Center for the Study of Childcare Employment

Josephine Silone Yates (1859-1912) was an educator, writer, and Black women’s club leader, whose career and community work was grounded in a commitment to “racial uplift,” emphasizing the improvement of newly freed Black communities post-emancipation. One of the first Black women professors in the United States, Yates taught at Lincoln Institute, now Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, Missouri (Dublin, 2020). Yates was integral to the establishment of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 (Dublin, 2020), and as the organization’s second president (1901-1904), she put her knowledge to work by establishing the NACW’s infrastructure to expand early care and education opportunities for Black children across the country (Robbins, 2011).

Early learning and child development theory shaped Yates’s pedagogical philosophy and grounded her advocacy for day nurseries and kindergartens, which remains a less-recognized aspect of her life’s work (Robbins, 2011). Her writings evidence her pedagogical fluency through the discussion of various educational theories and research and distinguish her as a great thought leader in education across the human lifespan. Nonetheless, Yates’s intellectual leadership and expertise in education is woefully understudied, buried like the efforts of many 20^th-century Black women whose perspectives on the role of education in Black liberation surpassed the boundaries of the Black men who dominate historical memory (Robbins, 2011).