Black Teacher Archive Launches Revamped Website

The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) announced the launch of a new website featuring a number of new ways to share and highlight its growing collection in the classroom and beyond.

The Juneteenth launch of BTA 2.0 marks a new chapter in the archive’s efforts to preserve the intellectual and political work of Black teachers in the 19th and 20th centuries by better curating and showcasing the collection’s vast resources for visitors to explore. Including new exhibits and curated features, a more robust search function, and a personalized profile option for users to save and collect research for future use, the archive’s creators hope the launch better puts the collection in the hands of a new era of scholars and learners.

“The Black Teacher Archive 2.0 is more user friendly for teachers, students, and researchers,” says Professor Jarvis Givens, co-founding director of the Black Teacher Archive. “It invites deeper engagement by all members of the public who are curious to learn more about the lives and legacy of African American educators during the 20th century Black freedom struggle.”

First announced in 2020 on the strength of a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Black Teacher Archive was unveiled publicly in 2023 as a collaboration between the BTA team and the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Gutman Library. Two additional grants allowed the archive to expand its reach in 2024, including the site redesign and new scholarship and preservation efforts by archivists and scholars around the country.

The new site was created in partnership with Harvard’s Digital Arts + Humanities team (DARTH). Since launching formally in 2023, Givens said the BTA team took note of how people were using the digital archive in research and their classrooms and decided a new website could be more “responsive” for users while making it easier to use the vast collection the archive contains. Materials from the collection have been used in college and university courses, and the BTA hopes the expanded website could extend its use to K12 classrooms and beyond.

The personalized profile feature on the new site is a major addition, as users can now create a profile and save, organize, and share resources they collect as they explore the digitized resources. For example, users can search the more than 60,000 pages of materials from the records of Colored Teacher Associations within the BTA collection for information about “Negro History Week” or “literacy.” They can then save pages of research in personal folders, write notes on and about these files, and organize the search results for their own study. Users can even create links to share with classmates, students, or other researchers that Givens likened to a “personalized mixtape of archival sources.”

“It’s really exciting. My own experience searching through the materials has been elevated because of these changes,” said Givens. “I find myself getting lost in the materials while using the new portal because it allows you to ask different kinds of questions and to search the materials in a more systematic way. Comparing trends across and within states, keyword searching, organizing results, seeing highlighted text results, and downloading pages with detailed cover sheets that include information about the historical objects are small details that make a big difference on the learning experience for students and for analyzing the historical material.”

The new website includes an updated Black education timeline, which was a popular feature on the site’s previous iteration, and a new feature, “Faces of the Archive.” Created by BTA researcher and incoming HGSE Ph.D. student Erica Buddington, it highlights stories of both widely known and lesser-known historical figures who appear in the archive. Also included in the revamped website are digital exhibits curated by past graduate students of the BTA’s Summer Research Institute.

“I hope that scholars, educators, and students experience the BTA as a source of both knowledge and inspiration. These materials are both rich and robust. You experience the resilience and passion of a people with great aspirations in the face of terrible adversity,” says Professor Imani Perry, co-founding faculty director of the archive. “I think they offer the possibility of new ways of understanding 20th century African American life precisely because school is such a common ground for communities, and I believe many people will be surprised at how central schools were to the fabric of Black communities.”

Perry noted a common thread throughout the project: many of the most famous figures of Black history have important educational threads to their own stories, which the archive helps bring to life in new detail.

“I also hope that people realize how many of the historic figures they admire were deeply embedded within these school communities, as students, educators or simply as engaged citizens,” says Perry. “Because then it becomes clear that the greatest among us emerge from ecosystems that have nurtured their development and imaginations.”

Givens credits BTA senior project manager Micha Broadnax, whose technical work behind the scenes on the archive helped the project “really come to life.” Also “central to the BTA’s origin story” is Theresa Perry, Ed.D.’82, who helped Givens and Imani Perry explore the idea that became the archive..  

He also noted more than 90 institutions and historical repositories — including a number of state college archival collections — now have archived material searchable in the BTA's collection.

“We are grateful that so many people recognized the importance of collaborating to help elevate such a critical legacy in our nation’s history and in the story of African American education,” says Givens.

Givens said the BTA is working on a book, tentatively titled The Black Teacher Archive: An Anthology, which highlights “gems” from the collection along with new scholarship about Black teachers and tells the BTA’s creation story. The Black Teacher Archive also announced a virtual open house for September 10, which will share more of the archive and model new ways of effectively using its new features and exhibits for teaching and research.