The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has launched a new website highlighting its growing collection of resources regarding the intellectual, political, and cultural impact of African American educators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
“The Black Teacher Archive 2.0 is more user friendly for teachers, students, and researchers,” said Jarvis Givens, co-founding director of the BTA. “It invites deeper engagement by all members of the public who are curious to learn more about the lives and legacy of African American educators during the twentieth-century Black freedom struggle.”
First announced in 2020 with grant funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the BTA was unveiled publicly in 2023. The newly revamped online archive created in partnership with Harvard’s Digital Arts + Humanities Team, contains new exhibits, curated features, and a more robust search function. Additionally, the BTA site now includes a personalized profile feature, allowing users to create their own profile and save, organize, and share resources they collect as they explore the digital portal.
“I hope that scholars, educators, and students experience the BTA as a source of both knowledge and inspiration. These materials are both rich and robust. You experience the resilience and passion of a people with great aspirations in the face of terrible adversity,” said Imani Perry, co-founding faculty director of the archive. “I think they offer the possibility of new ways of understanding twentieth-century African American life precisely because school is such a common ground for communities, and I believe many people will be surprised at how central schools were to the fabric of Black communities.”
