In this year's Presidential Address, historian Derrick P. Alridge discusses his current research project, Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom. The project builds on recent literature about teachers as activists between 1950 and 1980 and explores how and what secondary and postsecondary teachers taught. Focusing on teachers in…

In July 1963, students from Queens College (QC) and a group of New York City teachers traveled to Prince Edward County (PEC), Virginia, to teach local black youth in Freedom Schools. The county had eliminated public education four years earlier to avoid a desegregation order. PEC Freedom Schools represented the first major effort to recruit an…

The pursuit of literacy is a central theme in the history of African Americans in the United States. In the Western tradition, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and others have observed, people of African descent have been written out of "culture" because they have been identified with oral traditions. In that setting, literacy signifies both…