This panel explores African American women’s leadership and innovations in traditional and nontraditional education. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black women contributed to the education of their communities in the traditional setting of the classroom as well as through community building projects and intellectual pursuits. Their innovations empowered future generations of black female leaders as they placed emphasis on black women gaining new skills to aid themselves and their communities. Panelists examine how black women increased opportunities for themselves and for future generations of black Americans through their commitment to experimental forms of education. From citizenship training and community building to the creation of a new theoretical framework, black women acting as educators envisioned new spaces for themselves and their communities in which African Americans could thrive.

Bridget Haney’s research examines how black clubwomen from 1890 to 1919 created self-help programs in Kansas City, Missouri that shaped the city in the twentieth century. Funding community-based programs, these women laid the foundation for cultural centers, schools, and newspapers that kept the city’s black community connected and informed. Kevin Boland Johnson’s research explores the effect the Alameda Girls Industrial School had on black education in the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century. From 1890 to 1920, the Alameda Girls School provided a unique opportunity for black women to receive instruction in personal hygiene, thrift, agricultural efficiency, and citizenship training. Johnson examines how the schooling of a few women informed the values and instructional techniques of many Jeanes Teachers in the 1920s and 1930s. Shari Williams’s research analyzes how African-American home demonstration agents in Alabama from 1928 to 1955 used empowerment pedagogy, an educational method that affirms identity and fosters self-improvement and confidence, to cultivate leadership capabilities in Alabama’s African-American farm women and girls. Williams argues that black women experienced leadership development and consciousness-raising through participating in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cooperative Extension home demonstration and 4-H programs to the extent that some became essential Extension program and community leaders. Grace London’s research examines twentieth century black female intellectuals’ responses to negative stereotypes of black mothers as propagated by politicians and the media. In the 1970s and 1980s, black female intellectuals wrote about black motherhood and created new definitions of black womanhood racist rhetoric. London argues that these intellectuals’ theorization relied on an understanding of multiple social identities such as race, class, and gender which served as the foundation for the theory of intersectionality.

Panelists explore aspects of experimental or informal expressions of black education in the Jim Crow context. These case studies build off a host of Black studies but likewise provide for new examinations of the roles that black women played in the long struggle for a more inclusive America. These essays should inform our audience and likewise inspire us in our present social and cultural moment to theorize about how to resist current forces of racial retrenchment in places like Alabama, Florida, Missouri, and Mississippi -- if not the nation at large.