AIDS education and prevention program for low-income black and Latina women in Los Angeles County, a pilot study of black (n = 51) and Latina (n = 56) womens' AIDS related knowledge, attitudes and practices was conducted to gather baseline data and to test an instrument that would measure these variables. The factors underlying the instrument were identified and reliability coefficients were determined. The need for changes in the format and administration of the instrument was identified due to nonresponse to some items. There were sociodemographic differences between the two groups of women as well as differences in knowledge and attitudes. In general, black women had more knowledge of AIDS than Latina women and more positive attitudes. Practices did not differ. Both groups denied drug use and multiple sexual partners.

The Impact of the “Cult of True Womanhood” on the Education of Black Women

This paper compares the primary purposes and functions of educating black and white women in the 19th century. For white women, education served as a vehicle for developing homemaker skills, for reinforcing the role of wife and mother, and a milieu for finding a potential husband. For black women education served as an avenue for the improvement of their race or “race uplift.” The economic, political and social conditions which contributed to these purposes are discussed within a historical context.

Black Women and Higher Education: Spelman and Bennett Colleges Revisited

No history of women's education in America would be complete without the Spelman and Bennett stories. However, the histories of higher education for women usually focus narrowly on the seven sisters. Such authoritative treatises as Thomas Woody's classic A History of Women's Education in the United States, Louise Shutz Boas' Women's Education Begins: The Rise of Women's Colleges, and Mabel Newcomer's A Century of Higher Education for American Women, are similar in their failure to include even a footnote on Spelman and Bennett Colleges, the nation's oldest and best-known colleges for Black women. Despite increased interest during the past decade in a number of topics relating to women, including women's education, the history of higher education for Black women has been grossly ignored by those documenting the history of education for women in America.1 Recently, however, Patricia Bell Scott, in a ground-breaking article entitled Schoolin' 'Respectable' Ladies of Color . . . , has analyzed in a cogent manner the most critical issues surrounding the history of Black women's higher education. She also traces the development of educational institutions for Black women from the early efforts of Myrtilla Miner, a white woman who established in 1851 in Washington, D.C., a teachers' training school for Black girls (later known as District of Columbia Teachers Colleges-Miner