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Erica B. ✨

@ericabuddington

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Recovering Black Educational History.
Harvard PhD Student.
Hampton Alum ⚓
Hoodie low. Citations deep.
🏗️ @langstonleague
📖 @blackteacherarchive

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It all started with a scribble on a magazine article in 2021 under @imaniperry’s photo. ✏️ (Slide 2)

I wished that I could be a part of this project. That wish came true.

Black Teacher Archive (@blackteacherarchive) 2.0 is live! As a researcher and content creator, I had the privilege of working alongside Micha Broadnax, Dr. Imani Perry, Dr. Jarvis Givens, and Dr. Rebecca Horowitz-Willis, as well as the Harvard DARTH team, to steward this amazing project to a new home!

Black Teacher Archive is a collection of Colored Teacher Association journals—the work, thoughts, and pedagogy of Black teachers operating through Jim Crow up until Brown v. Board.

It can be used for academic research, genealogical exploration (was your ancestor a teacher?), Black history enthusiast inquiries, exhibit browsing, and much more!

The search function is improved; the design is new, there are exhibits from amazing grad students, breakdowns of many themes and throughlines that run through the journals.

Visit bta.gse.harvard.edu! by @ericabuddington

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3 months ago

I stood in front of a room at Harvard and asked: what if the origin story of Black History education is more crowded than we've been taught?

This is the intro to the speech I gave at @hgse_aocc called “Before the Father of Black History, There Were Mothers.” The full talk is on YouTube now. Head to my stories. 🔗

#BlackHistory #BlackWomen #AOCC #BlackEducation taken in Harvard University by @ericabuddington

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6 months ago

Saturday, September 26 I’ll be at Howard University for the inaugural Restoration Writers Festival, bringing poems and the question I’ve been living inside: what does it cost to put someone else’s name back?

My writing has shown up in a lot of places: rap & spoken word stages, a late-night TV writers’ room, fiction & memoir, curriculum that landed in classrooms.

Now I write alongside the archive, beside Black women who wrote the lessons that taught generations and watched that work go out under someone else’s name, or an institution’s.

I went in looking for lineage & no one warned me the work would restore me too.

Restoration runs both directions.
Let’s talk about it.

Confirmed guests also include: @demetriallucas, @alex_elle, @iamamandamillerlittlejohn @jaywalk1

📍 Howard University · Miner Building Auditorium, School of Education
🗓️ Sat 9/26 · 10AM–5PM
🎟️ restorationwriters.com
@restorationwriters

#RestorationWritersFestival #BlackWriters #BlackWomenWriters by @ericabuddington

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20 days ago

10/10. One of the best books I’ve ever read.

I am undone.

Princess of the Hither Isles by Adele Logan Alexander is a multigenerational reckoning: the story of educator and suffragist Adella Hunt Logan, traced through the women who came before and after her, and it left me raw for two weeks straight.

I think I dropped or threw the book 5x while reading in disbelief. (Sorry @bklynlibrary - it’s in great condition!)

This family’s genius runs generations deep, and Alexander does not flatten it into a tidy narrative.

She lets the contradictions stand: a healer grandmother whose folk knowledge was medicine before medicine had a name for it. A Susan B. Anthony who preached sisterhood while drawing the color line in her own movement. A W.E.B. Du Bois whose pettiness and personal grievances bled into how he treated the women around him. A George Washington Carver whose private life held far more than the sanitized textbook version ever let on. A Booker T. Washington whose reputation for wandering outside his marriage is documented and undeniable. And at the center of Tuskegee’s social order, Margaret Murray Washington — brilliant, exacting, controlling, a woman who ran her domain with a STRONG hand and left little room for any other woman to shine without friction.

I kept running to my shelves to grab books about the people mentioned; double checking things! While there is paraphrasing & critical fabulation…so much of it is rooted in TRUTH. You think you know Tuskegee? You have no idea.

Adella Hunt Logan was a suffragist fighting for the vote while living under a regime, both political and domestic, that had no real place for her ambition. Her articles are featured in the Crisis, St. Pierre’s Women’s Era. She received her Masters from Atlanta University with Du Bois as an advisor.

She sometimes passed for survival; for medical care or in a public space threatened by the Klan. She was brilliant, credentialed, tireless & still boxed in by the men and women running Tuskegee’s world around her.

She deserved every bit of this record. by @ericabuddington

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2 months ago

Spent yesterday at Harriet Tubman’s home in Auburn, New York. The local Methodist Episcopal Zion Church operates the site in partnership with the independent non-profit “The Harriet Tubman Home, Inc.,” alongside the National Park Service.

Even though it's a national parks-affiliated…the history here can’t be touched because they don’t accept federal funds. (& because they can never truly erase Black history.)

The truth is here.
More coming soon. by @ericabuddington

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2 months ago

My grandmother said cyclospora be damned. We were told to come and get our Callaloo, collard greens, bok choy, squash, tomatoes, and peppers from her garden immediately. She would not take no for an answer.

Each year she feeds an entire Brooklyn block (and us) from her yard on repeat, for free. We are always grateful, but this moment is different. We are taking a different heed. She’s growing us too. by @ericabuddington

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2 months ago

This is my @blackzinefair haul. As an antiquarian and paper crafter, I was over the moon that I finally got my hands on what I call “ancestral ephemera.”

Black Zine Fair... “is a platform for Black zine makers and publishers working in the lineage of earlier generations of Black radicals who understood the importance of print culture.”

From the Panther newspapers to the “I AM A MAN” signs… the griot, oral historians, and storytellers have also understood the urgency of font, collage/imagery, and sometimes overnight printing… we've always been a people eager to get our message out.

The zine has always been the people’s curriculum.

And in a world filled with AI errors, I love how the current generations are returning to the task… something that can sit in our hands.

Pieces from @canuseeher, morganic.matter, @jennebella, Mariame Kaba by @ericabuddington

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3 months ago

This week, I’ve been at a retreat in Aspen, Colorado at @andersonranchartscenter taking a nonfiction and photography workshop with @imaniperry. As I explore the archives in search of the artifacts left behind by Black women educators, I am eager to extract language from the images they left behind. I thought this would be a valuable addition to my toolkit.

My work with @blackteacherarchive has deepened my sense of connection to the schoolhouse facilitator. I am excited to begin my PhD research, which will focus on archival recovery of the stories of many of these women.

So, on the first day of the workshop, when I learned that our task was to create a self-portrait, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

The schoolteacher archive I study often offers a single stiff studio portrait of these women (if any at all)—one surviving image representing a whole interior life, which is part of the erasure, right? The flattening into a type.

These images defy that. I gave myself the multiplicity the archive denied them: many frames where one woman can be contemplative, delighted, and commanding—all without having to choose which one survives.

I’ve decided to call this series “Not Without Laughter,” a nod to the poet Langston Hughes and the multifaceted matriarchs he writes about—and, of course, a nod to the last image of the carousel.

Shout out to @johnica for her insistence and support in getting me here. 🙌🏾 #Day1 taken in Aspen, Colorado by @ericabuddington

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3 months ago

Day 1 of 30. Yes, it’s April 4th. The archive runs on its own schedule.

I didn’t know elegy was the word for many of the poems I've written in this lifetime.

I've been holding the names of Black women educators, builders, and enclave-makers the archive is slowly revealing. This month I’m writing thirty poems for them — and leaving a prompt each day so you can summon yours too.

Use the link in my stories to read the full post.

🖤 #AndManyMoreICouldSummon #NationalPoetryMonth #BlackWomenEducators by @ericabuddington

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6 months ago

Last night I had the honor of speaking in a Harvard conversation series called Courageous Conversations, led by Dr. Ayanna Cooper.

Someone asked how we protect the lineage work of Black educators. I told them that we have to bring them with us, everywhere. One-on-ones, panels, classrooms. I started flashing books that sit on my my desk in front of the screen.

I promised I would put some of those books here.

These are some of my most-reached-for texts, the ones I return to when I need to remember that the I'm in lineage…that nothing we are fighting is new. There are many generations who've left blueprints for us to follow.

@imaniperry names “black formalism”….the ritual practices, codes of conduct, and dignified ways of doing and being that Black institutions carried from the post-Reconstruction era forward. The graduation ceremonies. The Sunday best. The classroom on Monday. It is not about performing for white gaze. It is an expression of grace and identity that existed in refuge from the violence of white supremacy.

I take this lens with me…

When I read Mary McLeod Bethune burning logs and using charred splinters as pencils. When I sit with Anna Julia Cooper’s “No Flowers Please” & asking not for bouquets at her death but for courage, shoulder-to-shoulder and when I read letters between Maria and Charlotte hinting that their work was under surveillance…I understand black formalism as curriculum. As pedagogy.

And in the words of Mary Frances Gunner…there are many more I could summon!

I am because they were. by @ericabuddington

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5 months ago

A little birdie told me y’all want more ways to access Du Bois, because you know his work is also a resource for learning about lesser-known Black people and Black women in particular.

🙂‍↔️ by @ericabuddington

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4 months ago

Felt like spring today. 🌹 by @ericabuddington

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6 months ago