Black Teachers, Curriculum Development, and Racial Citizenship in Jim Crow Schools

In the first part of the twentieth century, two movements dominated the landscape of race-based curricular reform: 1) the “early Black history” movement, as the historian Pero Dagbovie calls it; 2) intercultural education. The first of these, spearheaded by Carter G. Woodson, emerged in schools alongside calls for a radical “New Negro.” Woodson famously argued that the standard (Eurocentric) curriculum in schools operated as a form of “miseducation” for Black children and he promoted teaching Black history, culture, and community uplift as an alternative. Intercultural education, by contrast, was a product of mid-century American liberalism. Often associated with white quaker Rachel Davis DuBois, advocates for intercultural education wanted students to gain a sense of ethnic and racial understanding and developed an educational program that shares much in common with modern-day multicultural education.

A growing historiography investigating school curricula as a medium for constructing racial identity has often treated these two movements as entirely separate. When occasionally mentioned in tandem, they are framed as antagonistic. In this paper, however, I argue that the lives and teaching of Black educators during the period paint a complex picture of two intertwined movements, which held overlapping visions about the centrality of race in the formation of students’ citizenship. I trace this narrative through Julia Davis (1891-1993) and Jane Dabney Shackelford (1895-1979), African American educators whose careers took place in segregated schools. Drawing on their personal collections—which provide a rarely seen picture of teaching in Jim Crow schools in the form of personal correspondence, teacher evaluations, scrapbooks, unpublish autobiographies, and lesson plans—I explore their approaches to connecting racial identity and citizenship in their teaching. Specifically, I focus on how their work as educators blended the seemingly conflicting visions of a distinctive Black curriculum and liberal intercultural education.