Annie Wealthy Holland was born in Virginia in 1871. She attended Hampton Institute and was licensed as a teacher by the Normal Industrial Institute. After almost twenty years of work as a teacher and principal in Virginia, Holland became a Jeanes Fund instructor in Gates County in 1911. African American teachers were supported by the Negro Rural School Fund of the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation, established in 1907. They instructed other teachers in techniques of teaching industrial arts and domestic skills. Jeanes instructors evolved into academic supervisors and school administrators. In Gates County Holland supervised education in 22 rural schools. She worked with schools to establish agriculture clubs that could help the communities in Gates County to become autonomous. Her work in the county helped to educate and to improve the lives of the students, teachers, and everyone in the communities she served.
North Carolina had more Jeanes teachers than any other state in 1915 and it was then that Holland became the Jeanes Fund’s state demonstration agent for North Carolina. In that role she was essentially the state supervisor of the elementary schools for African American students. When North Carolina established the Division of Negro Education in 1921, Holland became the division’s State Supervisor of Negro Elementary Schools. In this position Holland traveled extensively to visit schools across the state, organized fund drives, met with superintendents and boards of education, and taught demonstration classes ranging from academic subjects to agriculture. Her work gave her the opportunity to organize and lead people, both Black and white, with the goal of educating Black children and increasing the resiliency of their communities.
Holland founded the first parent-teacher association for African Americans which held its first meeting in Raleigh at Shaw University in 1928. The association came to be known as the North Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. She died while speaking to a group of teachers in Louisburg in 1934 and is buried in Franklin, Virginia. At the tenth annual meeting of the North Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, attendees planted a tree at Shaw University in memory of Annie Wealthy Holland.
References:
Annie Wealthy Holland biography at Dudley Flood Center website: https://floodcenter.org/jeanes-fellowship-program/
Annie Wealthy Holland biography from NCPedia (revised from the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography)
Margaret Suplee Smith and Emily Herring Wilson, North Carolina Women Making History, pp. 228-229.
Jeffrey Crow and Flora Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina, p. 156.
Nathan Newbold, Five North Carolina Negro Educators, 1939.