Teacher Appreciation Week is next month, May 8-12. Eleanor Roosevelt is largely credited with the official establishment of Teacher Appreciation Week in this country. While her husband was guiding the nation and our Allies through World War II, the First Lady worked consistently to build support for public education and stressed the importance of teachers as a critical component to the overall health of the nation.
Years later, the First Lady’s efforts resulted in the establishment of Teacher Appreciation Week. Eleanor Roosevelt also held a particular interest with the education of Black children in the South, a region that remained clutched in the oppressive Jim Crow policies against Black people less than 80 years from the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery in the United States.
In January 1945, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her nationally syndicated column, My Day, about her meeting with the Southern Education Foundation to learn about the Jeanes Teachers, a corps of Black educators developed and supported by the Jeanes Fund out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Jeanes Fund was created by Anna Jeanes, a Quaker who was considered one of the wealthiest women in America of her time. Anna Jeanes dedicated a considerable amount of her wealth for the education of African Americans in the South following the Civil War and for decades following. Previously, Anna Jeanes had been a strong supporter of the Abolitionist movement that was a hallmark of the Quaker faith’s expression of Christian incompatibility with slavery. Anna Jeanes’ education fund created an army of Black teachers (mostly women) and administrators known as Jeanes Teachers and Jeanes Supervisors who for decades provided the education for masses of African Americans, many alive today. The Jeanes Fund for the education of Black children was eventually consolidated along with similar philanthropic education funds to form what is now the Southern Education Foundation.
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