Black Teacher Archive

The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is a free digital resource that preserves and showcases the work of African American educators, historically organized under Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). This post-custodial archive focuses on 20th-century publications produced by these associations, highlighting the voices and visions of Black teachers from the Jim Crow era through the Civil Rights movement.

Bringing together over 50,000 pages of materials from 70 archives across the U.S., the BTA reveals the vital intellectual, political, and cultural contributions of Black educators. It is housed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in collaboration with the Monroe C. Gutman Library Special Collections.

The first iteration of the Archive is hosted on Harvard University’s CURIOSity platform. DARTH is developing a new portal for the archive that will improve user experience, enable rich full-text and semantic search, and share digital exhibits of material from the archive.