Black History Month: 6 Degrees of Connections
From past to present, learn how these brilliant scholars and educators are connected.
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This week, we celebrate our history of the incredible Black educators who have always been among the innovators of this country because they’ve had to be. Let’s meet a few.
Photo By Getty Images - Words By: Denise Clay-Murray
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For Booker T. Washington, the way forward for Black Americans can be found in vocational training. Born a slave in 1856 in Virginia, Washington moved with his mother to West Virginia and worked in the coal mines there to save money to attend what is now Hampton University.
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Washington took the knowledge he acquired at Hampton and created what is now Tuskegee University. He also served as an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and William McKinley on matters of race. Washington considered a prominent intellectual of his time debating segregation with leaders including W.E.B. DuBois.
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The United States Capitol has 99 statues in Statuary Hall, two for each state except for Virginia. But the only Black person who has a statue there is educator Mary McLeod Bethune.
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Like Booker T. Washington, Bethune was born a slave. She went on to open an all-girls boarding school in 1904 and merged it with the all-male Cookman Institute in 1929 to become Bethune-Cookman college in 1929. Bethune was the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women and was a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet.”
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In addition to being an educator, Franny Jackson Coppin was an advocate for women’s employment and went on to become a missionary in Africa. Born a slave in Washington, D.C., Coppin had been purchased by an aunt and taken in by another aunt who required her to work as a domestic and pick up classes whenever she could. She became the first Black person to graduate from Oberlin College and served as a student-teacher there. Coppin went on to run the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker school in Philadelphia for two generations of African Americans.
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Raising standards for African Americans in education was one of the causes Franny Jackson Coppin espoused. It was also the basis of the work of Marva Collins. Collins was a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools for 14 years. Frustrated by what she saw there, Collins decided to open the Westside Preparatory School on the second floor of her home. Her first students included her son and daughter and several neighborhood children, including some diagnosed with learning disabilities.
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The school’s success attracted national attention and led to Westside Preparatory schools opening in Cincinnati, Ohio and Florida. She also took on three of the Chicago Public School system’s worst performing schools. In the television movie, “The Marva Collins Story”, the late Cicely Tyson was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of the educator. Collins trained over 100,000 teachers and also trained teachers in Africa.
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Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, has won Emmy and Peabody Awards for his documentary films that showcase the history of African Americans including “The Black Church”. He is also the host of the show “Finding Your Roots” that has traced the genealogy of people including Oprah Winfrey, Mario Lopez, and Carol Burnett.
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Gates was one of the first group of MacArthur Foundation Genius grantees and is also the first African American scholar to win the National Humanities Medal. Every year in Philadelphia, the organization Global Citizen has a “Beer Summit” at the Reading Terminal Market. It’s an homage to the “Beer Summit” that then President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden held with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the police officer who arrested him in 2009 as he tried to enter his own home.
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