https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/black-teacher-archive

Reviewed by Raymond Pun, Academic and Research Librarian, Alder Graduate School of Education [PDF Full Text]

The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is a newly developed digital resource from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Monroe C. Gutman Library Special Collections that offers access to serial publications and other materials from the Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, a team of archivists, librarians, curators, and scholars collaborated to bring this project to fruition.

The CTAs were professional organizations of African American educators founded in 1861 by Black teachers to offer educational and learning opportunities for Black children. CTA members also sought “to develop themselves as professionals, political actors, and intellectuals, as well as to organize around broader socio-political concerns in the Black Freedom Movement.”^[1] BTA’s collection “makes public the intellectual, political, and cultural contributions” of CTAs from the Jim Crow era through the Civil Rights era, bringing together digitized materials from seventy archival repositories across the United States.^[2]

The BTA features more than 50,000 pages authored by Black educators, including periodicals, newsletters, program guides, books, memos, proceedings, minutes, constitutions, and handbooks. From the home page, users can browse the entire collection, digitized CTAs’ histories, or journals. From the browse tab in the main menu, users can also review materials by state.

Users can also search BTA by keyword. The default search only returns keyword results from collection-level metadata. However, users can opt to search for keywords within the text of items as well, since searchable text from transcriptions or optical character recognition is available for some items. Search results can be filtered by journal title, date, publisher, contributing institution, digitizing institution, genre, and exhibit tags. On each item page, users can view item-level metadata, download the item, save a permalink, and explore the Finding Aid Component for more details about the item’s collection (e.g., source, dates, creator, repository). Items appear in a screen viewer that also allows users to generate a citation for the item, perform a keyword search within the item using full-text searching, and convert the item to a single- or multi-page PDF to print or save.

Figure 1. Screenshot of The bulletin: official organ of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:493804703$1i.

Figure 2. Screenshot of The Black Teacher Archive’s search

Each digitized publication in BTA offers rich narratives and firsthand accounts from African American educators. Through BTA, researchers can explore a wide variety of interdisciplinary topics. For example, if a researcher is interested in exploring the history of foreign language teaching in primary schools in the early 1960s, they can find a North Carolina Recorder column by Mrs. Bernetta H. Pullen from Gumberry School in North Hampton. Pullen’s thoughtful piece explores the rationale for teaching foreign language at an early age and the importance of language instruction through stories and songs to enrich children’s lives. There are collection items that also reflect poignant periods like the Civil Rights Movement from 1958 to 1968 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, demonstrating how these events shaped classroom experiences and educational discussions among African American teachers.

Another important part of this repository is the Curated Features section, which includes a Black education timeline, a guide to collection materials, and an about page on CTAs that contextualizes collection resources. There is currently a “new beta viewer” that can enlarge the viewing of the specific item on the screen; enhanced images are of high quality, and this affords an opportunity to explore the item more closely. Though it is currently in beta mode, it may be refined over time. 

Overall, researchers interested in US social, cultural, and intellectual history will find BTA useful. The resource helps us understand how schools and classrooms situated the experiences of African American teachers and students in the community, and it allows us to explore primary and secondary sources highlighting professional development opportunities and challenges that Black teachers encountered in the twentieth century.

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^[1] The Black Teacher Archive, “About Colored Teachers Associations,” https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/black-teacher-archive/feature/about-colored-teachers-associations.

^[2] The Black Teacher Archive, https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/black-teacher-archive.