Harold Cressy

Harold Cressy (1 February 1889 – 23 August 1916) was a South African headteacher and activist. He was the first Coloured person to gain a degree in South Africa and he worked to improve education for non-white South Africans. He co-founded a teachers group which opposed the apartheid Bantu Education Act.

Life Cressy was born at the mission at Rorke's Drift on 1 February 1889 to Bernard and Mary Cressy. He first attended the school at the local mission. He then moved to Cape Town at the age of eight, where he eventually qualified as a teacher at the Zonnebloem College in 1905. left With his new qualification he was able to teach at the Dutch Reformed Church mission school at Clanwilliam in the Western Cape. At the same time he furthered his own education and he passed his matriculation meaning that he could, in theory, enter a university. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1910 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was the first Coloured person to achieve this distinction. Cressy married Caroline Hartog in 1912.

Cressy continued to work with Abdullah Abdurahman who had helped his career before. With Abdurahman's encouragement he and H.Gordan founded the important Teachers' League of South Africa His wife died only a few years later in the 1918 flu pandemic leaving their daughter, Millicent, an orphan. with a commemorative plaque unveiled on Heritage Day, 24 September.

The Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA), which Cressy created, became a powerful group. In the 1950s the organisation organised political resistance by South African teachers to the emergence of Bantu education based on apartheid ideals. In the 1950s Benjamin Kies, a teacher at Trafalgar High School, was banned from teaching for life for being involved with the TLSA.