That bitter separation extended to public education and even to parent-teacher advocacy groups, according to a new book by Temple College of Education associate professor Christine Woyshner. In The National PTA, Race and Civic Engagement 1897-1970, published by Ohio State University Press, Woyshner examines the development of separate parent-teacher organizations and the nature of parental involvement in the early South.

The work is an outgrowth of Woyshner’s graduate research on the national PTA. While researching the subject, Woyshner found multiple references to a so-called “black PTA.” Her book explores the national PTA’s relationship with that group, the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers (NCCPT), a network of black parent-teacher associations that existed in the predominately black schools of the South. Woyshner also addresses how black students were affected when the PTA desegregated and the NCCPT disbanded in 1970.

Although the unification of the two groups should have led to a consolidation of records from the two groups, finding information on the NCCPT was a challenge, Woyshner said.

“I looked for documentation about the group, and it took 10 years,” Woyshner said. “I went to the National PTA’s headquarters because I know that they save everything about the PTA — including photos and meeting minutes. But there were only two slender volumes on the Black PTA.”

A trip to the Library of Congress led Woyshner to the histories of the NCCPT, the Georgia Colored Congress and copies of the NCCPT’s national magazine, Our National Family, and its local counterpart, Our Georgia Family. Those discoveries led Woyshner to the papers of NCCPT and National Congress of Parents and Teachers founder Selena Sloan Butler at Spelman College in Atlanta and to Alabama, where records of the state’s NCCPT chapter were kept, she said.

Although the purposeful segregation of the PTA was mostly a Southern phenomenon, black parents in the North also formed groups to address the unique issues that their children faced, Woyshner said. But these groups didn’t last very long.

Although there was nothing codified in the organizations’ bylaws regarding leadership, until 1970 it was common practice for whites to serve as officers in integrated PTA groups, she said.

While the Civil Rights Movement made desegregation of the PTA inevitable, the resulting melding of the two groups took a toll on both the national PTA and on education in the South’s black communities, Woyshner said. While some whites at the National PTA level campaigned actively for the full inclusion of NCCPT members, NCCPT members themselves debated whether or not they wanted to merge at all, Woyshner said.

One unintended consequence of the merger was the dismantling of the national network that the NCCPT provided for black students. When that network was dissolved, more was taken away than anyone could have foreseen, she said.

“Something was lost,” said Woyshner. “A strong, active network of black parents stopped going to PTA meetings in the south because they felt no ownership. You also had white parents who left the PTA because they didn’t want to integrate.”

Woyshner is an associate professor of Elementary Education/K-12 social studies in the College of Education. Her book is available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and on the Ohio State University Press website at www.ohiostatepress.org.