Jackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States.

His photographs — most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved — provide a unique view of southern education during the first half of the twentieth century.

The Jackson Davis Collection consists of papers and photographs, given to Special Collections , in 1948 by Helen Mansfield Lynch and Ruth Elizabeth Langhorne, Davis’s daughters, and supplemented in 1999 by Sally Guy Browne and Helen Langhorne, Davis’s granddaughters.