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Abstract
This dissertation utilized digital archival methods to establish the significance of 19th and early 20th century Black women teachers in the fight for abolition. Historical Black women were not only active participants in the fight to abolish slavery but broadened the scope of the movement to include education. They expanded the role and responsibility of a teacher by providing instruction to pupils in the pulpit, podium, prisons, and the press, in home schools, churches, in quiet nooks, and in secret. More importantly, they injected their work with deeper meaning—namely, that freedom and education were not only human and civil rights but God-given rights. Grounded in womanist theology, this dissertation is presented in a three-paper format in order to ask distinctive research questions and engage interdisciplinary bodies of literature. In the first paper, I explored the spiritual underpinnings of historical Black women teachers’ radical abolitionist work. I theorized a theo-ethic of abolition to demonstrate how historical Black women teachers were guided by and rooted in deep moral, ethical, and spiritual values, igniting them into radical action. In the second paper, I established how historical Black women teachers contended with staunch antiblackness, white supremacy, and racialized terror in their educational strivings, specifically by constructing sacred, hush harbors spaces of healing for Black students, even in the midst of it. In the final paper, I explored how the historical struggles for freedom and education are inextricably linked to the contemporary demands for abolition and equitable education. Extending the abolitionist trajectory of historical Black women teachers, I examined how they responded after the abolition of slavery through an examination of the Reconstruction era. In conclusion, my dissertation study suggested that there exists a radical womanist tradition of Black women teachers subverting oppressive structures to ensure educational justice and Black liberation, through radical faith. Abolition persisted in slavery and freedom; it was a way of knowing, being, and believing. This conceptualization highlights that if true educational justice is to take place under our contemporary social conditions, abolition must become a way of life and must be guided by something deeper, the Spirit.