ABSTRACT
Introduction Those graduates of black colleges, normal, secondary and elementary schools who became teachers during the first half of the twentieth century stood in the vanguard of their race. They were the exception to the mass of sharecroppers, domestic servants, and unskilled labourers.1 And with the privilege of education came a duty to serve, to try to make a difference. This understanding went to the core of their educational value system; it was the signature of the black teacher’s personal philosophy. Noted African American intellectual James Weldon Johnson put it succinctly when he wrote of his fellows, they ‘were never allowed to entertain any thoughts of being educated as “go-getters.” Most ... knew that [they] ... were being educated for life work as underpaid teachers.’2
