Black History Month Spotlight

American Teachers Association:
The Story of the ATA and the NEA

ATA Video

Respect-Equality-Hope: The Journey of a People: Video history of the ATA, the preeminent voice for African-American educators and children from 1904 to 1966.

To see a clip of the NEA-produced video, download and install the free Real Player application.

ATA video  (56K)
ATA video  (Broadband)

Click here to purchase a copy from the NEA Professional Library.

ATA History

In 1904, John Robert Edward Lee, director of the Academic Department at Tuskegee Institute, called on teachers in black schools across the country to join him in Nashville to create a national organization.

Lee was born a slave in Sequin, Texas. He trained to teach at Bishop College in Marshall and became principal of a two-room school in Palestine, Texas. Later, he returned to teaching math and Latin at Bishop. He became one of the founding members of the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas.

The 1904 Nashville meeting resulted in the creation of the National Association of Colored Teachers. Realizing that not all teachers working with black youth were colored, association officials in 1907 changed the name to the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. The name was changed one last time in 1937, becoming the American Teachers Association (ATA).

Throughout the 62-year existence of the ATA, some of the most notable black educators of the nation belonged to -- and led -- the ATA.

The ATA-NEA Merger

The merger agreement
was signed at the Miami
Beach convention in 1966.

• In 1925, NEA president Mary McSkimmon created the NEA Committee on Problems in Negro Education and Life. For the first time, there was an official way for the ATA and the NEA to work cooperatively.
  
  
• In 1934, the two groups began working together to achieve accreditation for African-American schools and colleges.
  
  
• In 1947, NEA affiliates 18 black education associations in Southern states and the District of Columbia, where laws had prohibited black teachers from joining white organizations.
  
  
• In 1949, 36 African-American delegates from states with segregated black and white associations attended the NEA convention.
  
  
• In 1951, John Warren Davis, a former ATA president and a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, became the first African-American chairperson of an NEA Commission when he took the helm of the Commission on the Defense of Democracy Through Education.
  
  
• In 1952, former ATA President George William Gore, Jr., was elected vice-president of the NEA, the first black person ever to hold that office.
  
  
• In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, in Brown v. Board of Education, that the nation's public schools must desegregate.
  
  
• In 1966, in Miami, Florida – after 40 years of cooperation - the ATA and the NEA merged.
  
  
• In 1968, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz became the first black president of NEA.

Noted ATA Leaders

Mary McLeod Bethune -- first woman president of ATA (1924). Founder of Bethune-Cookman College in Florida, Bethune also was an adviser to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as director of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration.

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson -- ATA president (1930). Johnson, also a president of Howard University, would be among the very few African-Americans accredited by the U.S. Department of State to be an official observer at the creation of the United Nations.

Harper Councill Trenholm -- ATA president (1932). After years of lobbying, Trenholm -- also a former president of Alabama State University -- successfully challenged Southern Association of Colleges and Schools on its segregated accrediting system. By 1963, the organization provided full membership rights to black schools and colleges.

Walter Nathaniel Ridley -- ATA president (1945-47). Ridley was the first African-American to receive a doctorate degree from a white southern university, University of Virginia. Ridley worked with the National Education Association for black plaintiffs in the Brown case.