HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

National Congress of Colored Parents & Teachers

Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia

Marker Inscription

Building Together for Youth. The National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers grew from a meeting called at the request of Selena Sloan Butler through the school principle, Cora B. Finley, at Yonge Street School, March 14, 1911. As interest grew, other school units were created throughout the city and organized into the Parent-Teacher Council of Atlanta. A state organization was formed in the lecture room of Bethel A. M. E. Church in Atlanta, May 6, 1921. Mrs. Butler was elected first State President at that meeting. To the sixth annual state meeting held at Liberty Baptist Church in Atlanta, four states (Georgia, Alabama, Delaware, and Florida) sent delegates and national body was formed, May 7, 1926. A number of other states and the District of Columbia soon joined the organization. Mrs. Butler was e1ected first National president and is honored today as the founder of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. Her efforts at Yonge Street School, renamed Henry Rutherford Butler Elementary School to honor her husband, have been well received throughout the country. 060-116 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1957

Erected by Georgia Historical Commission

The Story

At Atlanta's Yonge Street School in 1911, Selena Sloan Butler organized a parent-teacher group that grew, through a state body formed in 1921 and a national congress in 1926, into the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. In an era of rigid segregation, Black parents built their own network to advocate for their children's schools when the existing PTA excluded them. Butler, elected first national president, is honored as its founder.

Why it matters

The organization gave African American families a national voice in education during Jim Crow, and its work is woven into the larger story of the American PTA movement.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

The story fixed to this marker begins in 1911, in an Atlanta shaped by the hard architecture of Jim Crow. Segregation was not merely custom but law, reaching into nearly every corner of public life — and public schooling was one of its most consequential arenas. Black schools were systematically underfunded, and the organizations forming to support schoolchildren nationally did not include Black families.

This was also the height of the Progressive Era, a time when Americans of all kinds were founding clubs, associations, and reform movements to improve their communities. Among Black Americans, and especially Black women, that impulse ran powerfully strong. Excluded from white institutions, they built their own — mutual aid societies, women's clubs, church networks, and schools — creating parallel structures that carried real weight.

Atlanta was a center of this activity, home to a substantial Black community with its own churches, educators, and institutions. It was fertile ground for exactly the kind of grassroots organizing that could start with a single meeting at a neighborhood school and grow, over years, into a movement of national scope.

People & events

It started with a request. Selena Sloan Butler asked that a meeting be called, and through the school principal, Cora B. Finley, that gathering took place at the Yonge Street School on March 14, 1911. From that beginning, a parent-teacher group formed to support the children of the school and the families around it.

Interest spread. Other school units were created across the city and organized into the Parent-Teacher Council of Atlanta. A decade after that first meeting, on May 6, 1921, a state organization was formed in the lecture room of Bethel A.M.E. Church in Atlanta, and Butler was elected its first state president — a recognition of the movement she had set in motion.

The reach kept widening. At the sixth annual state meeting, held at Liberty Baptist Church in Atlanta on May 7, 1926, delegates arrived from four states — Georgia, Alabama, Delaware, and Florida — and a national body was formed. Butler was elected its first national president, and other states and the District of Columbia soon joined. She is honored as the founder of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. The Yonge Street School where it all began was later renamed to honor her husband, Henry Rutherford Butler.

Its place in the American story

This marker records the birth of a national institution that gave African American families an organized voice in their children's education during the era of legal segregation. When the existing parent-teacher movement did not include them, Black parents and teachers built a congress of their own — one that grew from a single Atlanta schoolroom into an organization spanning many states and the District of Columbia.

That achievement sits at the intersection of several of the great currents of American history: the long Black freedom struggle, the movement for equal education, and the leadership of Black women in building the institutions their communities needed. Advocating for well-supported schools under Jim Crow was demanding work, and doing it through a formal national body multiplied its reach and its staying power.

The organization's legacy is also woven into the broader American PTA movement. The parallel congress that Butler founded is part of the larger national story of parents and teachers joining forces on behalf of children — a story that cannot be told completely without the families who, denied a seat at the existing table, built a powerful one of their own.

If you visit

Stand at this Atlanta site and recognize it for what it is: a birthplace. Big movements are easy to imagine as having always existed, but this one can be traced to a specific request, a specific meeting, and a specific school. Reading the marker is a way of honoring how something national grew from something intensely local.

Let the names anchor you. Selena Sloan Butler and Cora B. Finley were real people who set this in motion, and the sequence of dates and places on the marker — a schoolroom in 1911, a church lecture room in 1921, another church in 1926 — maps a movement gathering momentum year by year. It's worth pausing over how much organizing lies behind those few lines.

The site fits naturally into a tour of Atlanta's rich African American history, a city whose churches, schools, and institutions carry the story of Black achievement and the struggle for equality. Take the marker as an invitation to look closer at the neighborhood's educational and community landmarks, and to remember that a national congress advocating for children began right here, with a single meeting.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Selena Sloan Butler
  • · Cora B. Finley

Themes & tags

African American HistoryEducationWomen's HistoryLandmark

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