E.J. Edmunds

          E. J. Edmunds is important both as a pioneering Black American in the field of mathematics and a prominent figure in America's first civil rights movement.  He was a free person of color from the Afro-Creole community in pre-Civil War New Orleans.  In spite of the legal, social, and cultural impediments to a Black man getting a high-level mathematics education in the American South at this time, Edmunds managed to educate himself to the point where he could stand side by side with some of the most promising mathematical talent in Europe by testing into and studying at the prestigious École Polytechnique.  Edmunds returned to New Orleans after college to teach mathematics and found himself at the center of the fight for racial integration of public schools.  The senior class at New Orelans' Boys Central High School, egged on by the local conservative newspapers, boycotted the school when they discovered that their mathematics teacher was a Black man.  Edmunds stood his ground and stayed at the school for two years, until the Compromise of 1877 withdrew federal troops from Louisiana, permitted White supremacists to return to power, and ushered in the Jim Crow era.

See the following publications about Edmunds:

Zelbo, S. (2022). Edgar J. Edmunds: A Historical Case Study of Race in Mathematics Education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 53(5), 350-364. Link.

Zelbo, S. (2020). Edgar J. Edmunds (1851-1887): A cross-cultural case study of an African American mathematics teacher who studied at the École polytechnique. In Barbin, E., Bjarnadóttir, K., Furinghetti, F., Karp, A., Moussard G., A., Prytz, J., & Schubring, G. (Eds.) (2020). “Dig where you stand” 6. Proceedings of the sixth International Conference on the History of Mathematics Education. Münster: WTM-Verlag. 

Zelbo, S. (2019). E. J. Edmunds, school integration, and white supremacist backlash in Reconstruction New Orleans. History of Education Quarterly, 59(3), 379-406. doi:10.1017/heq.2019.26. 

Zelbo, S. (2019). Edgar Joseph Edmunds (1851 - 1887), mathematics teacher at the center of New Orleans’ post-Civil War fight over school integration (doctoral dissertation, to be defended December 2019). Columbia University Teachers College, New York, NY.