Jackson Davis and the Lost World of Jim Crow Education

Boy with Teacherby William A. Link

William A. Link is Lucy Spinks Keker Excellence Professor and Head of the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of several books on Southern history, including A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1986) and The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

The 5,509 images that are contained in the digitized holdings of the Jackson Davis Collection offer a unique view into southern education during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the images document southern white schools–mostly in Virginia–but the great majority concern rural African Americans and their school facilities, teachers, and students. Davis himself created most of the images with a specific purpose in mind–to demonstrate the abject condition of black schools in the South. Many of the images composed part of a lantern slide show that Davis displayed as a school official and General Education Board agent1,  but all of them detail conditions of black schools before and after the impact of reform and modernization. Uniquely, they tell us much about school interiors and the layout of rural education inside the classroom. They represent a remarkable breadth of coverage, predominantly in the Carolinas and Virginia, with a sprinkling in various Deep South states. Taken together with other photographic sources, they provide one of the most complete extant collections documenting the lost world of Jim Crow education.

Jackson Davis occupied an important position in a complex, triangular relationship that included southern whites, northern philanthropists, and African Americans. The South’s public schools, existing under a rigid system of segregation and white supremacy, were established during Reconstruction as a result of constitutional and statutory requirements for universal public education for blacks and whites. These “common” schools–mostly isolated, one-room schools–came into existence across the South during the last third of the 19th century, and education for southern blacks and whites shared common conditions of poverty, isolation, and undereducation. Children of both races attended school for a few months a year in shabby and underequipped facilities, taught by underpaid and undertrained teachers. These were schools closely attuned to community sentiment, but they reflected the widespread poverty that existed across the region.

 

White and Black Schooling in the Post-Reconstruction Era

The African American communities that created and sustained schools during and after Reconstruction composed the first part of the triangle of black education, the southern whites that controlled the public school system the second. While antebellum common schools excluded free blacks and slaves, post-Civil War Republicans embraced public schools for freed people. Tax-supported African American education survived the wreckage of “Redemption,” and the numbers of schools, enrollment, and attendance grew for both whites and blacks during the 1880s and 1890s.2  To be sure, Southern schools remained racially segregated and profoundly unequal. The South’s tiny state school bureaucracies in the nineteenth century were all-white, as were the local-level county superintendents and school trustees. White schools lasted longer than black schools, white teachers were better paid, and white facilities were superior–though sometimes only slightly so.3

Still, schools became vehicles for African American empowerment. Under the slaveholder regime, blacks viewed literacy and learning, though illegal for slaves to acquire, as keys to freedom, and the surreptitious acquisition of these skills became ways in which they resisted an oppressive system. With the arrival of Union armies during the Civil War, emancipation and freedom became connected to the early development of black schools, and freed people greeted the establishment of a skeletal system of universal education with genuine enthusiasm. Schools for African American communities were as much a part of the social fabric as they were for whites, and despite white neglect, underequipped black schools provided opportunities for local pride and accomplishment. Reconstruction had established a system of universal, public education for both races, but this system provided for extraordinary community control. In the 1880s and 1890s, as local, mostly one-room schools expanded across the South for both races, they survived with the necessary community support.4

For both races, rural schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century resulted from a public-private partnership. The public end of this partnership came from the representatives of the infant bureaucracy, the state superintendents of public instruction and the county superintendents. These officials, who lacked any real power to compel behavior on the part of local communities, dispensed most of the small amounts of state funds by paying the salaries of teachers. The private end of the partnership came in the form of a substantial involvement by the local community. Not only did communities provide school facilities, they were also expected to support schools with adequate enrollment and regular attendance. Local funds supplemented the state contribution; private contributions and property taxes built and maintained schools. The public-private partnership was sealed when communities petitioned for public support, as did one community in Cullman County, Alabama in 1889. “We have had our School meeting,” they reported, “and the majority of the Community has settled upon the location of the School and the party’s agree to give land and build a good house, provided we can get a five months winter School.” In this case and many others, the bargain was sealed with the hiring of a teacher, a decision that was reached according to local discretion and schools were located according to local convenience.5

It was in this context of community-based enthusiasm among African Americans that a new era of change arrived. Much depended on the second side of the triangular relationship, the southern whites who dominated the school system. In the early twentieth century, a new era of change began, the benefits of which, at least prior to about 1910, became available for whites only. In many ways, these inequities only grew worse during the subsequent years, despite a region-wide and much-celebrated campaign for improved schools. Southern school campaigns occurred only after white school reformers consciously decided to exclude black schools from their program. After 1900, major changes in southern education arrived. After the turn of the 20th century, educational reformers, drawing inspiration from educators around the country, sought to modernize public schools, redesign curricula, and extend bureaucratic supervision over community schools. School reformers enjoyed the support of a new generation of southern leaders–such as Governors Andrew Jackson Montague of Virginia and Charles Brantley Aycock of North Carolina–who rose to power on the heels of disfranchisement, segregation, and one-party Democratic hegemony. This combination of reform and racial oppression did not augur well for black schools: while white schools after 1900 enjoyed an era of an expanding physical plant, developing curricula, an emerging high school system, and a newly created corps of bureaucrats, black schools remained neglected. The result was an obvious feature of Jim Crow schools: while white schools grew and improved, black schools remained frozen in time. White school modernization, Booker T. Washington sadly concluded in 1910, had taken place at the “expense of Negro education.”6   Although some whites had long been concerned with black education, most school officials were either indifferent or downright hostile to the interests of African Americans. They saw little need to educate blacks beyond what one Georgia school superintendent described as “that sort of training which will make him respect law and fit him for vocations open to him.”7  At best, the most sympathetic whites were paternalistic in their attitudes, and they made a calculated, and rationalized, political choice. According to one reformer, since southern whites possessed “directive control” over public education, the key to improve public education lay in converting them to reform.8

School reformers, whether at a regional level with the Southern Education Board (SEB) or at the state and local level, scrupulously avoided public contact either with blacks or with the issue of black schools. Moreover, their neglect of black education meant that the greater their successes, the wider the inequalities of the segregated schools. As public financial support for white schools grew during the years prior to World War I, black schools largely remained neglected. For the most part, the hallmarks of early twentieth-century southern school reform–longer school terms, higher teacher pay, the consolidation and rehabilitation of the physical plant–had little effect on southern rural black schools.9

 

The Advent of Industrial Education and Northern Philanthropy

In the early 20th century, northern philanthropy–the third side of the triangle–initiated a major intervention in southern black education. Its interests coincided with the desire of black parents for better schools; the limited inclination of southern whites to support them at all converged in the concept of “industrial education.” Its precise meaning remained vague, perhaps deliberately so. Most northern and southern whites agreed that it provided a minimal form of education better suited to what they believed were the “limited” capacities of southern blacks. They believed that the style of schooling pioneered at Hampton Institute in Virginia and Tuskegee Institute in Alabama would fulfill the needs of the mass of rural blacks by teaching them basic skills, habits of thrift and work discipline, and values of Victorian morality. Aside from its ideological value, industrial education served as a smokescreen behind which its white supporters could provide resources to black education. Industrial schooling provided political cover for support among southern whites for minimal black schooling. For northern philanthropists, it provided a means by which to funnel funds to African American education.10

For many African Americans, however, industrial education signified something very different. The leading exponent of industrial education among African Americans was Booker T. Washington, but there were many other followers and associates of Washington who established private industrial institutes across the rural South and embraced this model of educational reform as the only available form of uplift. Nonetheless, although industrial education was conceptually vague, its implementation obviously depended on adequate facilities. “Industrial” instruction could not begin without better trained and educated teachers and, above all, without schools that had modernized facilities. So went the logic, and southern rural blacks quickly grasped how the “industrial” curriculum offered considerable potential for publicly- and privately-supported school improvement.

Early on, industrial education attracted considerable interest among northern philanthropists. Both Washington and his white mentor, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a northern missionary and founder of Hampton Institute, skillfully cultivated northern audiences during the late decades of the nineteenth century; both Hampton and Tuskegee had wealthy northerners as trustees and supporters. Northern interest in southern black education greatly expanded after about 1910. In 1904, the Philadelphia philanthropist Anna T. Jeanes donated $10,000 each to Hampton and Tuskegee to help to introduce industrial education to southern rural black schools, and by 1907 she had given $1.2 million to the General Education Board (GEB) to establish an ambitious program of training black teachers in the methods of industrial schooling. The GEB’s major involvement came a little later, and, like the Jeanes program, sought to train black teachers in industrial education. In cooperation with the John F. Slater Fund, the GEB help to establish county training schools to provide a rudimentary form of secondary schooling for prospective rural African American teachers. The General Education Board controlled the Slater Fund and with it began efforts at teacher education through the county training school program; county training schools provided the basis for a rudimentary form of secondary education for rural African Americans.11  In all of these activities, Rockefeller philanthropy poured resources into African American education: between 1902 and 1937, the GEB spent nearly $40 million on black schools.12

Along with the Jeanes Fund and GEB, the Rosenwald Fund had a major impact on black schools. Sears and Roebuck magnate Julius Rosenwald formally established the Fund in 1917 following six years of involvement in black education. It functioned most energetically during the 1920s, when it worked with southern authorities, local whites, and African Americans to refurbish much of the physical plant of southern black schools.13  In order to receive Rosenwald support, black schools were required to follow strict architectural standards; schoolrooms had to include space for practical training and “industrial education.” As important, Rosenwald officials required a “common effort” by state and county school authorities, along with local whites and blacks. Despite what the Fund’s president described as the “continuing inadequacies of provisions for Negro schools,” the accomplishments of the Rosenwald school building program were real and its legacy significant. By 1932, the Rosenwald Fund had participated in the construction of more than 5,300 schools; these cost more than $4.2 million in public and private funds and housed more than 650,000 black children and 15,000 teachers. According to the Fund’s estimates, these schools exceeded the numbers of all black schools in existence in 1913 and were worth more than twice their value.

The intervention of northern philanthropy was focused on a particular goal: to increase the financial commitment and involvement of white-led local and state governments toward African American education. The Jeanes Fund and the GEB shared a common objective: increasing public tax support for black schools. As one GEB official later explained, the board sought to “throw upon the state, county, or community the whole responsibility for carrying on the work of public education.” Philanthropic support was intended, he said, primarily “to stimulate the giving of public funds.”14

To a large extent, northern philanthropists were mediators between African Americans seeking to improve their schools and southern whites, who ranged in attitudes from outright hostility to cautious support for limited improvements. Philanthropists sought ways to stimulate public funding for black education, though they clearly did so within the constraints of Jim Crow schooling. In the course of attempting to change the system, Northerners found that they worked most effectively with native white Southerners who could represent their interests and communicate effectively with the southern power structure. Beginning in 1911, the GEB began supporting a supervisor–attached to state superintendents’ offices but supported by northern philanthropy–whose purpose was to coordinate the Jeanes, GEB, and later Rosenwald efforts and to solidify state support for black education. Although this program eventually spread to most southern states, the first such supervisor, appointed in Virginia in 1910, was white Southerner Jackson Davis.15

 

Jackson Davis and African American Schools

A key figure in the triangular relationship between southern whites, African Americans, and northern philanthropists, Jackson “Jack” Davis was graduated from the College of William and Mary. In his twenties he joined the new world of Progressive Era education, first serving as a school principal in the town of Marion and then in Henrico County, and then as a state inspector for the newly created Virginia State Board of Examiners. Two influences were particularly powerful: graduate training at Columbia Teachers’ College–then an important training center for progressive educators–and his experiences in the field as an educator. In 1905, after becoming at the age of twenty-three superintendent of the Henrico County Schools outside Richmond, Davis began a long involvement in black education. In 1905, Davis visited a Henrico school taught by Virginia Estelle Randolph, a black teacher who had whitewashed, cleaned, and landscaped her school grounds. He concluded that Randolph’s example course could serve as a model for other African American teachers. Attracting the support of the Jeanes Fund, black teachers such as Randolph were designated as “Jeanes teachers,” and they were dispatched into the hinterlands, nominally to inaugurate industrial education, but for all practical purposes to encourage the physical modernization of black schools. Davis’ Henrico successes attracted the attention of northern philanthropists, and when Virginia officials agreed to name a white supervisor of black schools in 1910–a position paid for by the GEB–Davis was the logical choice. His background and temperament, according to Rockefeller officials, made him “peculiarly well qualified” for the job. These included his “large experience” and “his previous success,” but they also reflected his unique ability to communicate across racial and sectional lines–his “tact and sympathy” in serving as “so effective a mediator” among whites and blacks.16  In 1915, he became affiliated with the General Education Board as a field agent, though he remained based in Richmond, in which capacity he remained until 1929, when he was made assistant director. Becoming associate director in 1933, Davis moved his offices to New York City in 1937, and in 1946 he became the GEB’s vice-president and director.17

Jack Davis also remained connected, as part of the GEB’s southern program, to the network of private black colleges that were receiving philanthropic support. Hampton and Tuskegee continued to receive the Rockefellers’ attention and largesse, but a host of other black private colleges, including Fisk University, Morehouse College, and Atlanta University, enjoyed their support after World War I. The GEB expanded its support to black colleges even farther during the 1920s and 1930s, while it began a fellowship program designed to provide expanded graduate training for black faculty.18  Davis remained closely associated with Hampton; in 1942, he was offered and refused the presidency of that institution.19  But it was his experiences in the field that guided his approach to black education. Subscribing to contemporary racial mores, along with other white educators who promoted philanthropic-supported industrial education–men such as Jeanes Fund head James Hardy Dillard, longtime GEB field agent and Lousianian Leo Favrot, and North Carolinian N. C. Newbold–Davis viewed industrial education as part of a segregated pedagogy and wider, paternalistic approach to race relations.

Still, Davis’ experiences–documented in the large number of photographs that survive in his papers–forced him to confront the rough edges of southern education. The environment of rural black schools, he wrote in 1910, was “usually not one that can uplift and inspire.” Shabby, unattractive, and unhealthy, African Americans schools, he believed, were doing about as much harm as good. In 1913, Davis described a school in Dawn, a community in Caroline County, Virginia. The building was 16 x 29 feet, separated into two rooms by a flimsy partition. Two teachers enrolled 104 students in a building that should have held twenty people; the furniture was comprised of twenty four homemade desks, nine pictures, one globe, a “battered & torn” map, a bookcase, and a hornet’s nest on the ceiling. Davis and local white officials urged the local community to raise money to consolidate schools and erect and new structure, and he reported leaving them “thinking hard over our proposition.” But Davis’ theory–and the theory of many other reformers–was that if the school environment could change, only “if we can make the schoolroom attractive and the schoolgrounds attractive.” Physical improvement of schools, Davis maintained, would lead to pattern of community uplift.20

Improving rural black schools, Davis asserted, was part of an effort to improve conditions for African Americans generally, efforts that married educational reform with other community-building organizations. In schools, as in other community institutions, Davis believed that in order to obtain the “full co-operation of the negroes they must feel some degree of ownership in their schools.”21  The thrust of these efforts–and the key to Davis’ own approach–was his insistence on empowerment of black communities. In 1912, Davis toured the hinterlands of Nottoway County to visit black farmers working with the federal county extension service. The work of black farmers struck Davis as an example of African American empowerment. One farmer reported “great gratitude” that his corn crop had doubled after the adoption of scientific farming methods of fertilization and crop rotation. The farmer “pointed with pride” to a lush cornfield cultivated by extension methods, a “well fenced” vegetable garden that his wife tended. The man clearly expressed “interest and hope.” Another farmer reported a similar transformation. His farmhouse was “neatly whitewashed,” the garden “well fenced,” vegetables were abundant, hogs fat and well fed. Not only were his farm yield improved through extension methods, but the farmer had become a regular church attender and an active, contributing member of the community.22

The original conception of industrial education underwent considerable change during the 1920s and 1930s in the face of the realities of southern rural education. While promoting its virtues to northern philanthropist and southern white audiences, there was some skepticism among southern blacks. When Davis spoke to the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools in St. Louis in July 1911, he encountered a mood of “grievance” among the teachers. Complaining that virtually all state appropriations went to white schools, they urged that Jeanes teachers become involved in as much academic as industrial work.23  In fact, much of Davis’ energies–and those of the industrial education program–concentrated on the physical modernization of the dilapidated school plant existing for African American children. Citing the “steady migration” of black people out of the South after World War I and a “serious shortage of farm labor,” Davis declared that the Great Migration was at least partly the result of inferior rural school facilities. Creating new county training schools–and, eventually, high schools–would combined with supervising Jeanes teachers to make these schools, and the rural South generally, more attractive.

Under Davis’ direction, the GEB sponsored the construction of these schools, and by 1923, there were 179 county training schools from Maryland to Texas, and these contained fifty-three teachers’ homes and thirty-five dormitories. By 1929, there were 306 county training schools, with 11,810 students attending. Not only would the new county training schools prepare better teachers, they would supply models for school modernization.24  Most black schools were “wretchedly poor,” Davis wrote in 1920, and inadequate schools were “danger signals in any democratic society.” The answer, he believed, lay in an infusion of much-needed funds into African American education.25

By the 1930s, the GEB’s core program in African American education–and Jackson Davis’ chief responsibility–remained oversight of and support for the state agents for Negro education. During the twenty-five years following their creation, their operations had expanded significantly. In many southern states, state school bureaucracies had established separate divisions of black education, and under this rubric state support and supervision of black schooling grew. By 1936, there were assistant agents in eight southern states, while in five states the school bureaucracies included an African American school official–known as a “Negro supervisor.” The state agents and black school divisions spearheaded school modernization for African American children in increased teacher training, new school construction, and the establishment of black high schools.26

In 1938, fellow white educator and GEB operative Leo M. Favrot described Davis as possessing a “rare combination of wisdom, kindliness and sympathetic understanding.”27  Jackson Davis can be characterized as moderately liberal in his posture toward black education–and toward race relations generally. Davis’s experiences were international in scope, and involved applying a model of self-help, physical improvement, and an industrially-oriented curriculum to developing nations, especially those in South America and Africa. The Phelps-Stokes Fund, another northern philanthropy interested in southern black education, surveyed education in Africa in 1920-21, and this philanthropy along with missionary societies and church organizations created an Advisory Committee on Education in Liberia. Educational reformers, borrowing from the model in the American South, sent one of the state agents for black schools, James L. Sibley of Alabama, as the “educational adviser” for the program. Although the GEB was limited by its charter to the United States, Davis frequently encouraged the application of the South’s model of black education. He saw particular comparisons in South Africa, where the GEB worked to apply the Jeanes model. Though he admitted the limitations that racism had placed on black education in both South Africa and the American South, he found many lines of comparison.28

In this he was representative of opinion among southern white interracialists and their northern supporters, and the GEB–as well as the rest of the Rockefeller establishment–charted a moderately conservative path on race relations. Davis favored a program that would bring physical modernization of southern rural black schools, but he and his associates saw this as occurring within the context of segregated education. However unjust that system might be–and by the 1930s its injustices were becoming obvious–neither Davis nor many other white Southerners saw integration, and the disassembling of the Jim Crow system, as a realistic model for educational change. On his death in April 1947, a fellow GEB official hailed Jackson Davis for “initiating the educational revolution of which the Jeanes teachers were the shock troops.” In more than forty years of work with black education, Davis became the most important GEB official associated with its southern program during the first forty years of its existence. Travelling across the South, he sat astride the connections linking southern educators, northern philanthropists, and southern African Americans.29

 

NOTES

1 In one such slide show in Charlottesville, Davis noted that, for the 250 people present, the images evoked “human interest and human[ity] of pictures made strong appeal to audiences.” Jackson Davis diary, July 18, 1911, Jackson Davis Papers, University of Virginia Library, #3072b.
2 In Virginia, enrollment and attendance in black schools roughly doubled between 1870 and 1900. See William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), Appendices 1.2 and 1.3, pp. 204-5.
3 Link, Hard Country, pp. 40-41; Harlan, Separate and Unequal, passim.
4 South Carolina’s constitution of 1895 specified that schools be established in districts of nine square miles, but in 1911 the state’s school superintendent admitted that that county school district surveys had “seldom been made” and school district lines “rarely been definitely laid out.” In North Carolina, another observer agreed. That state school districts had been so “divided and sub-divided” that schools had “dotted” the countryside. Eugene C. Brooks, “The Public School Question,” Raleigh News and Observer, January 5, 1902.
5 W. R. Anderson to Solomon Palmer, 1889, Alabama Superintendent of Education Records, Correspondence, 1868-1916, Box 1, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. In Georgia in 1901, the state school superintendent dispatched a detailed survey to all of the state’s county school commissioners. The results provide a revealing record of post-Reconstruction public schooling in one state. Despite a baseline of inequality among white and black schools, both races struggled with similar conditions of poverty, isolation, meager funds, and spartan facilities. From Appling County, Georgia, the school commissioner described the differences between white and black schools in the following manner. White schools were, he reported, one-third good, one-third fair, and one-third bad; black schools, one quarter fair and three-quarters bad. Another school commissioner noted that, in general, white schools were “good” and blacks schools in “poor” condition. These general descriptions translated into concrete realities. “Having no building fund,” as the Bulloch County school commissioner explained, “we have run our schools with houses already built by patrons.” In Georgia and elsewhere in the rural South, the state felt no responsibility to provide permanent schoolhouses, and facilities depended on the community. Whites provided themselves with permanent facilities either through buildings supported by local property taxes or through schools built by local subscription. Blacks had less access to tax-supported buildings, though they could and did construct schools through community subscription. In most instances, they simply made do. In Catoosa County, for example, whites had twenty-one and blacks four schools. All four black schools, which were described as “uncomfortable,” were located in churches. In Cowerta County, all forty-six of the black schools were held in local churches. Some white schools used patent desks, but most of them– and virtually all black schools–relied on pine benches.
6 Quoted in Link, Hard Country , pp. 173-74.
7 A. J. Beck, DeKalb County, Georgia, 1901, Special Reports from County School Commissioners, Georgia Department of Education Records (microfilm copy), Georgia Department of Archives and History
8 J. L. M. Curry, quoted in Link, Hard Country, p. 103.
9 As noted earlier, this remains the major and essentially correct conclusion of Harlan, in his Separate and Unequal.
10 Rooted in popular nineteenth-century models of manual training–which emphasized “learning by doing”–industrial education embraced a broad worldview and approach to African Americans’ position in the modern South. But it had different meanings for its different constituencies: southern whites saw in it a model for Jim Crow schooling in which permitted a curricular and pedagogical segregation by race. The roots of industrial education lay in the post-Reconstruction era, at Hampton Institute, which was founded by northern white missionary educator Samuel Chapman Armstrong in Hampton, Virginia after the Civil War. Even more important as a promoter of industrial education was Tuskegee Institute, founded in Alabama in 1881. These institutions stressed training black high school and college students in manual arts and vocational skills, and the great majorities of those attending became teachers. But Hampton and Tuskegee also emphasized the inculcation of qualities of “industry,” the acquisition of morality, and the dignity of labor–through strict military style regimen. The Hampton-Tuskegee model became popular, in part because of the success of its chief promoter, Booker T. Washington, in persuading black and white audience of its value. Across the South, a number of “little Tuskegees” were created in the early 20th century, which were privately established and which sought northern largesse.
11 Jackson Davis, “County Training Schools,” Southern Workman (October 1918), pp. 481-89; Leo M. Favrot, “The State Agents of Rural Schools for Negroes and Their Relation to Outside Funds Stimulating Negro Public Education,” enc. in Favrot to S. L. Smith, February 14, 1928, JRF, box 202, folder 16; Annual Report of the General Education Board, 1917-1918 (New York: General Education Board, 1918), pp. 51-52.
12 Annual Report of the General Education Board 1928-1929 (New York: General Education Board, 1929), p. 23; General Education Board, Annual Report for 1936-1937 (New York: General Education Board, 1937), p. 3.
13 Rosenwald’s pre-1917 involvement in black education is explained in A. Gilbert Belles, “The Julius Rosenwald Fund: Efforts in Race Relations, 1928-1948” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1972), pp. 4-7; Kathleen Williams Boom, “The Julius Rosenwald Fund’s Aid to Education in the South” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1949), pp. 15-19.
14 “Conference of State Agents of Rural Schools for Negroes, June 8 and 9, 1928,” JRF, box 188, folder 4.
15 Jackson Davis, “Negro Training and Racial Good-Will,” American Review of Reviews 58 (October 1918): 525-26. By 1915, seven of twelve southern states had state agents for black schools.
16 The General Education Board, Report of the Secretary, 1914-1915 (New York: General Education Board, 1915), pp. 35-36.
17 Jackson Davis, “Building a Rural Civilization: Some Educational Results among Southern Negroes,” Southern Workman (December 1920): 549-54.
18Annual Report of the General Education Board 1931-1932 (New York: General Education Board, 1932), p. 41.
19 At this time, Hampton was experiencing considerable turmoil in its transition from a white-led institution. See interview notes, Jackson Davis with Raymond B. Fosdick, Davis with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., January 22, 1943, Davis Papers, # 3072, Box 3.
20 Davis diary, January 3, 1913; Jackson Davis, “Schools and Community Needs,” Southern Workman (September 1910), p. 472.
21 Davis diary, July 1, 1911.
22 Jackson Davis, “The Negro in Rural Life,” Southern Workman (January 1912): 15-25. For Davis’ direct account of the tour in Nottoway County, see the Davis diary, September 8, 1911.
23 Davis Diary, July 27, 1911.
24 Jackson Davis, “Building a Rural Civilization: Some Educational Results Among Southern Negroes,” Southern Workman (November 1920): 501-8; Davis, “County Training Schools,” ibid. (August 1923), pp. 378-79; “The Outlook for Negro Colleges,” ibid. (March 1928), 129.
25 Jackson Davis, “Building a Rural Civilization: Some Educational Results among Southern Negroes,” Southern Workman (December 1920): 556-57.
26 General Education Board, Annual Report, 1936-1937 (New York: General Education Board, 1937), pp. 35-36.
27 Leo M. Favrot to Jackson Davis, October 23, 1938, Jackson Davis Papers, MSS # 3072, Box 2, University of Virginia Library. Davis returned the compliment, calling Favrot “a sort of southern institution.” Davis to Favrot, July 26, 1939, ibid.
28 Raymond Fosdick, speech on African education, 1943, Davis Papers, #3072, Box 2; Jackson Davis, “British Africa and the South,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 13 (Summer 1937): 362-75.
29 General Education Board, Annual Report, 1946 (New York: General Education Board, 1947), p. xvi.


Published jointly by the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library and The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, May 2000. Copyright © 2000 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia.