Every day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Education Post and Philly’s 7th Ward, will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month and February is just the Blackest. All year are ongoing opportunities to learn and teach and the colossal impact Black educators have had on society.
Today, our featured Black educator is Charles L. Reason.
Charles Lewis Reason was born in New York City on July 21, 1818. Lewis was a child prodigy; displaying a high ability for math. He was so academically gifted that he began teaching at 14 at the New York African school. His salary was $25 Per year. With the money he saved, he continued his own education, paying for teachers and tutors to help him along his educational journey.
With his education, reason drifted into political activism on behalf of African Americans, most notably as an abolitionist. In 1847, he and Charles Bennett Ray founded the Society for the Promotion of Education among Colored Children. Additionally, he started a normal school or teacher training college in New York City.
In 1848, Reason served as the superintendent of New York City PS number two and received Compliments from Frederick Douglas, who wrote in the abolitionist newspaper the North Star, that under Reason’s leadership, “the school became a rigorous reputation of the defamations of John C Calhoun about the potential of free Blacks.” In 1849, when the white Free Mission College (later renamed, New York Central College) opened up, it admitted Black students and hired Reason to serve on the faculty. He became the first African-American to hold a professorship at a predominantly white American College, as a professor of Belles letters, Greek, Latin, French, and professor of mathematics.
A few years later in 1952, Reason became principal of the famed Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, currently Cheyney University. Reason’s work is responsible for expanding the school’s enrollment from six students in 1852 to 118 students in 1855. He also improved the library and made the school form for distinguished visiting speakers.
In 1855 he left the Institute for Colored Youth to return to New York City, where he engaged in more activist work on behalf of Black civil rights. He spoke out against the work of the American Colonization Society, he fought to desegregate New York City Public Schools and he worked to end enslavement. Helping to achieve the desegregation of schools in New York, Reason returned to them as a principal of numerous schools. He engaged in these while writing as a journalist and poet.
Reason is another example of an educator who can fuse their purpose as an educator with their purpose as an activist. He saw that education was a tool to not only empower individuals but to empower them to change the world, which is exactly what Charles Reason did.
Charles Lewis Reason; a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
For more information on Charles L. Reason, visit the following site.
