Tag Archives: African American Teachers

Former public school teacher and music icon Roberta Flack passes away

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Americans were sad to learn that former public school teacher and Grammy-winning singer Roberta Flack passed away yesterday. Photo Credit: IMDB

Music fans all over the county were sad to learn yesterday of the passing of Grammy Award-winning songwriter and singer Roberta Flack. Her best-known songs are “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and “Where Is the Love?” Did you know that this celebrated jazz, folk, and R&B icon was once a public school teacher?

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, Buncombe County, North Carolina. She was raised in Arlington, Virginia. Her mother was a church organist, so of course Roberta grew up in a musical household. At the age of nine, Roberta began to study classical piano, and by the time she was fifteen, she’d earned a full scholarship in music from Howard University. Howard is a traditionally Black college located in Washington, DC.

Roberta completed her undergraduate work, and then her student teaching at an all-white school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She was the first African American student teacher to work at that school. After her college graduation, Roberta accepted a position teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina, a gig which paid her only $2,800 per year. During her career as a public school teacher, she also taught in Washington, DC, at Browne Junior High and Rabaut Junior High School. While she was teaching, Roberta took a number of side jobs as a night club singer. It was there that she was discovered and signed to a contract for Atlanta Records. The rest, as they say, is music business history.

Over the course of her music career, the former teacher has been nominated for a Grammy 13 times, winning on four occasions. On May 11, 2017, Roberta received an honorary Doctorate degree in the Arts from Long Island University. In 2009 she was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and in 2022, she was honored with the Women in American History War by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In recent years, Roberta continues to contribute to education came when she founded an after-school music program entitled “The Roberta Flack School of Music” to provide music education free of charge to underprivileged students in the Bronx borough of New York City. The program is offered through Hyde Leadership Charter School. You can learn more about this program at this link: Roberta Flack School of Music.

Roberta Flack suffered from a number of serious health issues towards the end of her life. She suffered a stroke in 2018, and she was diagnosed with ALS in 2022. The iconic singer passed away on February 24, 2025, in New York City, the victim of a heart attack. She was 88 years old. The world will surely miss this exceptional teacher and musician.

 

Legendary girls’ basketball coach and PE teacher Dorothy Gaters garners many honors

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Girls’ basketball coach and physical education teacher Dorothy Gaters is legendary in Chicago, Illinois. Photo credit: Chicago History Museum

As part of our celebration of Black History Month, we pay homage to Dorothy Gaters, a legendary girls’ basketball coach and physical education teacher from Illinois. In fact, it has been said that you can’t talk about the history of high school basketball in Illinois without including legendary Coach Gaters in the discussion.

Dorothy taught and coached at her alma mater, John Marshall Metropolitan High School, in Chicago, Illinois. Her career began there at 1976, and spanned 45 years. She concluded her career with 1,153 wins and ten Illinois High School Association state titles. In addition, she served as an Assistant Coach at the US Olympic Festival in 1986, helping the South win a gold medal. After such a long and distinguished career, she retired in 2021, but she still works as the Athletic Director at Marshall High.

Dorothy fondly remembered her days as a student at Marshall fondly, having graduated from there in 1964. “There were 5,000 students here then; now, there are only 200,” she recalls. “There was no girls’ basketball team then, which was years before Title IX, which bans discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance,” she continued. “I didn’t have any real role models,” Dorothy said. “I just watched basketball on TV, but we had a very successful boys team, even when I attended.” And that love of basketball grew. After her graduation from high school, Dorothy earned her Bachelor’s degree in Physical Education from DePaul University. “When I graduated from college, they asked me to come back here to teach and, shortly after that, there were intramurals—and that’s when I started to learn about the game,” she explains.

For her work as a coach, Dorothy has garnered many honors. She was selected as Coach of the Year by the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association seven times, and she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000 and the National High School Hall of Fame in 2018. She was also named a recipient of the National Student-Athlete Day Giant Steps Award in 1998. Furthermore, the gymnasium at Marshall High has been named in her honor.

Dorothy Gaters: A true Chalkboard Champion.

NEA President Becky Pringle issues statement about President Trump’s federal budget-cutting policies

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Since President Donald Trump has announced his intention to impose deep cuts in federal spending to public education—and has even declared his intention to close down the United States Department of Education—many public school teachers have been worrying about how these actions will possibly impact them and students. In response,  educator Becky Pringle, President of the National Education Association, spoke out to ABC News on Feb. 15, 2025.

“What the Trump Administration has done through executive orders or through rhetoric is to diminish educators in a way that they are not in any way respecting their right and professional authority,” Pringle declared. “They are not listening to them about what they know their students need to learn.”

This Chalkboard Champion has long been advocating for smaller classroom sizes and individualized attention, as well as increased resources for students with disabilities and students from low-income families. She says these are just some student needs that are not being met. And, Pringle said, even though all over the country parents and educators have been working for the improvements, the Trump Administration is not making those needs a priority.

Furthermore, Pringle said that recent Trump moves “will have an immediate and devastating impact on millions. Students will lose access to learning opportunities if Head Start programs are shuttered. Parents will be cut off from childcare services they depend on so they can go to work and provide for their families. Students will go hungry if school meals are taken away. And the dream of higher education will be further out of reach as institutional aid for programs is affected. These are the real people impacted.”

Pringle knows exactly what she’s talking about. She has more than three decades of experience as a middle school science teacher. And the organization she leads, the National Education Association (NEA) represents more than 3 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators, student teachers, healthcare workers, and public employees. To learn more about the NEA, click on this link: www.nea.org

Remembering educator and Civil Rights leader Bob Moses

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Math educator and legendary Civil Rights Movement leader Bob Moses organized Black voter registration efforts and the Freedom Schools made famous during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. Photo credit: The Pine Belt News

During Black History Month, we’d like to recognize Bob Moses. He was a legendary Civil Rights Movement leader who organized black voter registration efforts and Freedom Schools made famous during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. He was also an innovative math educator.

Bob Moses was born in New York City on Jan. 23, 1935, to a family of modest means. He was raised in the Projects in Harlem. Despite his family’s limited financial resources, Bob earned a scholarship to attend Stuyvesant High School, an elite public high school for gifted boys. Before his graduation in 1952, Bob was elected senior class president and served as the captain of the school’s baseball team.

Upon graduation, Bob earned another scholarship, this time to attend Hamilton College, a prestigious private liberal arts college in Clinton, New York. There he majored in philosophy and participated in both the basketball and baseball programs. After completing the requirements for his Bachelor’s degree in 1956, Bob traveled abroad extensively, working in a series of Quaker summer camps in Europe and Japan building housing for the poor, harvesting crops for a missionary hospital, and improving facilities for mentally disturbed children. The following year he earned his Master’s degree in Analytic Philosophy from Harvard University.

Bob was teaching at the prestigious Horace Mann High School in the Bronx when he became aware of the student sit-ins that were taking place in Greensboro, North Carolina. He decided to join them, and that decision launched the math educator’s path towards becoming a legendary figure during the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement. Bob is best known for organizing the Black voter registration efforts and the Freedom Schools made famous during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. This heroic teacher’s revolutionary work, which was not without risk to life and limb, transformed the political power structure of entire communities.

Forty years later, Bob advocated for yet another transformational change: the Algebra Project. When he created this program, Bob asserted that a deficiency in math literacy in poor neighborhoods puts impoverished children at an economic disadvantage. The deficiency makes students unable to compete successfully for jobs in the 21st century. This disenfranchisement, he declared, is as debilitating as lack of personal liberties was prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Bob’s solution was to organize people, community by community, school by school, to overcome the achievement gap. He believed this would give impoverished children the tools they need to claim their share of economic enfranchisement. Bob described his work in this area in his  book, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project written with fellow Civil Rights worker Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Sadly, Bob Moses passed away in Florida on Sun., July 25, 2021, at the age of 86.

A chapter about this remarkable teacher is also included in my second book, entitled Chalkboard Heroes: Twelve Courageous Teachers and Their Deeds of Valor.  This book is also available on amazon; click on this link to view: Chalkboard Heroes.

Iowa’s Grace Allen Jones: She worked to educate to Black youth

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Iowa’s Grace Allen Jones championed greater educational opportunities for Black students in her home state, Missouri, and Mississippi. Photo credit: Public Domain.

During Black History Month, we shine a spotlight on numerous African American educators. Today, we spotlight Grace Allen Jones, a teacher from Iowa who worked tirelessly to provide educational opportunities for African American youth in her home state, in Missouri, and in Mississippi.

Grace was born on January 7, 1876, in Keokuk, Iowa. Unlike many African Americans of her day, her parents were educated and financially well-off. As a young girl, Grace attended Burlington High School in Burlington, Iowa. There she earned her diploma in 1891. Following high school, she attended Burlington Normal School from 1894 to 1895.

After she earned her college degree, Grace spent three years in Missouri teaching at schools in Bethel and Slater. In 1902, she returned to Iowa and founded a vocational school for African American students. She named the school the Grace M. Allen Industrial School for Colored Youth.

When the school closed in 1906, Grace enrolled in public speaking courses a the Chicago Conservatory of Music. Once she completed her courses in Chicago, Grace worked as a fundraiser and public speaker, advocating for better educational opportunities for all the students in her community.

After her marriage to fellow-educator Laurence Jones, Grace accepted a teaching position at Piney Woods Country Life School in Rankin County, Mississippi. At this school, students were offered courses in agriculture, carpentry, dairy farming, and construction. To help support the school, Grace organized and led several student choir groups on fundraising tours across the South, the Midwest, and the East. The schools’ Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, the Cotton Blossom Singers, and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm were just three of several choral groups that Grace organized.

In addition to her classroom and fundraising responsibilities, Grace actively participated in clubs meant to advance the status of women and, more specifically, women of color. Those groups also worked to improve child care, to teach African American history, to start libraries for African American children, and to provide resources so that physically handicapped African American children could learn. In addition, she helped start an American Red Cross organization for African Americans, and she served as President of the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs from 1920 to 1924. Later she served as a statistician for the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1925.

Sadly, this Chalkboard Champion passed away of complications from pneumonia on March 2, 1928, in Piney Woods. She was only 52 years old. To read more about Grace Allen Jones, see this article published about her by Piney Woods School.