Using the History of Black Teachers to (Re)Construct What We Know About Teacher Leadership

Background/Context: Teacher leadership is frequently traced to U.S. reform movements of the 1980s, a framing that narrows the construct’s historical timeline and overlooks earlier traditions of teacher-led professional coordination and advocacy. By centering the history of Black teachers in the segregated South, this study challenges the dominant periodization and foregrounds a longer professional lineage grounded in equity, advocacy, and collective responsibility. Purpose/Research Question: This study examines the following question: What historical evidence highlights the teacher leadership practices of Black teachers in southern segregated schooling communities? The objective is to determine whether contemporary conceptualizations of teacher leadership can be traced to what is known historically about Black teachers’ professional work, particularly within the oppressive social, political, and educational contexts of the Jim Crow–era South Carolina. Research Design: Guided by critical historical inquiry, this study takes the form of a historical case study of the Palmetto Education Association’s Department of Classroom Teachers (PEA-DCT) from 1956 to 1967. Archival records were analyzed using qualitative frequency-based coding aligned with the seven domains of the Teacher Leader Model Standards. Frequency counts were treated as ordinal indicators of relative emphasis, supplemented by memo writing and iterative interpretation to preserve historical nuance. Conclusions/Recommendations: The PEA-DCT case demonstrates that Black teachers enacted leadership as integrated professional practice embedded within organizational systems they designed and sustained. The study recommends that the field account for this deeper historical lineage when defining teacher leadership and urges scholars to foreground equity, professional dignity, and collective responsibility as foundational rather than emergent dimensions of the construct.