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.