In 1912, a textbook for black children, entitled A Narrative of the Negro , appeared. We do not know much information about its author, Leila Amos Pendleton. What we do know about her comes from her marriage to Robert Pendleton, a publisher, who owned R. L. Publishing Company. We know that Mrs. Pendleton, as she was known, taught briefly in the Washington DC school system and left her career as a teacher to become a writer. Indeed, Mrs. Pendleton’s career change would not have been possible without her fortuitous marriage, as she was also afforded the opportunity to publish her work through her husband’s publishing company. Mrs. Pendleton had a relative freedom to write that many black women did not have during the early twentieth century. Mrs. Pendleton also wrote An Alphabet for Negro Children (1915), Our New Possession—the Dutch West Indies (1917), An Autobiography of Frederick Douglass (1921), and two short stories published in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine The Crisis . Mrs. Pendleton remains largely unknown to the public and to subsequent scholars because she lived in an insular, protected community of educated black elites centered in Washington, DC. However, outside of that community, Mrs. Pendleton’s work impacted the development of a social studies curriculum that shaped the identity of black children in public schools.
Jessie Redmon Fauset is often described as a “literary” midwife in the blossoming of the Harlem Renaissance. And unlike Mrs. Pendleton, we do know a great deal about Jessie Redmon Fauset. She began her teaching career at Douglass High School in Baltimore, MD, and ended it at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York. Deeply enmeshed in the literary scene of New York, she allied herself philosophically with the “New Negro” movement permeating the black community in the 1920s. Jessie Fauset made significant contributions to the literature of the period authoring four books: There is Confusion (1932), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933), as well as serving as the co-editor of The Brownies’ Book , a children’s literary magazine. Her positive review of Mrs. Pendleton’s A Narrative of the Negro was published in the The Crisis and captures what is known about the response to the textbook, “For this book treats not only of the Negro in the United States, but imaginable way by every nation on every continent, the Negro still is.”1
Both Mrs. Pendleton and Jessie Fauset combined scholarly pursuits with the more mundane work of being a public-school teacher. As we delve deeper into their stories, we find that Leila Amos Pendleton and Jessie Redmon Fauset share many commonalities beyond simply their professional experiences. These women were part of a small cadre of black women educators who sought to reshape how black children understood the history of African Americans in the United States. They tended to the larger needs of institution building that black communities confronted in the period after Reconstruction, both serving as club women. And both women advocated for a rich view of African American history which combatted a one-dimensional and often racist story generated by white historians.
Several elements of these shared commitments, in many respects, have been studied and recorded within the relevant historical literature. For instance, the comprehensive nature of black women’s creation of and participation in the women’s club movement is well documented.2 However, there are other elements of these shared commitments that have been less studied. This book will examine one of the lesser understood elements of the women’s shared commitment: how black women educators sought to create a pedagogical counter-narrative to reframe often-racist national and international education curricula to provide a more accurate rendering of US and world history in the United States. This counter-narrative, which I term the alternative black curriculum , refers to the ongoing relationship between the theoretical principles that arose out of institutional contexts of the university and national professional associations and the practical context of the everyday classroom. The basic principles of the alternative black curriculum were often first publicly articulated by male scholars but were subsequently supplemented and even furthered by an ongoing dialogue regarding the pedagogical work of African American women school founders, administrators, librarians, and teachers.3
The alternative black curriculum comprises both the content and pedagogy these educators used to implement the curriculum and emphasized four key elements. First, the alternative black curriculum stressed that African civilizations contributed to an overall world history. Second, the curriculum stressed the central role enslaved people played in building social, political, and economic institutions in the United States. Third, the writers of the alternative black curriculum encouraged an identity connected to the African diaspora which linked African American’s struggle with people of color throughout the world. Fourth, the alternative black curriculum stressed the needed dialogue about race and racism and the importance of white allies.4
My analysis of the alternative black curriculum through the development of educational theory and curriculum during the Progressive Era combines insights from two disciplines, black history and educational history. The absence of black women historians is widely acknowledged with greater attention being focused on the work of Carter G. Woodson and the formation of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.5 In the book Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, Deborah Gray White outlines specific ordeals black women confronted in training to become historians and contribute to institutions of higher learning.
The book, The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890–1940: Countering the Master Narrative, opens several new avenues in its concentration on the alternative black curriculum by employing under-utilized sources to examine its subject. The alternative black curriculum found its expression in a variety of concrete pedagogical forms, including plays, pageants, and textbooks. The utility of these sources is often not understood by current scholars because these alternative sources are frequently viewed as less credible than literature or scholarly work within university settings. I contend that these materials, created by black women during this period, are worth being studied based on their own merits. The pedagogical choices of African American women had a major impact on the construction of knowledge in social studies. Because these women operated outside of traditional university settings and through alternative means of communication, educators and historians may have been slow to recognize the construction of the alternative black curriculum. These historians without a portfolio deserve to have their work be at the center of the discussion in a number of different academic disciplines.6 This book examines the impact of these women in shaping the development of the alternative black curriculum through plays, pageants, and textbooks that reflect a coherent ideological identity that profoundly shaped the current K-12 social studies curriculum.
This book has three thematic goals. First, this book is deliberately intersectional by drawing on the fields of education history and social studies through a focus on the efforts of African American women at the secondary school level to develop the alternative black curriculum. I will argue that the alternative black curriculum demonstrates how black women scholars and educators offered a theoretical and practical critique of the more prominent education reform movements in the United States.7 Second, this book offers the first comprehensive account of how black women scholars impacted the development of the social studies curriculum. Important scholarly work by Sarah Bair, Julie Des Jardins, LaGarrett King, and Pero Gaglo Dagbovie has addressed the efforts of individual black women in this area, yet this book is the first to examine the discursive work of black women educators on the content and the pedagogy of social studies as it related to black children. Finally, this book offers an important examination of how current school reform can incorporate the lessons learned from the alternative black curriculum.
The Alternative Black Curriculum in Social Studies
The Progressive Era is increasingly being viewed as a foundational period in educational history. Likewise, my work is informed by existing scholarship on black education during the period of 1890–1940. Recent scholarship has emphasized how major black intellectuals focused on educational theory in their work. For instance, Derrick P. Aldridge created an educational history of W.E.B. Du Bois’s educational philosophy and contributions to the field of education. Aldridge used case studies of African American leaders to demonstrate how Progressive Era educators engaged in a dialogue about how to teach black children. Notable, however, is a distinctly masculine bias present in the increased focus on the black educators of the Progressive Era. For example, the representative debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois often dominates the relevant literature. Similarly, the work of Carter G. Woodson is often cited by scholars who do extend their work. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder persuasively outlined that the basic tenets of Carter G. Woodson’s critique of black education can be squarely placed at the center of a Progressive tradition. Snyder contended that The Mis-Education of the Negro connects deeply with a major claim of Progressive educators, that education must be relevant to students’ lives and interests.8
A limited but growing set of educational histories have attempted to correct this masculine bias within relevant educational literature. Margaret Nash and Sarah Bair explored the educational values of Nannie H . Burroughs, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell. Julie Des Jardins examined how black women educators contributed to the development of histories in the United States.9 Christine Woyshner presented an examination of the impact and extensive network of black women’s civic organizations on educational outcomes.10 More recently, LaGarrett King examined black history textbooks written by Merle Eppes, Edward A. Johnson, and Leila Amos Pendleton, deconstructing how these scholars expanded definitions of citizenship from 1890 to 1940. Each of these previous scholars links black women to Progressive Era education reform.
Although black women’s intellectual theory did not receive the same manner of public attention as Du Bois, Washington, and Woodson, the collective nature of their work speaks to how black women persistently created, implemented, and applied Progressive principles to their work as educators.
The latter half of the time period studied spans the Harlem Renaissance and World War II. The Harlem Renaissance is particularly important because it is during this period the focus on black history as seen in the individual works of Leila Amos P...