National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers
Founder: Selena Sloan Butler > Read Biography

The roots of segregation were as much economic as racial. Following the Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War, many African-Americans had little choice but to live in impoverished isolation from the white mainstream.

Although African-Americans were now citizens of the nation, few could vote because of a poll tax that required citizens to pay for the right to vote. This practice effectively disenfranchised the poor—white and black alike.

By law, in the South, African-Americans were to be schooled in "separate but equal" facilities from whites. But in actuality, that arrangement usually created conditions more separate than equal.

African-American mothers realized that if conditions were bad for poor white children across the land, they were deplorable for black children.

Selena Sloan Butler, an African-American teacher and the wife of the prominent Atlanta physician, H.R. Butler, had followed the work of Alice Birney and Phoebe Hearst with great interest and started to work towards organizing a similar institution in Georgia for what was then called colored or Negro parents.

She was determined to unite African-American mothers of the Atlanta community—and did so with the assistance and encouragement of the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, which as early as 1908, had declared that its interest was in all children, irrespective of color or condition.

By 1911, Mrs. Butler had organized a group of mothers and teachers at the Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta. This first Colored Parent-Teacher unit followed the unit structure of the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations. Its work and mission won wide acclaim and support, and Mrs. Butler set out to respond to requests from around the state to establish similar chapters.

Her work among Georgia’s African-American communities was relentless. By 1919, virtually all of them had a local unit, and so in that year these units joined to form the Georgia Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers.

While attending one of the early annual conventions of this new state congress, Margaretta Reeve, now president of the National PTA, addressed the delegates. Her zeal and support for the work of this new sister association attracted interest in developing parent-teacher work for both races in Alabama, Florida, and Delaware. According to the Coral Anniversary History of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, upon consulting with teachers and welfare workers from these states, Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Reeve "deemed it logical to invite the organizations in these states into a national body, which would give opportunity for development of leadership among the members, as well as to create inspiration and deeper interest in the work and thereby accomplish greater results."

In early 1926, the Georgia Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers issued a nationwide call to a convention to be held in Atlanta for the purpose of establishing a national association.

On May 7, 1926, the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT) was formed. Selena Butler was elected its first president.

As explained in the Coral Anniversary History, the NCCPT was to function only in those states where separate schools for the races were maintained.

It was the individual state laws segregating schools, and not National PTA bylaws, that prevented African-American communities from belonging to the larger, older association.