











































Publication Draft – SSCH – 2004


Behind-the-Scenes Ally: The GEB, 
Southern Black High Schools, and Inter-War Curriculum Reform 

Matthew D. Davis 
University of Missouri-St. Louis 

 
 During the 1920s, Southern black teachers 
organized and agitated for improved schooling in their 
communities.  Accreditation of black high schools, 
using the same standards set for schools attended by 
whites, constituted a primary agenda item for these 
activists.1  The National Association of Teachers in 
Colored Schools (NATCS), later the American 
Teachers Association, led the fight.  Less than a 
decade later, in 1932, the Southern Association of 
Colleges and Secondary Schools (SACSS) published 
its first list of accredited black high schools across the 
South, twenty in all.2  A “five-year effort” by the 
NATCS climaxed in what historian Adam Fairclough 
has called “a clear rejection of white supremacist 
assumptions.”3   
 This NATCS’ accomplishment, to gain 
strong accreditation status for high schools in African 
American communities, was profound and correctly 
has been lauded by historians.4  This received 
narrative, however, largely has missed the significant 
allied activities of the General Education Board in the 
same endeavor.  The GEB, the behemoth among 
philanthropic organization interested in Southern 
black education, worked behind-the-scenes, both 
politically and administratively, throughout the inter-
war period as an ally of the NATCS for the 
accreditation of black high schools.  These activities 
may seem to be contradictory in light of much that has 
been written about the GEB.5  Its ideological origins 
in Washingtonian industrial education appears to 
negate the possibility that its officials could promote 
academically robust curriculums for black schools.  
Still, it did, and its advocacy was so fashioned as to be 
both persistent and strategic. 
 This essay illuminates the important but 
overlooked role played by the GEB in a major 
curriculum reform effort, Southern black high school 
accreditation.  Further, in this endeavor, the GEB, 
despite the routine unfavorable characterization of the 
organization and in contrast to the purportedly more 
“liberal” Julius Rosenwald Fund (JRF), constituted a 
powerful ally to the black educational community in 
this endeavor.  Importantly, the GEB carried its own 
goals within its allied actions, at times distinct from 
those articulated by the black professional educators.  
The GEB’s “white supremacist assumptions” 
remained salient throughout the interwar period.  The 
Board, throughout the deliberations about and the 
effective implementation of this curricular reform, 
never discarded its primary paternalistic position.  On 
the other hand, Southern black high school 
accreditation became a curriculum policy reality, in no 
small measure, because of the GEB’s influence and 
support. 

The NATCS and a Curriculum Reform Dance 
 William A. Robinson delivered a report at the 
1926 National Association of Teachers in Colored 
Schools Conference which had long-lasting 
implications.  After outlining great disparities between 
white and black schooling in the South, a phenomenon 
that his audience knew all too well, Robinson 
announced the need for a regional accreditation 
system for black institutions to partially remedy the 
blighted educational circumstances.  Apparently, 
Robinson left no record of his expectations; surely the 
successful results from the NATCS’s “five year 
effort” must have been a pleasant surprise.  Certainly, 
the white educational establishment had rarely 
responded so quickly to a call for change from black 
professional educators.  In part, as historian Melanie 
Carter outlines, this was due to a “southern etiquette” 
dance with partners from the NATCS, the Association 
for Colleges for Negro Youth (ACNY), the U.S. 
Bureau of Education, and the Southern Association of 
Colleges and Secondary Schools.  Still, the NACTS 
asserted its willingness to take the lead throughout this 
dance. 6  
 Subsequent to the initial Robinson report of 
1926, a succession of NATCS presidents kept the fire 
stoked under the feet of the various dance partners.  
Reports, publications, and correspondence flowed 
from NATCS leadership.  The U.S. Bureau of 
Education released a new report on Southern 
educational condition that mirrored the results and 
rhetoric of the Robinson reports (presented annually 
during this period at the NATCS Conferences).  The 
NACTS successfully countered an early proposal by 
the SACSS to turn over to the ACNY the accreditation 
of black institutions.  Moreover, by 1932, the 
NATCS’s perseverance was honored with the release 
of the 1932 SACSS list of accredited Negro high 
schools.7   
 Thus, the NATCS deserves full credit for its 
leadership of the dance toward accreditation of black 
high schools.  However, it neglects the ways in which 
the GEB organized and supported the dance.   
 
The GEB, Curriculum Policy Contexts, and High 
School Education for Blacks 
 The General Education Board gained life in 
1902 specifically to foster the reconstruction of 
Southern public education.  The entry point of interest 
for John D. Rockefeller and his partners on the Board 
was their railway “tourism” through the dismal 
landscape of Southern black schooling.  However, 
despite their primary moral focus on the education of 
blacks, GEB board members from the South 
convincingly influenced their fellow trustees that the 



 

 22 

climate in the South at this time was inauspicious for 
direct attention to black education.  Rather, they 
advocated a “trickle down” policy, one that viewed 
early gains for white schooling as a vital and 
necessary precursor to subsequent improvement for 
blacks’ education.8  Thus, when the GEB 
implemented its first systemic reform effort in the 
South, the Board focused on reform of public 
secondary schooling, an institutional setting for whites 
only.9

  The need for public high schools in the South 
for both whites and blacks at the turn of the century 
was dire; massive obstacles of indifference and 
finance existed.  GEB leaders devised a plan to “seed” 
the growth of white secondary schools by establishing 
Professors of Secondary Education at the leading 
public university in twelve Southern states.  Begun in 
1905, this initiative was completed just five years 
later; twelve GEB-funded professors were in place.  
The GEB continuously supported these positions until 
1926.  The Professors’ pioneering work was 
complimented from 1919 to 1926 by State Agents for 
Secondary Education in each of these twelve states.  
These individuals, in contrast to the Professors’ 
attention to more schools, focused on better schools; 
as well, these state department men toiled within 
existing and growing state bureaucracies designed to 
aid local provision of education.10  Unfortunately, the 
primary purview of these Professors and their 
colleagues in state departments of education explicitly 
did not promote black high schools.   

However, this circumstance of absence was 
accompanied by a few pointed reminders of those 
their actions marginalized.  First, in a 1905 speech, 
Bruce R. Payne, the University of Virginia’s Professor 
of Secondary Education (the first funded by the GEB) 
and the future long-time President of George Peabody 
College for Teachers, “challenged the accepted notion 
that Negroes were incapable of absorbing a high 
school education.”11  Later, in 1910, in response to a 
headquarters query, B.W. Torreyson, the Professor of 
Secondary Education at the University of Arkansas, 
forwarded to GEB headquarters a list of his state’s 
public Negro high schools with details of each 
school’s characteristics.12  Indeed, this institutional 
request for information about “advanced” black 
schooling suggests a significant turning point in GEB 
policy leadership regarding Southern black education.  
Quietly, the GEB overhauled its policy; henceforth, 
the Board would directly support Southern black 
education.   
 This new GEB policy imperative was most 
readily reflected in the foundation’s second major 
systemic reform effort, the State Agent for Negro 
Education Program, begun in 1910.13  This Program, 
one that installed State Agents for Negro Education in 
all of the Southern states by 1920, represents the 
GEB’s most impressive and direct action to improve 
Southern black education.  The GEB’s support of the 

State Agent Program continued until the early 1950s.  
Importantly, it served as the foundational platform for 
the GEB’s and nearly all philanthropic support of 
Southern black education for more than four decades.  
GEB officials charged each State Agent to promote 
public black education and to supervise teachers and 
principals in the state’s schools for African 
Americans.  In addition, the Agent’s purview included 
oversight of Jeanes Teachers and Rosenwald Building 
Agents.14  For more than forty years, these State 
Agents for Negro Education (forty in all) were 
“virtually assistant [state] superintendents”15 and 
became “gatekeepers” for Southern education 
initiatives for all major philanthropies. 
 Jackson Davis, a Virginian, stands tall in any 
understanding of the work and influence of the State 
Agent Program.  In 1910, Davis became the South’s 
first State Agent for Negro Education.  In that role, he 
exercised oversight of Virginia’s program for 
improved education for black children and youth.  
Five years later, he accepted direct employment with 
the Board and became its Field Agent for the entire 
southern region.  At the time of his death in 1947, he 
had risen to become the GEB’s Associate Director and 
Vice President.  While still a State Agent, Davis 
interviewed and “trained” all others similarly 
employed in Southern state departments of education.  
His “supervision” of the entire corps of State Agents 
continued unabated until his death and his vision 
guided and directed their endeavors.16  Davis, as 
Adam Fairclough recently opined of the GEB in 
general, was “very much attuned to the art of the 
possible.”17   Davis, like Payne earlier, envisioned 
proper high schools for Negroes.  Davis, quite 
possibly alone among white Southern educators, 
understood something more: the system-wide respect 
of black high schools that met the rigorous Southern 
Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools’ 
accreditation requirements set for high schools 
attended by whites. 
 
The GEB and Black High School Accreditation 
 Leaders of the major philanthropies involved 
in the improvement of Southern black education met 
on 30 April 1925 at the GEB offices in New York.  
The deliberations of this “interlocking directorate” of 
white executives focused directly upon the 
development of black high schools.18  Apparently, 
little of substance resulted from the meeting.  
Certainly, little by way of consensus could develop 
quickly.  Actively opposed to the idea or only “foot-
dragging” were the representatives from the Slater 
Fund.  James Dillard, the Fund’s leader, was among 
the oldest and the most respected men at the meeting.  
Early in the 20th century, Dillard had pioneered the 
concept and operations of “county training schools,” 
secondary institutions that were inferior to high 
schools.   



 

 23

 Dillard was not pleased with plans to 
transform county training schools to largely academic 
high schools.19  Officials of the Julius Rosenwald 
Fund officials, at least those from its Chicago 
headquarters, appeared to be altogether confused 
about the symbolic and substantive differences 
between varieties of secondary schools.20  (More 
definitive direction, or misdirection of this Fund 
would await the arrival of Edwin Embree as JRF 
President in 1928.21)  Even the top GEB officials 
seemed curiously tentative about taking the out-front 
position on Negro high schools.22  Indeed, the GEB’s 
Annual Reports were generally silent about the State 
Agents’ advocacy of Negro high school accreditation 
throughout the interwar period.23  This group of 
influential officials, the “interlocking directorate,” 
therefore, stalled on the issue of Negro high schools.   
 On the other hand, the State Agents for 
Negro Education, led by Jackson Davis, had been 
tackling the issue of Negro high school improvement 
for at least four years.  By 1925, their actions were 
deliberate and robust.  The origins of Davis’ 
conviction about black high schools and their 
improved curriculum are hazy.  He certainly began to 
keep tabs on the number and character of black high 
schools as early as 1916.24  Perhaps his interest in 
high schools for Negroes developed out of his 
professional friendship with W.E.B. Dubois.25  
Whatever his motivations, and working behind-the-
scenes, Davis led the cadre of State Agents for Negro 
Education into the campaign for black high school 
accreditation in the South. 
  Davis’ agenda for the 1921 State Agents 
Conference suggests that this event was the venue for 
his unveiling of a new policy end-in-view for 
improved Negro high schools.26  Near the end of the 
conference he asked State Agents to respond to two 
questions.  First, “Has anything been done to classify 
the Negro schools?”  Second, “To what extent are 
training schools meeting State requirements as junior 
and senior high schools?”  Little comment is recorded 
for either question;27 “classification” and “standards” 
raised in relation to Negro schools may have seemed 
“beyond the pale” for these men who fought daily for 
the mere presence of black schooling in Southern 
communities.  Davis’ distance from the front lines 
likely accorded him increased latitude to dream.  
Unfortunately, the brevity of the Conference “Notes” 
permits only speculation about the State Agents’ 
reactions to Davis’ questions.  Leo Favrot, Davis chief 
assistant, offered the only substantive response that 
was noted.  Favrot raised his concern about the 
conversion of County Training Schools to 
“conventional high schools.”28  Likely, the group, and 
Favrot himself, missed the irony of labeling Negro 
schools as “conventional” that met rigorous state and 
or regional accreditation standards.  On the other 
hand, the profundity of the concern, even for symbolic 
reasons, must not be missed.  Historians have 

routinely perceived the County Training Schools as an 
immutable icon for the work of the GEB and other 
groups involved in the improvement of Southern black 
education.  Favrot appears to have understood what 
historians have missed.  Davis had unveiled a new 
policy imperative: a broader mission and an advanced 
status for Negro high schools. 
 When the State Agents once again assembled 
in 1923, Davis sought increased deliberation about 
Negro high schools.  Near the middle of the 
conference, Davis asked: “To What Extent are 
Training Schools Meeting State Requirements as 
Junior and Secondary High Schools?”29  Oral 
responses were not recorded, but a compilation of 
statistics, by state, was listed.  Each State Agent had 
come prepared with their reports, undoubtedly aware 
of Davis’ desires.  As a group, the results revealed 
only meager or uncertain movement toward the goal 
of standards-meeting Negro schools.  Davis turned up 
the heat on the State Agents for their 1925 conference.  
Davis moved the discussion of Negro High Schools to 
the top of the group’s agenda with accreditation of 
these schools explicitly stated and leading the list of 
discussion prompts.30  The Conference notes for that 
year detail each State Agent’s remarks.  They 
identified many obstacles and only a few State Agents 
reported real progress.31  Still, Davis’ actions had 
made one thing crystal clear to the State Agents: 
raising the standards of Negro high schools under their 
care would be a primary focus of their work. 
 Davis took his campaign for the accreditation 
of high school for Negroes “on the road” during 1926.  
He called no official conference that year with his 
State Agents for Negro Education.  This was the year 
that the NATCS embarked on their “five-year effort” 
to garner accreditation of high schools attended by 
Southern African Americans.32  However, from 1927 
to 1930, Davis and his State Agents met for official 
conferences four times.33  Apparently, deliberations 
over Negro high school accreditation continued 
unabated.  The 1930 Conference record notes the 
advocacy by N.C. Newbold, long-time North Carolina 
State Agent,34 for equal standards of accreditation for 
Negro and white high schools.35  Likely, Newbold 
used his voice to advocate equal standards throughout 
this period.  He was lauded by the GEB president 
during the closing remarks of the 1929 Conference 
“for his responses to the challenge to find the next step 
in Negro education.”36  Likely, this remark carried 
intent beyond simple praise of Newbold; it probably 
was a pointed reminder for the other State Agents.  
The actual accomplishments of Newbold and his 
colleagues in this high school accreditation endeavor 
remain hazy.  However, their efforts are more easily 
recognized.  Davis’ supervision of these men, a 
process which included spending substantial time with 
each of them every year, would have used effort 
toward the end-in-view as one of the benchmarks of 
his assessment of the State Agents’ work.  To be sure, 



 

 24 

the State Agents were answerable to their respective 
State Superintendents.  Nevertheless, the GEB’s 
continued financial support of their roles certainly 
accorded Davis a voice in each State Agent’s 
continued employment.  The remarkable stability of 
the State Agents’ collective tenure underscores the 
alignment of their efforts with Davis’ policy 
preferences.37  By inference at least, the State Agents 
worked diligently toward accreditation of black high 
schools in their states. 
 Thus far, this narrative of GEB involvement 
in the encouragement of the development of four-year 
academically robust black high schools reveals a 
distanced or indirect allied character to the 
GEB/NATCS relationship.  However, two features of 
the NACTS “five year effort” illustrate more direct 
connections between the two groups.  First, W. A. 
Robinson, an African American and, not 
inconsequentially, Assistant State Agent in North 
Carolina, authored the research reports that were 
foundational to the NACTS push for high school.38  
Presumably, Robinson’s research efforts were a part 
of his official duties in a GEB-funded position.  
Second, the plan eventually developed in 1930 to 
facilitate the technical procedures of black high school 
accreditation situated each State Agent as the 
“shepherd” of the process.  From the distribution of 
applications and, importantly, by providing the 
requisite fees to launch the accreditation process to 
“signing off” on the application, to the Southern 
Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, the 
State Agent “walked with” each individual black 
school that sought accreditation.39  To what extent this 
gatekeeper function might have been abused by 
individual State Agents awaits more focused state and 
local studies.  However, in general, State Agents 
appear to have taken this new function in stride as a 
part of their routine ally-in-action relationship with 
black schools. 
 To implement the new accreditation 
procedures, the Southern Association of Colleges and 
Secondary Schools created a new position, Executive 
Agent.  From 1930 to 1938, the GEB underwrote the 
salary of this individual.40  Two men served as the 
Executive Agent of the Southern Association during 
those eight years.  Both had deep ties to the GEB in 
general and to Jackson Davis in particular.  Arthur D. 
Wright was the inaugural Executive Agent.41  
However, Wright, a classmate and fraternity brother 
of Davis at the College of William & Mary and, also, 
Davis’ successor as Virginia’s State Agent, resigned 
the Executive Agent position after only one year in 
order to assume the dual presidency of the Slater Fund 
and Jeanes Foundation.42  To replace him, the 
Southern Association tapped Fred McCuistion, a 
former Arkansas State Agent who later followed 
Davis into the position of GEB Associate Director.43  
These GEB-affiliated men represented personal 
manifestations of the GEB allied activity on black 

high school accreditation that persisted to the end of 
the inter-war period.   
Philanthropies as Allies: GEB/JRF Contrast 
 Historical memory of Southern black 
schooling, or at least historians’ representations of 
such memory, has marginalized actions by the GEB as 
patriarchal, conservative, and cautious.44  In this view, 
the GEB becomes the “heavy hand” among 
philanthropies, a Northern enterprise distanced from 
the pains of Southern black lived reality, and the 
principal purveyor of a self-help ethic to black 
communities.  In contrast, actions undertaken by the 
Julius Rosenwald Fund are characterized routinely as 
more progressive than those of the GEB, more directly 
enabling and relevant to Southern blacks.  The 
Rosenwald Fund is lauded, among a myriad of support 
to Southern black communities, for provision of 
schoolhouses throughout the South for black students 
and of fellowships for black adults to study in 
Northern institutions.45  Furthermore, positive 
historical treatment of Edwin Embree, the Fund’s 
president for its last twenty years, adds to this lore 
surrounding the Fund.  A chief element of Embree’s 
progressive personae is his long time friendship and 
research collaboration with Fisk University’s 
scholar/president Charles S. Johnson. 46 However, 
Embree’s advocacy for urban black high schools as 
the Rosenwald Fund’s president represents an errant 
mark on Embree’s, and, as well, the JRF’s progressive 
report card.  Indeed, a closer look at this JRF 
advocacy illuminates a too-long-hidden facet of GEB 
progressivism. 
 Shortly after Embree assumed the Rosenwald 
Fund’s presidency in 1928, he lent his voice to a new 
Fund initiative: high schools for urban blacks in the 
South.47  Substantive pragmatism underscored this 
effort of the Fund.  Previously, the various 
philanthropies interested in the advancement of 
Southern black education had focused on rural 
children and youth.  By 1928, however, substantial 
numbers of blacks had migrated to Southern cities, 
some on their way north during the “great migration,” 
others to presumably better Southern lives.  With its 
new initiative, the Rosenwald Fund, led by Embree, 
sought to make an impressive foray into the provision 
of black schooling.  However, its efforts met with 
fierce opposition from Southern urban blacks.  Brief 
details of two early Embree and JRF experiments with 
urban high schools illuminate the Fund’s missteps.  In 
1929, the JRF-planned Paul Laurance Dunbar High 
School opened in Little Rock, Arkansas.  It was to be 
an industrial high school.  However, during the 
school’s construction, the local black community 
successfully altered the original Fund plans.  As 
analyzed by James Anderson, “the black citizens, 
taxpayers, and educators outmaneuvered the” Fund.48  
The second industrial high school planned by the Fund 
for New Orleans, Louisiana, never got beyond the 
blueprint stage.  In this case, the Rosenwald Fund 



 

 25

                                                

authorized $125,000 in 1930 to build a “model black 
industrial high school.”  The school’s “Architectural 
Sketch,” revealingly omitted any academic space.  A 
variety of forces, including intense protest by the New 
Orleans’ black community, kept the high school from 
being built.49  A key element in both these 
illustrations of the Rosewald Fund’s short-lived 
experiment into urban black high school provision is 
its evasion of the desires for robust academic high 
schools collectively articulated by urban black 
communities for more than a decade.   
 
Listening and Acting: The GEB as Ally 
 General Education Board officials, unlike 
those who led the Julius Rosenwald Fund, listened to 
those they wished to help, Southern African 
Americans.  Without doubt, GEB leaders always did 
not adopt such a stance.  The movement to accredit 
high schools for blacks, however, offers another and 
nuanced story about the relationships of allies.  Black 
educational leaders during the interwar years 
recognized that accreditation of black high schools as 
academic institutions was an essential step toward 
more robust education of black youth.  They also 
understood that such accreditation held a position of 
heightened status throughout the South.  Very 
importantly, Jackson Davis and the network of State 
Agents for Negro Education listened to the voices of 
black aspiration for the recognition of highly qualified 
academic high schools for blacks.  These Southern 
white men set out to translate these hopes into a 
realizable possibility.  Moreover, as allies, the GEB-
funded officials did not usurp public leadership from 
black leaders and groups.  Rather, they worked 
diligently and successfully behind the scenes such that 
procedures for the accreditation of black academic 
high schools became institutionalized rather than an 
empty dream.  In this work, the GEB resources and 
influence enabled the development of a conspicuous 
curriculum reform for black high schools in the South. 

 
1 Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and 
Equality, 1890-2000 (New York, 2001), 170. 
2 H. Council Trenholm, “The Accreditation of the 
Negro High School,” The Journal of Negro Education 
1 (Apr. 1932): 34-43. 
3 Fairclough, Better Day Coming, 170. 
4 See, for example, Melanie Carter, “From Jim Crow 
ro Inclusion: An Historical Analysis of the 
Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for 
Negroes, 1934-1965,” PhD Diss. (The Ohio State 
University, 1996). 
5 A partial list of works whose narratives on the GEB 
focus’s upon its intrusive ideological imperative of 
industrial education include: Henry Allen Bullock, A 
History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 
to the Present (Cambridge, 1967); William A. Link, A 
Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, 
and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel 

                                                                           
Hill, 1986); Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the 
South;  William H. Watkins, The White Architects of 
Black Education, Ideology and Power in America, 
1865-1954 (New York, 2001).  A notable exception to 
the norm that suggests slightly more progressive 
ideals to the GEB is found in Eric Anderson and 
Alfred A. Moss, Jr. Dangerous Donations: Northern 
Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902-
1930 (Columbia, 1999). 
6 Carter, “From Jim Crow ro Inclusion,” 63.  See also 
Thelma D. Perry, History of the American Teachers 
Association (Washington, D.C., 1975), 166-176. 
7 Ibid.  See also Trenholm, “The Accreditation of the 
Negro High School.” 
8 See fn 3 above. 
9 This assertion of a first systemic reform effort refers 
to the GEB’s cautious entry into philanthropic support 
through individual giving that took place prior to this 
focus upon secondary schooling. 
10 Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, Chapter 3: “High 
Schools for the South,” 25-38. 
11 Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 30. 
12 Torreyson to Buttrick letter, 2 April 1920, floder 
2861, box 275, sub-series 2, series 1, GEB Archives, 
Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, New 
York (hereafter designated RAC). 
13 The Southern Education Board was the primary 
support (using GEB money) of the first State Agent 
for negro Education.  However, for a myriad of 
reasons, likely including a desire to distance itself 
from such direct support, the SEB handed over direct 
support of the State Agent in 1911.  Importantly, the 
GEB eschewed the masking of the position’s purpose 
by adding the word Negro to the title. 
14 Matthew D. Davis, “Advocates and Overseers: State 
Agents of Negro Education in the Pre-Brown South,” 
paper presentation, AERA, April 2004, San Diego. 
15 Henry Allen Bullock, op cit, 135. 
16 Matthew D. Davis, “’Attuned to the Art of the 
Possible:’ The GEB’s Jackson Davis,” American 
Educational History Journal (in press). 
17 Adam Fairclough, “The General Education Board, 
Black Teachers and Civil Rights,” Rockefeller 
Archive Center Newsletter (Spring 2002): 3. 
18 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 
205.  Various correspondence, file 2008, box 209, 
sub-series 2, series 1, GEB Archives, RAC. 
19 Dillard wrote to Backman, in apparent anger, that 
the field work to be performed by Caldwell and him 
might preclude their involvement in the meeting.  See 
Dillard to Bachman letter, 3 April 1925, ibid.  In fact, 
they did attend the meeting.  Apparently, a summons 
to 60 Broadway was not taken lightly. 
 
20 See various correspondence, file 8, box 129, Julius 
Rosenwald Fund Papers, Fisk University Archives. 



 

 26 

                                                                           
21 On Embree’s arrival at and reorganization of the 
Julius Rosenwald Fund, see, for example, Anderson 
and Moss, Dangerous Donations, 199. 
22 Their collective respect for Dillard was deep; direct 
confrontation of him over this issue might have been 
nearly impossible. 
23 Only brief notices are listed in the Annual Reports; 
the remarks mask the work to assign accreditation 
status to high schools.  See, for example, Annual 
Report of the General Education Board, 1929-1930 
(New York, 1930), 31; and Annual Report of the 
General Education Board, 1933-1934 (New York, 
1934), 53. 
24 Jackson Davis, “Summary of Statistics, Negro 
Public High Schools in the Southern States, 1915-
1916,” file 2861, box 275, sub-series 2, series 1, GEB 
Archives, RAC. 
25 David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Bu Bois: Biography 
of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York, 1993), 548. 
26 “Notes Made at the Conference of State Agents for 
Negro Rural Schools held at Battery Park Hotel, 
Ashville, North Carolina, November 26, 27, and 28, 
1921,” file 2000, box 208, sub-series 2, series 1, GEB 
Archives, RAC.   
27 “Notes Made at the Conference of State Agents for 
Negro Rural Schools held at Battery Park Hotel, 
Ashville, North Carolina, November 26, 27, and 28, 
1921” (pages 11 and 12), file 2000, box 208, sub-
series 2, series 1, GEB Archives, RAC.   
28 Ibid. 
29 “Conference of State Agents for Negro Rural 
Schools Held at Hampton Institute, Hampton, 
Virginia, May 6-9, 1923,” file 2000, box 208, sub-
series 2, series 1, GEB Archives, RAC.   
30 “Suggested Program: Conference State Agents for 
Negro Rural Schools,” file 1998, box 208, sub-series 
2, series 1, GEB Archives, RAC.   
31 “Conference of State Agents of Rural Schools for 
Negroes Held at Gulfport Mississippi, January 7-8, 
1925,” file 2000, box 208, sub-series 2, series 1, GEB 
Archives, RAC.   
32 H. Council Trenholm, “The Accreditation of the 
Negro High School,” The Journal of Negro Education 
1 (Apr. 1932): 34. 
33 “Conference of State Agents of Rural Schools for 
Negroes, June 5 and 6, 1930, Atlantic City, New 
Jersey,” p. 30, file: “Misc. – Jeanes Foundation,” box 
15, MSS 9498, James Dillard Papers, Special 
Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.   
34 Newbold is extensively discussed in James L. 
LeLoudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, 
and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (Chapel 
Hill, 1996), 183-228. 
35 Ibid, p, 26. 
36 “Conference of State Agents of Rural Schools for 
Negroes, June 4 and 5, 1929, Atlantic City, New 
Jersey,” p. 21, file: “Misc. – Jeanes Foundation,” box 

                                                                           
15, MSS 9498, James Dillard Papers, Special 
Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.   
37 Ten of the fifteen State Agents stayed in office 
between 1925 and 1930.  And nine of these ten served 
at least sixteen years as State Agent.  See Smith, 
Builders of Goodwill, 175-178. 
38 Trenholm, “The Accreditation of the Negro High 
School.”  By the early 1930s, all Southern states save 
South Carolina officially employed African American 
men in these roles.  See Smith, Builders of Goodwill.  
In all likelihood, these individuals were the only 
blacks employed by most of the Southern state 
departments of education. 
39 Trenholm, “The Accreditation of the Negro High 
School.” 
40 “Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary 
Schools – Committee on Approval of Negro Schools,” 
November 1938, file 3385, box 316, sub-series 2, 
series 1, GEB Archives, RAC. 
41 Letter from “Standing Committee on Approval of 
Night Schools” …”To the Negro Colleges and 
Universities of the South,” 6 May 1930, file 3383, box 
326, sub-series 2, series 1, GEB Archives, RAC. 
42 “Mu Pi Lambda Fraternity” photo page, College of 
William & Mary Annual (n.d., n.p.), file: Davis 
Records at the College of William & Mary (1 of 3), 
box w/3072-e, MSS 3072-f, Jackson Davis Papers, , 
Special Collections Library, University of Virginia 
Library.  Smith, Builders of Goodwill, 38.  Darlene 
Joy Conley, Philanthropic Foundations and 
Organizational Change: The Case of the Southern 
Education Foundation (SEF) During the Civil Rights 
Era (Ph.D. Diss., Northwestern Univ, 1990), 104. 
43 Fred McCuistion Fellowship Cards, General 
Education Board Archives, RAC. 
44 See fn 3 above.  
45 Due, largely, to JRF Funds, “(b)y 1930 over half 
million rural black children studied in clean, well-lit, 
one-to-six-room brick or clapboard buildings.”  Judith 
Sealander, Private Wealth & Public Life: Foundation 
Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social 
Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal 
(Baltimore, 1997), 69.  On JRF fellowships, see Jayne 
Rae Beilke, “To Render Better Service: The Role of 
the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship Program in the 
Development of Graduate and Professional 
Educational Development Opportunities for African 
Americans,” Phd Diss. (Indiana University, 1994).  
46 See, for example, Patrick J. Gilpin and Marybeth 
Gasman, Charles S. Johnson: leadership Beyond the 
Veil in the Age of Jim Crow (Albany, 2003).  
47 The JRF short-lived experience with urban high 
schools for blacks is carefully detailed by Anderson in 
The Education of Blacks in the South, Ch. 186.  
Unfortunately, Anderson, throughout the chapter, 
conflates the actions of JRF and other philanthropies, 
particularly GEB.   
48 Ibid, 211.    48 Ibid, 218-221. 




