Hidden labor and legacies: Colored Conventions, Black women and educational activists

Abstract

In spite of their absence from archives and records, Black women educators enacted and taught the principles of what I term, Sacred Black citizenship through institutions ranging from the Invisible Church, the formal Black church, early Black benevolent societies and the Colored Conventions Movement. Sacred Black citizenship was explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced in homes, Sunday school benches and classrooms for well over a century. Black teachers taught and molded Black citizens long before American laws and jurisprudence conceived of the possibility of Black American citizenship and are responsible for creating and articulating a Black rhetoric I call, Sacred Black Testimony. In fact, it was these thousands of Black students who would go on—within a hundred years of enslavement and in spite of the crushing force of laws, dominant white religion, culture, and habit—to demand and realize civil rights in the twentieth century. These righteous demands forced a national reckoning with the contradictions between the ideas and ethics of American life and law with the deeply racist, unfair brutish realities. Educational activists developed the premises of American public education which came to inform and shape national educational activism leading eventually to the formation of the Department of Education in 1979. This dissertation traces the lives and labors of Black women through nineteenth century records and archives of their activism ending with an analysis of Delaware as a case study of Black women’s educational activism nationally. I contend that it is through the careful examination of nineteenth century Black women educational activists who created a praxis of their faith that we can trace and understand the promises and challenges of American public education as they taught Sacred Black citizenship to their students and encouraged them to claim their rights and privileges as full citizens.