Selena Sloan Butler, Who Founded the First Black Parent-Teacher Association, Was a Soror of Sigma Gamma Rho

Did you know that Selena Sloan Butler, the educator who founded the first parent-teacher association for African Americans and is honored today as a co-founder of the National PTA, was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.?

Selena Sloan was born on January 4, around 1872, in Thomasville, Georgia, just seven years after the abolition of slavery. She attended a missionary elementary school before enrolling at Spelman Seminary, now Spelman College, and graduated in 1888 at the age of sixteen. She began her career teaching in Atlanta, and later became a member of Sigma Gamma Rho.

Butler married Henry Rutherford Butler, a prominent Harvard-trained physician, and the couple had one son. When her son approached school age and she could find no kindergarten in any Black neighborhood in Atlanta, Butler started one in her own home. That experience awakened a lifelong mission. Seeking to bring parents and teachers together on behalf of Black children, she founded a parent-teacher association at Atlanta’s Yonge Street Elementary School in 1911, the first of its kind for African Americans in the country.

What began as a local effort grew into a national movement. Through a series of letters urging parents and teachers across the country to organize, Butler built support that culminated in 1926 with the founding of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, which she led as its first president for more than three decades. Her work drew national attention, and in 1929 President Herbert Hoover appointed her to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection.

Butler’s service extended across many fronts. She co-founded the Spelman College Alumnae Association, organized the Phyllis Wheatley branch of the Atlanta YWCA, served as the first president of the Georgia Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, and was a delegate to the founding convention of the National Association of Colored Women. During World War II, she organized the first Black women’s chapter of the Red Cross Gray Ladies.

Selena Sloan Butler died on October 7, 1964, at the age of 92. Her legacy endures: a portrait of her hangs in the Georgia State Capitol, an Atlanta park bears her name, and in 1970 she was formally recognized as one of the founders of the National Parent-Teacher Association. Her lifetime of devotion to children and community reflects the Sigma Gamma Rho motto, “Greater Service, Greater Progress.”

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