Preview
Creation Date
3-11-2026
Description
A Presentation by Dr. Abena Ampofoa Asare, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University
Using the records from the Bank Street College Archives, this presentation probes the throughline and tension between Bank Street’s mid-century vision of progressive teacher training and the Black Studies movement in higher education of the late 1960s and 70s.
In 1945, the young Mrs. Annie Mae Tooks traveled from Bethune-Cookman College and her home in Daytona Beach, Florida to attend the Bank Street Cooperative School, a progressive teacher training program that stressed the importance of educating “the whole child” and building a more humane, just, and rational world.
Dr. Annie Mae Walker went on to become the first director of Stony Brook University’s Black Studies program (1969). In this role she navigated the demands of Black and Puerto Rican student organizers and the directives of university administrators to establish an educational unit that has persisted for almost six decades. From 1969 to 1975 Stony Brook’s newly formed Black Studies Program (now Africana Studies), established by and supported by Dr. Annie Mae Walker, was decidedly internationalist, unapologetically political, and closely connected to local communities beyond the university’s walls.