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Business School Education Gender Race Undergraduate

Useful links. The Monographs on Education in the U.S. edited by Nicholas Murray Butler for the St. Louis World Fair. 1904

 

The institution of “World Expositions”, where newest developments in science and technology, industry and the arts are celebrated and showcased in specially built halls in fairgrounds that include activities for young and old, gardens, parks and fountains, etc., lacks salience in the public mind today. Looking at a list of world expos in Wikipedia, I confess that several decades have gone by without a single Expo having even caught my attention for a moment. In comparison the World Expositions used to be a huge deal at least up through the middle of the twentieth century.

No less a light than the President of Columbia University commissioned some twenty monographs for the national U.S. contribution to the Education department of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (a.k.a. the St. Louis World’s Fair).  Economics in the Rear-view Mirror posts links to these twenty monographs on aspects of education in the United States as of 1904. About half of the titles provide interesting context for the artifacts gathered here dedicated to economics education. I have added the group assignments for the monographs from the attached outline of the education exhibits featured in the Palace of Education and Social Economy at the St. Louis exposition. 

Meet me in St. Louis, Louis (1904) performed by Billy Murry.

_______________________________

Monographs on Education in the United States
edited by
Nicholas Murray Butler

Department of Education, Universal Exposition
St. Louis, 1904.
  1. Educational Organization and Administration. Andrew Sloan Draper, President of the University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois. [Group 1] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc01butluoft
  2. Kindergarten Education. Susan E. Blow, Cazenovia, New York. [Group 1] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc02butluoft
  3. Elementary Education. William T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education, Washington, D. C. [Group 1] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc03butluoft
  4. Secondary Education. Elmer Ellsworth Brown, Professor of Education in the University of California, Berkeley, California. [Group 2] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc04butluoft
  5. The American College. Andrew Fleming West, Professor of Latin in Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. [Group 3] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc05butluoft
  6. The American University. Edward Delavan Perry, Jay Professor of Greek in Columbia University, New York. [Group 3] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc06butluoft
  7. Education of Women. M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. [Group 3] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc07butluoft
  8. Training of Teachers. B. A. Hinsdale, Professor of the Science and Art of Teaching in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. [Group 1] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc08butluoft
  9. School Architecture and Hygiene. Gilbert B. Morrison, Principal of the Manual Training High School, Kansas City, Missouri. [Group 1] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc09butluoft/mode/2up
  10. Professional Education. James Russell Parsons, Director of the College and High School Departments, University of the State of New York, Albany, New York. [Group 3] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc10butluoft/mode/2up
  11. Scientific, Technical and Engineering Education. T. Mendenhall, President of the Technological Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts. [Group 3] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc11butluoft
  12. Agricultural Education. Charles W. Dabney, President of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee. [Group 5] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc12butluoft
  13. Commercial Education. Edmund J. James, Professor of Public Administration in the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. [Group 6] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc13butluoft
  14. Art and Industrial Education. Isaac Edwards Clarke, Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C. [Group 4] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc14butluoft
  15. Education of Defectives. Edward Ellis Allen, Principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, Overbrook, Pennsylvania. [Group 7] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc15butluoft/mode/2up
  16. Summer Schools and University Extension. George E. Vincent, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago; Principal of Chautauqua. [Group 8] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc16butluoft/mode/2up
  17. Scientific Societies and Associations. James Mckeen Cattell, Professor of Psychology in Columbia University, New York. [Group 8] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc17butluoft
  18. Education of the Negro. Booker T. Washington, Principal of the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama. [Group 6] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc18butluoft
  19. Education of the Indian. William N. Hailmann, Superintendent of Schools, Dayton, Ohio. [Group 6] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc19butluoft
  20. Education Through the Agency of the Several Religious Organizations. Dr. W. H. Larrabee, Plainfield, N.J. [Group 8] https://archive.org/details/monographsoneduc20butluoft

_______________________________

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION.
Classification of Exhibits.

GROUP I.
ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Class 1. Kindergarten.

Class 2. Elementary grades.

Class 3. Training and certification of teachers.

Class 4. Continuation schools, including evening schools, vacation schools and schools for special training.

Legislation, organization, general statistics.
School supervision and school management.
Buildings: plans, models; school hygiene.
Methods of instruction; results obtained.

GROUP 2.
SECONDARY EDUCATION

Class 5. High schools and academies; manual training high schools, commercial high schools.

Class 6. Training and certification of teachers.

Legislation, organization, statistics.
Buildings: plans and models.
Supervision, management, methods of instruction; results obtained.

GROUP 3.
HIGHER EDUCATION

Class 7. Colleges and universities.

Class 8. Scientific, technical and engineering schools and institutions.

Class 9. Professional schools.

Class 10. Libraries.

Class 11. Museums.

Legislation, organization, statistics.
Buildings: plans and models.
Curriculums, regulations, methods, administration, investigations, etc.

GROUP 4.
SPECIAL EDUCATION IN FINE ARTS

(Institutions for teaching drawing,
painting and music.)

Class 12. Art schools and institutes.

Class 13. Schools and departments of music; conservatories of music.

Methods of instruction; results obtained. Legislation, organization, general statistics.

GROUP 5.
SPECIAL EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE

Class 14. Agricultural colleges and departments; experiment stations; instruction in forestry. (See Department H, Group 83.)

Curriculums; experiments and investigations; results. Methods of transportation and shipment. Legislation, organization, general statistics. Buildings: plans and models.

GROUP 6.
SPECIAL EDUCATION IN COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY

Class 15. Industrial and trade schools; evening industrial schools.

Class 16. (a) Business and commercial schools; (b) Higher instruction in commerce.

Class 17. Education of the Indian.

Class 18. Education of the Negro.

Legislation, organization, statistics. Buildings: plans and models. Methods of instruction; results.

GROUP 7.
EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES

Class 19. Institutions for the blind; publications for the blind.

Class 20. Institutions for the deaf and dumb.

Class 21. Institutions for the feeble minded.

Management, methods, courses of study; results. Special appliances for instruction. Legislation, organization, statistics. Buildings: plans and models.

GROUP 8.
SPECIAL FORMS OF EDUCATION
— TEXT BOOKS—
SCHOOL FURNITURE AND SCHOOL APPLIANCES

Class 22. Summer schools.
Class 23. Extension courses; popular lectures and people’s institutes; correspondence schools.
Class 24. Scientific societies and associations; scientific expeditions and investigations.
Class 25. Educational publications, text books, etc.
Class 36. School furniture, school appliances.

Source: Official catalogue of exhibitors. Universal exposition. St. Louis, U.S.A. 1904, pp. 11-12.

Image Source: Palace of Education and Social Economy from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Snapshots. The State Historical Society of Missouri.

 

Categories
Economics Programs Economists Harvard Race

Harvard. Application for Ph.D. candidacy. W.E.B. Du Bois, 1895

The following “Application for Candidacy for the Degree of Ph.D.” for William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who was awarded his Ph.D. in 1895 and whose 1896 publication of his dissertation book is noted, appears to be a record filed ex post. His 1895 Ph.D. was only the 3rd awarded by Harvard’s Division of History and Political Science in political science and it appears to me that the creation of an explicit, real-time record of a candidate’s satisfaction of degree requirements only came later. Similar omissions and ex post inclusions can be found in the similar applications filed for/by Frank W. Taussig and J. Laurence Laughlin.

For the previous post I have transcribed Du Bois’ updates in the reports up through 1920 by the secretary of the Harvard Class of 1890.

Research Tip: W.E.B. Du Bois Papers in the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Cf. the portrait included in above linked page which is dated 1907 with the 1900 portrait  by Paul Nadar of Paris made in 1900. They are not identical, but close enough for me to suspect that they are both from the same Paris studio in 1900.

[Note: Boldface used to indicate printed text of the application; italics used to indicate handwritten entries]

______________________

William Edward Burghardt DuBois 1895

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DIVISION OF HISTORY
AND POLITICAL SCIENCE.

Application for Candidacy for the Degree of Ph.D.

I. Name (in full, and date of birth).

[Name left blank] Feb 23—1868

II. Academic career. (Mention, with dates inclusive, colleges or other higher institutions of learning attended; and teaching positions held.)

Fisk University 1888
Harvard College 1888-90
Harvard Graduate School 1890-92
Berlin University 1892-94?
Prof. Latin & Greek Wilberforce Univ (Ohio);
Prof. Econ. & Hist. Atlanta Univ (Georgia)

III. Degrees already attained (Mention institutions and dates.)

A.B. Fisk 1888
A.B. Harvard 1890 [cum laude]
A.M. Harvard 1891
Ph.D. Harvard 1895

IV. Academic Distinctions. (Mention prizes, honors, fellowships, scholarships, etc.)

1st Boylston Prize 1890-91 2nd Boylston Prize 1889-90

Matthews Scholarship 1890

Henry Bromfield Rogers Memorial Fellow [1890-91, first year studying Ethics in Relation to Sociology; second year studying history]

Foreign Fellowship on Slater Fund [1891-92, as non-resident at Harvard to study political science at the University of Berlin]

[Other Academic Distinctions not listed here: Honorable Mention in Philosophy awarded A.B.; Delivered the commencement disquisition “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.”]

V. Department of Study. (Do you propose to offer yourself for the Ph.D., in “History” or in “Political Science”?

Political Science

VI. Choice of subjects for the General Examination. (Write out each subject, and at the end put in square brackets the number of that subject in the Division lists. Indicate any digressions from the normal choices, and any combinations of partial subjects. State briefly what your means of preparation have been on each subject, as by Harvard courses, courses taken elsewhere, private reading, teaching the subject, etc., etc.)

1. [left blank]
2. [left blank]
3. [left blank]
4. [left blank]
5. [left blank]
6. [left blank]
7. [left blank]

VII. Special subject for the special examination.

[left blank]

VIII. Thesis Subject. (State the subject and mention the instructor who knows most about your work upon it.)

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America.— ?illegible word? and published Harvard Historical Studies, I (1896).

IX. Examinations. (Indicate any preferences as to the time of either of the general or special examinations.)

[left blank]

*   *   *   [Last page of application] *   *   *

[Not to be filled out by the applicant.]

Name: William Edward Burghardt DuBois
Date of reception: [left blank]
Approved: [left blank]
Date of general examination: [left blank]
Thesis received: [left blank]
Approved: [left blank]
Read by: [left blank]
Date of special examination: [left blank]
Recommended for the Doctorate: [left blank]
Voted by the Faculty: [left blank]
Degree conferred: 1895 (Pol Sci.)

Source: Harvard University Archives. Division of History, Government, and Economics, Box 1, Folder “Ph.D. degrees conferred, 1873-1901 (folder 1 of 2)”.

Image Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, identification card for Exposition Universelle, 1900. Nadar, Paul, 1856-1939 (photographer).

Categories
Gender Race Radcliffe

Radcliffe, A.B. cum laude. African-American teacher of education. 1905

By chance I found the following verse given to a member of the Radcliffe class of 1905, Evangeline Rachael Hall (1882-1947), who was one of Radcliffe’s early African-American alumnae. While the verse testifies to her active participation in Radcliffe economics class(es?), it turns out that she went on instead to a long career at the oldest historically black college, Cheyney State Teachers College, where she taught education and English. Maybe a century later she would have continued studying economics.

In any event we all know how some of our economics students “only dully stare, or sit and sigh” and how few are “keen” and ask “The ‘how’ and ‘why things were’.”

___________________________

Radcliffe Yearbook 1905

Evangeline Rachael Hall, 39 Parker St., Cambridge

In economics she was keen and asked the “how”
and “why
Things were:” while some did only dully stare,
or sit and sigh.

Source: Radcliffe College. Book of the Class of Nineteen Five. (Boston: Everett Press, 1905), p. 27.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Evangeline graduated A.B. cum laude, June 27, 1905.

SourceAnnual Report of the President of Radcliffe College, 1904-1905, p. 24.

___________________________

Taught English at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers

Hall’s Special Work in English
(as of 1914/14)

(1) Public Speaking Summer Course at Emerson’s College of Oratory; (2) Composition and Literature, Harvard Summer School, 1912; (3) The Teaching of Oral English, Harvard Summer School, 1913.

Source: Annual Report of the Cheyney Training School for Teachers 1914/15, p. 8.

___________________________

Portrait from ca. 1930

Detail from an oil on canvas portrait painted by Laura Wheeler Waring in her style for portraits of leading African Americans.

Evangeline Rachel Hall, painted around 1930, portrays the educator and Wheeler’s long-time colleague at Cheyney as a mature, refined and educated woman, serene in her heritage and her achievements. Her pale, lightly patterned dress, draped on even paler skin, and her elongated face and pursed mouth give the impression of purity and untouchable respectability. She wears a corsage, not unlike an honored member of an exclusive sorority. She is clearly a member of the black middle class, the kind of person who inhabited Wheeler’s personal and professional sphere.”

SourceLife of a Portrait: Laura Wheeler Waring’s Anna Washington Derry by Valerie Harris in Pennsylvania Heritage, Summer 1919.

___________________________

A Pair of Obits

Miss Evangeline R. Hall

Funeral services for Miss Evangeline R. Hall, member of the faculty of Cheyney State Teachers College, Cheyney, Pa., will be held at 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon at the Bell Funeral Home, 909 Poplar Street.

Miss Hall, a native of Cambridge, Mass., died Sunday in Delaware Hospital. She received her B.A. degree with honors from Radcliffe College, and did graduate work at Harvard University where she won her master of arts degree. She had taught at Cheney for 42 years.

Surviving are: A sister, Mrs. Madeline Hall Wheeler, this city; two nieces, Mrs. Mary Ann Avent, Buffalo. N. Y., and Mrs. Wheeler Murphy of Baltimore, and a nephew, Arthur E. Wheeler, Jr, this city.

Source: The Morning News (Wilmington, Delaware), 2 Dec 1947, p. 4.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Miss Evangeline Hall

Miss Evangeline Rachel Hall, connected for more than 42 years with the State Teachers College at Cheyney, Pa., died Sunday morning in Delaware Hospital, Wilmington, Del.

Miss Hall was director of the Coppin Laboratory Practice School and a teacher of education and English at the Cheyney School. She held an A.B. degree from Radcliffe College and a Master of Education degree from Harvard University.

Funeral services will be held at 3 P. M. today at 909 Poplar st., Wilmington. A memorial service will be held in Pennsylvania Hall at the college at 3:30 P.M. Sunday.

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, 03 Dec 1947, p. 32.

Image Source: Radcliffe College. Book of the Class of Nineteen Five. (Boston: Everett Press, 1905).

Categories
Gender M.I.T. Modigliani Race Suggested Reading Syllabus Undergraduate

M.I.T. Undergraduate Finance Reading List. Kuh, 1962

 

Edwin Kuh (1925-86) was hired by the Sloan School at M.I.T. in 1954, completing his Harvard Ph.D. in 1955. He was promoted to full professor of economics and finance in 1962 and was a joint appointment of the Sloan School and the department of economics. Mostly known as a pioneer in the application of econometric methods to forecasting, his New York Times obituary notes that in 1971 he worked together with Lester Thurow and John Kenneth Galbraith to devise proposals to promote affirmative action.

The undergraduate course reading list for finance transcribed for this post was fished out of Franco Modigliani’s papers at the Economists’ Papers Archive at Duke University.

_______________________

15.46 FINANCE
E. Kuh
Fall Semester, 1962

I. CAPITAL MARKETS (2 weeks)

W.L. Smith, “Monetary Policy and Debt Management”, Chapter 9, Staff Report on Employment, Growth and Price Levels, Joint Economic Committee, 1959, pp. 315-407.

R. L. Rierson, The Investment Outlook, Bankers Trust Co., 1962.

II. CAPITAL BUDGETING (8 weeks)

A. Decision Criteria—New Asset Demand

P. Massé, Optimal Investment Decisions, Ch. 1.

V. L. Smith, Investment and Production, Ch. 1, Ch. 3, pp. 62-72, Ch. 9.

E. Solomon, editor, The Management of Corporate Capital, Essays II—3, 5, 6, 7, 8.

D. Bowdenhorn, “Problems in the Theory of Capital Budgeting”, Journal of Finance, December 1959, pp. 473-92.

B. Decision Criteria—Replacement Demand

V. L. Smith, Investment and Production, Ch. 5.

P. Massé, Optimal Investment Decisions, Ch. 2.

C. Cost of Capital—Risk and Uncertainty

H. Markowitz, Portfolio Selection, 1959, pp. 1-34, 180-201, 287-97.

J. Hirschleifer, “Risk, the Discount Rate and investment Decisions”, Proceedings of the American Economic Association, May, 1961, pp. 112-120.

F. Modigliani and M. H. Miller, The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment, American Economic Review, June, 1958, pp. 473-492.

L. Fisher, “Determinants of Risk Premiums on Corporation Bonds”, Journal of Political Economy, June, 1959, pp. 217-37.

E. Kuh, “Capital Theory and Capital Budgeting”, Metroeconomics, (August-December, 1960), pp. 64-80.

D. Cost of Capital—Rationing

V. L. Smith, Investment and Production, Ch. 7.

E. Kuh, Capital Stock Growth, excerpts from Ch. 2 (mimeo).

E. Solomon, ed., The Management of Corporate Capital, Essay II-4.

III. DIVIDEND POLICY (2 weeks)

J. Lintner, “Distribution of Incomes of Corporations Among Dividends, Retaining Earnings, and Taxes,” American Economic Review, Supplement, May, 1956.

S. Dobrovolsky, Corporate Income Retention, 1915-1943.

IV. CURRENT POSITION (1 week)

D. Greenlaw, “Liquidity Variations Among Selected Manufacturing Companies,” M.I.T. Masters Thesis, 1957.

C. H. Silberman, “The Big Corporation Lenders,” in Readings in Finance from Fortune, Holt, 1958.

V. DEPRECIATION (2 weeks)

R. Eisner, “Depreciation Allowances, Replacement Requirements and Growth,” American Economic Review, December, 1952.

E. C. Brown, “The New Depreciation Policy Under the Income Tax: An Economic Appraisal,” National Tax Journal, March, 1955.

Article on Depreciation Practices in Europe, National City Bank Newsletter, September, 1960.

E. C. Brown, “Tax Incentives for Investment”, Proceedings, American Economic Review, May, 1962, pp. 335-45.

William H. White, “Illusions in the Marginal Investment Subsidy”, National Tax Journal, March 1962.

E. C. Brown, “Comments on Tax Credits as Investment Incentives”, National Tax Journal, June 1962, pp. 198-204.

 

Source:  Duke University. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Economists’ Papers Archive. Franco Modigliani Papers, Box T1, Folder: “Capital Markets, 15.432. Spring 1963”.

Image Source: MIT Museum website. People: Kuh, Edwin.

Categories
Economists Race

Boston University. Mistaken racial identity. Economics Ph.D. alumnus Waight Gibbs Henry, 1918.

 

Colleagues in the history of economics community can imagine my delight in coming across a work by Harry W. Greene that claims to have identified African Americans who had earned Ph.D.’s from 1876 through 1943. As I worked through his sub-list of economics Ph.D.’s, looking for further information about the lives and careers of those named by Greene, I found (thus far) a most peculiar error, namely a Boston University economics Ph.D. recipient, Waight Gibbs Henry, whose race I found clearly identified in U.S. Census returns and his WWI selective service registration as “White”. I have included several sentences from the preface to his doctoral dissertation that make it obviously clear that his ancestors, including his father, even owned slaves themselves.

What to do about a bum observation in a sample? I figure that a post like this might make help someone working with Greene’s list, at least should they perform the minimal diligence of conducting a Google search on the name “Waight Gibbs Henry” to land here.

_______________________

From Harry W. Greene’s list of “Holders of Doctorates among American Negroes” (1946)

HENRY, W.G.

A.B., Southern University
Ph.D., ’18, Boston University
MAJOR FIELD: Economics
TITLE OF DISSERTATION: “The Negro as an Economic Factor in Alabama.”

Source: Harry Washington Greene. Holders of Doctorates among American Negroes: An Educational and Social Study of Negroes who have Earned Doctoral Degrees in Course, 1876-1943. Boston: Meador Publishing Company, 1946. Page 62.

_______________________

From the Preface
to Henry’s
“The Negro as an Economic Factor in Alabama.”

p. 9: “My ancestors were all slave owners. From them I inherited the customary attitude which the slave owner assumes toward the slave. I was reared in direct contact in personal association with many of the old slaves—ex-slaves. Though freed, the majority of them voluntarily remained on my father’s farm. So great was his kindness to them and so immeasurable was their affection for “Old Master” that they refused to leave when dowered with freedom…The negro’s superstitions, folklore, religious proclivities, and social customs are well known to me.”

_______________________
HENRY, WAIGHTS GIBBS, 1879-1960

Methodist clergyman, professor. Born– January 13, 1879, at Palm in Pickens Co. Parents– Robert Fillmore and Rebecca Catherine (Morris) Henry. Married– Mary Elizabeth Davis, June 18, 1903. Children– Five. Education– Southern University, A.B., 1900; Vanderbilt University, B.D., 1902; University of Alabama, A.M., 1912 [sic]; Boston University, Ph.D., 1915 [sic]; further graduate work at University of Chicago, Millsaps College, and Harvard University. Ordained to Methodist ministry, 1903; pastorates in Trinity, Pratt City, Tuscaloosa, Brookhaven, Huntsville, and Birmingham; professor of religious education, Emory University, 1924-1929; professor of Bible, Athens College, after 1951. Member of many councils and conferences of the Methodist Church; District Superintendent, Anniston district. Died August 25, 1960.

Source: Dictionary of Alabama Biography, Vol. 3; Marquis who’s who online

Publication(s):

Needful Knowledge for Worthful Living. Birmingham, Ala.; W.G. Henry, 1930.

The Negro as an Economic Factor in Alabama.  Nashville:  M.E. Church South Publishing House, 1918.

The Organization of Personality. Birmingham, Ala.; Birmingham Printing Co., 1922.

Source: Website Alabama Authors.

 

 

Categories
Economics Programs Race Sociology Undergraduate

Fisk University. Economics, Sociology & Social Work Courses. Haynes, 1911-13

In the previous post we met the first African American awarded a Columbia University Ph.D. (Dissertation: “The Negro at Work in New York City”, 1912), George Edmund Haynes (1880-1960). His first academic appointment was at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where he was Professor of Social Science, a department of one. This post provides an excerpt from the catalogue to this private historically black university that gives us courses with descriptions and text-books (linked here!) for economics, sociology and social work à la Haynes.

________________________

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL WORK
[Fisk University, 1911-13]

In the study of Sociology and Economics and the scientific approach to social problems Fisk is making every effort to keep abreast of the leading developments. Especially is there need for thorough training in scientific methods for study of social problems and the development of the spirit of social service among Negro college youth.

The growing urban concentration of Negroes demands special study and the development of methods of social betterment to meet the problems attendant upon the increasing complexity of their life and conditions in cities, North and South. This urban situation can best be met by college Negroes who have had training in the social sciences and in practical methods of social work. The greatest need of the urban situation is a number of well-trained social and religious workers. It is the chief aim of this department to develop courses, theoretical and practical, in Economics, Sociology and Social Problems that will give a thorough foundation as a preparatory training for social and religious workers.

Also, the increasing concentration of Negroes in urban centers demands that teachers, ministers, doctors, and those entering other professions, should have a thorough equipment to enable them to understand and to meet successfully the problems with which they will have to deal.

The students who desire to make their life calling that of social workers and who show promise of efficiency and success in such work will be given, through fellowships after graduation, opportunities for practical experience and further study in social betterment efforts in New York and other cities under the auspices of the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, which has been organized by a number of public-spirited citizens with the purpose of studying conditions among Negroes in cities, of developing agencies to meet social needs and for the purpose of securing and training Negro social workers. The University is affiliated with the League in developing this work.

Besides, the time has come for the Negro college to become closely articulated with the community in which it is located. The further aim is to bring the University into closer relation with the conditions among colored people in Nashville and to seek the cooperation of the other Negro colleges in developing this much needed phase of education. The following courses are now given:

  1. ELEMENTARY ECONOMICS: INDUSTRIAL HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION. Junior Year. First and second semesters, 3 hours per week. The aim of this course is to acquaint the student, through a study of concrete facts, with the underlying principles of the economic organization and activity of society, with special reference to American conditions, and with the fundamental economic doctrines as an introductory knowledge of the principles of production, consumption and distribution. The course is conducted by means of readings, class discussions and lectures. Text-books: Coman, “Industrial History of the United States;” collateral reading, and Ely, “Outlines of Economics”.

 

  1. ADVANCED ECONOMICS; ECONOMICS AND LABOR PROBLEMS. Senior Year. First and second semesters. 2 hours per week. The work of this course is based upon Course 1. It is conducted partly in the form of a seminar.

In the second half of the course such questions as taxation, labor legislation, child labor, strikes and lockouts, etc., are studied by means of discussions, lectures, readings and assigned investigations. The aim is to develop the student in independent thinking about current economic and labor problems. Text-books: Seager, “Introduction to Economics”[replaced by Nearing and Watson, “Economics” in 1912-13]; Adams and Sumner, “Labor Problems”; collateral reading.

 

  1. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS. Senior Year. First and second semesters, 3 hours per week in class-room work. During 12 weeks of the second semester ten hours per week additional field work is required. The first half of this course gives the student an acquaintance with some of the fundamental sociological principles and laws, with some of the chief authorities in sociology, and leads him to a point of view for his thinking about modern social problems. The class-room work is conducted by means of lectures, assigned readings and discussions.

The second half of the course begins with a study of elementary statistics and methods of social investigation. Each student is required to take part in an investigation of some problem like the housing problem, occupations, etc., as they are found among Negroes in Nashville. In addition, he is required to acquaint himself with the literature bearing on the topics of the investigation. In the last part of the course a series of lectures on problems and methods of bettering conditions among Negroes in cities is given by social experts from various cities. The past year the following lectures were given:

Two lectures on “Conservation of Childhood”;
Six lectures on the “Religious Problem among Negroes in Cities”;
Ten lectures on “Principles of Relief and Charity Organization”;
Three lectures on “Special Problems among Negro Women in Cities”;
Five lectures on “Delinquency and Probation”.

[Topics added 1912-13: “Health Problems Among Negroes”; “Educational Problems Among Negroes”; “The State and City in Relation to Social Conditions”; “Rural Conditions Among Negroes”.]

Text-books: Blackmar, “Elements of Sociology” [replaced by Metcalf, “Organic Evolution” in 1912-13]; Carver, “Sociology and Social Progress”; Ward, “Applied Sociology”; collateral reading.

 

  1. HISTORY OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA. Junior Year. First and second semesters. 1 hour per week. A rapid survey is made of the early period of the importation of slaves and of the social and economic conditions which gave rise to slavery, as well as the suppression of the slave trade. A more intensive study is made of the two periods, 1820-1860, and 1860 to the present day. The study thus gives historical perspective for the understanding of present conditions, an appreciation of the honored names of the Negroes of the past, and an estimate of the genuine contributions the Negro people has made in the way of labor force, military strength, musical culture, etc., to American civilization.

There is no suitable text-book to be used for such a historical course, so that in addition to lectures assigned readings are selected from standard histories [added in 1912-13: Brawley, “Short History of the American Negro”], from Du Bois’ “Suppression of the Slave Trade”, Williams’ “History of the Negro in America”[Williams not listed as text-book in 1912-13], Washington’s “Story of the Negro” [Volume I; Volume II], and Hart’s “Slavery and Abolition”. In addition, each student is required to use original sources and report upon some assigned topic, such as biographies of slaves, sale of slaves, underground railroad, etc.

 

  1. THE NEGRO PROBLEM. Senior Year. First and second semesters, 1 hour per week. It is the aim of this course to use all available data to acquaint the student with the part the Negro has in the developing life of America and with the economic, political, intellectual, religious and social forces that enter into the condition and relations of the Negro in America. Particular attention is given to urban conditions. Reviews of current books and articles on the Negro Problem are made. The student is thus developed in the power of independent thinking upon the subject. Text-books: Weatherford, “Negro Life in the South”; Du Bois, “Philadelphia Negro”; Haynes, “The Negro at Work in New York City”; collateral reading.

Source: Catalogue Number 1911-1912 (2nd ed.), Fisk University News, Vol. III, No. 3 (May, 1912), pp. 47-50.

Image Source: Tennessee Vacation Website. Road trip to Nashville.

 

Categories
Columbia Economists Race Social Work Yale

Columbia’s first African American Ph.D. Social Economics Ph.D. alumnus, George Edmund Haynes, 1912

 

Early in the twentieth century disciplinary borders in the social sciences were considerably more porous than by mid-century. Sociology, while already a distinct department at Chicago on a par with the department of political economy, either shared a broader social scientific condominium with economics and other disciplines as in the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia  or it was a subordinate field within an economics department, e.g. at Harvard. This is the main reason for residual ambiguity in the attribution of a disciplinary identity to some of the scholars who earned their doctorates back in that day. 

Today’s addition to the series “Meet an economics Ph.D. alumnus/a” is precisely such a case. The African American George Edmund Haynes (Columbia Ph.D., 1912) was the first African American to be awarded a doctorate by Columbia University and like the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. at Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois (1895), taught both economics and sociology during his early academic career. Where Du Bois brought an historian’s lens to his work, Haynes brought that of a social worker to his, having studied at the New York School of Philanthropy following his M.A. from Yale.

In the current discussion of structural racism in U.S. society in general and in academic economics in particular, the careers of Du Bois and Haynes suggest that “The Negro Problem” had been outsourced from academic economics in a way that “The Labor Problem” never was. African American men and women interested in the economics of race found homes in schools of social work and separate departments of sociology (or in traditional Black colleges). Analogously those women interested in the economics of families and consumption more often were expected to enter departments of home economics. 

This post provides three brief internet biographies about George Edmund Haynes in which I have linked wherever possible to his writings available on the internet. Details of Haynes’ academic whereabouts were confirmed from official publications of Fisk University and Columbia University and appended to the post.

The next post provides the social science curriculum developed by Haynes at Fisk University shortly after he was awarded his doctorate from Columbia.

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Fun Fact: Jared Bernstein received his Ph.D. in Social Welfare from the Columbia University School of Social Work, the ultimate successor to the New York School of Philanthropy (that in 1917 had morphed into the New York School of Social Work). Jared Bernstein served as Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden so perhaps we find ourselves on the cusp of an inclusionary revolution in economics.

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Research Tip

“Memoirs” ca. 1950 unpublished autobiography “in the possession of his widow” cited p. 482 in Guichard Parris and Lester Brooks Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League. Little, Brown, 1971.
Where are the memoirs now?

Tip of the hat to: Francille Rusan Wilson for her book, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), pp. 61-66 on George Edmund Haynes’ early academic years.

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From the Preface to Haynes’ dissertation:

“This study was begun as one of the several researches of the Bureau of Social Research of the New York School of Philanthropy, largely at the suggestion of Dr. Samuel McCune Lindsay, the director, to whose interest, advice and sympathy its completion is largely due…
…The material was gathered between January, 1909, and January, 1910, except about four weeks in August, 1909, during the time that I was pursuing studies at the School of Philanthropy and at Columbia University…
…I wish to acknowledge especially the help of Dr. William L. Bulkley in making possible many of the interviews with wage-earners, or Dr. Roswell C. McCrea for criticism and encouragement in preparation of the monograph, and of Dr. E.E. Pratt, sometime fellow of the Bureau of Social Research; Miss Dora Sandowsky for her careful and painstaking tabulation of most of the figures.”

Source: The Negro at Work in New York City—A Study in Economic Progress published in the series Studies in History, Economic and Public Law, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1912),p. 7.

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Dr. George Edmund Haynes  (1880 – January 8, 1960)
Social Worker, Reformer, Educator and Co-Founder of the National Urban League.

NOTE: …  Much of the entry was excerpted from the booklet “The National Urban League: 100 years of Empowering Communities” authored by Anne Nixon and produced by The Human Spirit Initiative, an organization with a mission to inspire people to desire to make a difference and then act on it….

Introduction: The National Urban League was established in 1910 through the efforts of George Edmund Haynes and Ruth Standish Baldwin, the Urban League is the nation’s oldest and largest community- based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream. Today, the National Urban League, headquartered in New York City, spearheads the non-partisan efforts of its local affiliates. There are over 100 local affiliates of the National Urban League located in 35 states and the District of Columbia providing direct services to more than 2 million people nationwide through programs, advocacy and research. The mission of the Urban League movement is to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights. (Source: www.nul.org, July 2006)

Background: The National Urban League was founded in 1910. The Civil War between North and South had ended forty-five years before, but the country was still deeply divided, and most former slaves remained locked in a system of political powerlessness and economic inequality. The new organization set two major goals – remove barriers to racial equality and achieve economic empowerment for the country’s Negro citizens.

Slavery had been abolished in 1865 by the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution. The 14th and 15th amendments went further and guaranteed equal treatment to Negroes and gave Negro men the right to vote. Despite these Constitutional protections, the civil war continued to rage in the hearts and minds of white Southerners. They were resigned to the abolition of slavery but were not willing to accept either social change or political domination by former slaves.

[…]

The alternatives for former slaves were limited. They could work for white farmers as tenants or sharecroppers, barely a step above slavery, or they could leave the South. Many opted to migrate and moved north to find a better life. Two people stepped forward at this time to provide leadership and help build an organization dedicated to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream – one Negro, one white; one man, one woman – and together, they founded the National Urban League.

Their names were George Edmund Haynes and Ruth Standish Baldwin.  Mrs. Baldwin came from a family of early New England colonists with a history of social activism. Her father was the editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican. A graduate of Smith College, she was the wife of William Henry Baldwin, Jr., president of the Long Island Railroad. She was active in the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (NLPCW) – an organization formed to help protect Negro women new to Northern cities.

George Edmund Haynes, unlike Ruth Standish Baldwin, did not come from a background of privilege. His father was a laborer, and his mother was a domestic servant with great ambitions for her son. When George Haynes completed his elementary education, the family moved from his birthplace in Pine Bluff, Arkansas to the more cosmopolitan community of Hot Springs. At a point in history when educational opportunities for Negroes ranged from limited to nonexistent, George Haynes’ achievements were astonishing. In Hot Springs, he completed the limited educational opportunities available and went on to take high school level courses and college preparatory studies at the Agricultural and Mechanical University in Huntsville, Alabama. He received his bachelor’s degree from Nashville, Tennessee’s Fisk University and then a master’s degree from Yale. Because he was an outstanding student, Yale awarded him an academic scholarship, and he waited tables and stoked furnaces for his room and board.

His varied and distinguished career began immediately after the Yale years. His first job was with the Colored Men’s Department of the International YMCA, where his visits to Negro colleges and universities broadened his horizons. But his academic studies continued, and he added to his reputation as a brilliant scholar. While studying at the University of Chicago during the summers of 1906 and 1907, Dr. Haynes became interested in social problems affecting black migrants from the South. This interest led him to the New York School of Philanthropy, from which he graduated in 1910. Two years later he received a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Columbia University Press published his doctoral dissertation, The Negro at Work in New York City [— A Study in Economic Progress]. He had the distinction of being the first Negro to receive a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University.

Within this period, he also involved himself in the activities of the American Association for the Protection of Colored Women, the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York, and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. Dr. Haynes was a man of many talents with an extraordinary number of professional commitments. In addition to being a co-founder of the National Urban League, he also founded and directed the Department of Social Sciences at Fisk University. At Fisk, his students trained at the Bethlehem Training Center that he had established as part of the Social Science Department. As part of their training, they did field work in existing agencies, and many were assigned to local affiliates of the National Urban League (i.e., Philadelphia, St. Louis, Nashville, Baltimore, Memphis, and Louisville). This model program was repeated at the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, and New York University.

Dr. Haynes served as executive director of the National Urban League from 1910 to 1918. He also established the Association of Negro Colleges and Secondary Schools, and served that organization as secretary from 1910 to 1918. He helped the New York School of Philanthropy and NLUCAN in collaborative planning that led to the establishment of the first social work training center for black graduate students at Fisk, and he directed that center from 1910-1918.

From 1918 to 1921, he served as Director of Negro Economics in the United States Department of Labor. As a special assistant to the Secretary of Labor, he was involved in matters of racial conflict in employment, housing, and recreation. He continued his earlier studies of exclusion of black workers from certain trade unions, interracial conditions in the workplace, and child labor. These studies resulted in numerous scholarly works. One of the most significant of these was The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction. The work’s widespread and profound impact resulted in his appointment as a member of the President’s Unemployment Conference in 1921.

In 1930 Dr. Haynes conducted a survey of the work of the YMCA in South Africa, and in 1947 he managed a similar study of the organization’s activities in other African nations. These efforts resulted in his being chosen as consultant on Africa by the World Committee of YMCAs. His book, Trend of the Races (1922), reflected his belief in the union of all people.

For the last nine years of his life, Dr. Haynes taught at the City College of New York and served as an officer of the American Committee on Africa. Dr. Haynes died in New York City in 1960.

Dr. George Edmund Haynes and Ruth Standish Baldwin have been memorialized with a plaque in the The Extra Mile — Points of Light Volunteer Pathway located on the sidewalks of downtown Washington, D.C. The Extra Mile Pathway is a program of Points of Light Institute, dedicated to inspire, mobilize and equip individuals to volunteer and serve. The Extra Mile was approved by Congress and the District of Columbia. It is funded entirely by private sources.

In 1917, Dr. Haynes made a presentation at the National Conference on Social Welfare on the migration of Negroes to northern cities. It can be viewed on the ERAS section under Civil Rights or linked directly: The Migration Of Negroes Into Northern Cities: By George E. Haynes, Ph. D., Executive Secretary of the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes

For further reading:

Carlton-La Ney, Iris (1983) “Notes on a Forgotten Black Social Worker and Sociologist: George Edmund Haynes,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 10 : Iss. 3 , Article 14.

Interracial Conference of Church Women, Eagles Mere, Pa., September 21-22, 1926, Social Welfare History Portal.

Source: Nixon, A. (n.d.). Julia Clifford Lathrop (1858-1932): Dr. George Edmund Haynes (1880 – January 8, 1960) – Social worker, reformer, educator and co-founder of the National Urban League. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved July 31, 2020 from http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/social-work/haynes-george-edmund/

Archived copy at the Internet Archive WaybackMachine.

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George Edmund Haynes
by Reavis L. Mitchell, Jr.

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, George E. Haynes was the only child of Louis and Mattie Sloan Haynes. At a young age he moved with his parents to New York, where he spent his youth. In 1903 he received his B.A. from Fisk University, he earned his M.A. from Yale University in 1904, and in 1912 he became the first African American awarded the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Columbia University.

In 1910 George Haynes married Elizabeth Ross of Montgomery, Alabama; they became the parents of one child, George Edmund Haynes Jr. After their marriage, the couple resided in New York, where Haynes studied social science and economics. He developed an acute awareness of the impact of socioeconomic readjustment upon African Americans who migrated northward from the South. Shortly after his marriage in 1910, he joined with Frances Kellor and Ruth Baldwin to establish the National Urban League for assisting those making the transition from agrarian to urban living.

Haynes accepted a faculty position at Fisk University in 1912. His intense interest in America’s changing social fabric prompted his leadership in establishing Fisk’s department of social sciences and an academic program to train professional social workers. By 1914 he had developed the first college-level course on the history of African Americans. His research on the African American adjustment to a predominately white society earned Haynes acclaim as a leader in the study of racial affairs.

Haynes emerged as a leader in efforts to bring Nashville’s white and African American communities together. Bethlehem House, a settlement house first proposed in 1907 by Fisk graduate Sallie Hill Sawyer and enlarged in 1913 by the addition of a kindergarten and clinic, became the “hands-on” training center for Professor Haynes’s social science students. The settlement house concept, patterned after the British movement of the 1880s, began to gather momentum in America in the early 1900s. By 1915 the Bethlehem Settlement House was the product of very advanced social theory put into action–especially in the turn-of-the-century South. Fisk University’s involvement with Bethlehem House supported the reality of whites and African Americans working together to provide social services.

In 1916, when a fire devastated East Nashville, the African American community suffered extensively. In the charred aftermath of this horrendous fire, Haynes’s Fisk University students offered assistance to the fire victims as they struggled to cope with their losses.

Two years later, Haynes left Tennessee for Washington, where he was appointed special assistant to the U.S. secretary of labor, serving until 1921, when he became cofounder and first executive secretary of the Department of Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. For the next twenty-six years, he remained with the council in New York City and became a visionary leader of the city’s African American community. In the late 1940s, for example, Haynes organized the Interracial Clinic, which promoted interracial understanding and easing of racial tensions. In 1955 he was appointed to the New York University Board of Trustees, becoming the first African American appointed to a major American university’s board. After his wife’s death in 1953, Haynes remarried in 1955 to Olyve Jeter of Mount Vernon, New York, where the couple made their home. Haynes died in 1960 at Mount Vernon.

Suggested Reading

Reavis L. Mitchell Jr., Fisk University Since 1866: The Loyal Children Make Their Way (1995).

Source: The Tennessee Historical Society, Tennessee Encyclopedia website. “George Edmund Haynes” by Reavis L. Mitchell, Jr.

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George Edmund Haynes (1880-1960)
by Jessica Salo

Author, educator and organizer George Edmund Haynes was a social scientist, religious leader and pioneer in social work education for African Americans. Born in 1880 to Louis and Mattie Haynes in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, George Haynes was the oldest of two children of a domestic worker mother and day laborer father. He was educated in the segregated and unequal school system of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.  Eventually his family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas to pursue greater educational opportunities for the Haynes children.

In 1893 at the age of thirteen, Haynes attended the Chicago World’s Fair where for the first time he witnessed discussions about the problems affecting African Americans. It was here he first heard about the “Negro Problem” and a variety of possible solutions including emigration to Africa.

Haynes’s experience at the World’s Fair motivated him to pursue higher education.  With the support of his mother he enrolled at the Agriculture and Mechanical College for Negroes at Normal, Alabama. After a year he transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he eventually earned his B.A. degree in 1903. Haynes was admitted to Yale Graduate School where he earned his M.A. in 1904.

Haynes in 1905 began his career at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) working with African American youth in the Association’s Colored Men’s Department. In 1905 and 1906, with the support of the YMCA, he toured the South and visited almost all of the African American colleges to assess black higher education. During this time Haynes met and married Elizabeth Ross who was engaged in similar work with African American women.

While working at the YMCA, he enrolled at the University of Chicago during the summers of 1906 and 1907. He then moved to New York and attended the New York School of Philanthropy (later called the New York School of Social Work of Columbia University) and was its first African American graduate in 1910. Two years later he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia.

George Haynes, upon graduation found himself in New York at the beginning of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, and in particular, New York City.  The migration became an important issue for social scientists.  Haynes, the activist, became involved with various organizations that hoped to ease the transition of the Southern newcomers to the city.  The organizations included the Association for the Protection of Colored Women, the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of the Negroes of New York, and the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes.  In 1910 Haynes and white reformer, Ruth Standish Baldwin, brought these three organizations together into the National League on Urban Conditions or the National Urban League (NUL).  Haynes became the first Executive Secretary of the NUL, a post he held between 1910 and 1917.

Haynes, used his work with black migrants as the basis for his 1912 Columbia University dissertation, “The Negro at Work in New York” which was later published by Columbia University Press under the same title.

After completing his dissertation Haynes was hired by Fisk University.  Between 1913 and 1917, he split his time between New York and Nashville, working directly on black community issues related to the Great Migration while teaching the next generation of social scientists who would succeed him.

In 1918, Haynes went to Washington, D.C. where he became a special assistant (with the title Director of Negro Economics) to the Secretary of Labor, a post he held until 1921.  While at the Department of Labor, Haynes conducted surveys and provided analysis and recommendations to the U.S. government on the most effective way to utilize the new Northern black industrial workers.  Much of his federally-sponsored research was published in 1921 as The Negro at Work During the World War and During Reconstruction.  Haynes and Emmett Scott who worked in a similar capacity in the War Department during this period, were the highest ranking black federal employees and the first to have influence at the Cabinet level.

In 1921 Haynes became the first Executive Secretary of the Department of Race Relations for the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. Here he applied his study and analysis to the question of race and religion in Ameican society for the Council until his retirement in 1947.  In 1930 Haynes conducted surveys for the YMCA of South Africa and in the 1940s did much the same for other African nations.  His Africa work brought international prominence to his research.

Even after retirement in 1947, Haynes remained involved in race relations work while teaching courses at the City College of the City University of New York including one of the first courses on African American history presented in a predominately white institution. In 1948 Haynes was appointed to the first Board of Trustees of the new State University of New York (SUNY) system.  He also published one book, Africa, the Continent of the Future in 1950.

George Edmund Haynes died in New York City in 1960.  Many of his manuscript and papers are preserved in the George Edmund Haynes Collection at Yale University and at the Erastus Milo Cravath Library at Fisk University.

SourceJessica Salo, “George Edmund Haynes (1880-1960)” article at the Website: BlackPast.

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Other publications
by George Edmund Haynes

“Co-operation with Colleges in Securing and Training Negro Social Workers for Urban Conditions,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections 38: 384-387.

Negro New-Comers in Detroit, Michigan: A Challenge to Christian Statesmanship, A Preliminary Survey. New York: Home Missions Council, 1918.

“Negro Migration—its Effects on Family and Community Life in the North,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work 51: 62-75.

Cotton Growing Communities (with Benson Y. Landis), 1934.

Africa, Continent of the Future. New York (The Association Press) and Geneva (World’s Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations), 1951.

“The Birth and Childhood of the National Urban League,” The National Urban League 50th Anniversary Year Book (1960), 1-12.

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Ph.D. Columbia University, 1912

George Edmund Haynes

A.B. Fisk 1903, A.M. Yale 1904
Dissertation: The negro at work in New York City

Source: Columbia University, One Hundred and Fifty-eighth Annual Commencement (June 5, 1912), p. 40.

 

George Edmund Haynes,

Ph.D., 12; A.B., 03, Fisk Univ.; A.M., 04, Yale; Prof. Social Science Fisk Univ.; Ex-Sec. Natl. League on Urban Conditions among Negroes; mem. Am. Acad. Pol. And Social Sci.; Am. Economics Assn.; Am. Social and Natl. Geographic Socs. Fisk University and 1611 Harding St., Nashville, Tenn.

Source: Catalogue of Officers and Graduates of Columbia University (XVI edition). New York, 1916, p. 1065.

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From Fisk University Catalogues

College Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; A.M., Student. Graduate School, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Source: Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Fisk University, 1904-1905, p. 79.

College Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; A.M., Assistant Secretary, College Y.M.C.A., Atlanta, Ga.

Source: Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Fisk University, 1905-1906, p. 79.

Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; A.M., Yale University, 1904; Secretary International Committee, College Y.M.C.A., Atlanta, Ga.

Source: Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Fisk University, 1906-1907, p.85.

Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; A.M., Yale University, 1904; Secretary International Committee, College Y.M.C.A., Atlanta, Ga.

Source: Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Fisk University, 1907-1908, p. 86.

College Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; A.M., Yale University, 1904; Junior Fellow, Bureau of Social Research, The New York School of Philanthropy; Graduate Student Columbia University; 219 West 134th Street, New York City.

Source: Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Fisk University, 1908-1909, p.95.

College Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; A.M., Yale University, 1904; Junior Fellow, Bureau of Social Research, The New York School of Philanthropy; Graduate Student Columbia University; 219 West One-Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street, New York City.

Source: Catalogue of the Officers, Students and Alumni of Fisk University, 1909-1910, p. 71.

Faculty and Officers

George Edmund Haynes, M.A.
Associate Professor of Social Science

Source: Catalogue Number 1910-1911, Fisk University News, Vol. II, No. 2 (March, 1911), p. 5.

Events on the Campus

October 28.—Lecture on “What Sociology is About,” by Prof. G. E. Haynes.

Source: Catalogue Number 1910-1911, Fisk University News, Vol. II, No. 2 (March, 1911), p. 15.

Class Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; M.A., Yale University, 1904; Graduate, The New York School of Philanthropy, 1910; Associate Professor Sociology [sic], Fisk University, 1033 Twelfth Avenue, N., Nashville.

Source: Catalogue Number 1910-1911,Fisk University News, Vol. II, No. 2 (March, 1911), p. 89.

Faculty and Officers

George Edmund Haynes, M.A.
Professor of Social Science

Source: Catalogue Number 1911-1912 (2nd ed.), Fisk University News, Vol. III, No. 3 (May, 1912), p. 5.

College Alumni
Class 1903

George Edmund Haynes, B.A.; M.A., Yale University, 1904; Graduate, The New York School of Philanthropy, 1910; Professor Social Science, Fisk University; Director, National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, 1033 Twelfth Avenue, N., Nashville.

Source: Catalogue Number 1911-1912 (2nd ed.), Fisk University News, Vol. III, No. 3 (May, 1912), p. 96.

Faculty and Officers

George Edmund Haynes, M.A.
Professor of Social Science

Source: Catalogue Number 1912-1913, Fisk University News, Vol. IV, No. 3 (May, 1912), p. 5.

 

Image Source:  U. S. National Archives. Rediscovering Black History website. Post by Gabrielle Hutchins “Dr. George Edmund Haynes: Social Crusader in Black Economics” (July 8, 2020).

 

Categories
Berkeley Economics Programs M.I.T. Race

M.I.T. Economics Chair’s Account of Early Efforts of Affirmative Action for Black Graduate Students. Cary Brown, 1974

 

Starting with the 1970/71 academic year, the M.I.T. economics department launched an initiative to increase the enrollment of black students in its graduate program. E. Cary Brown, the head of the M.I.T. economics department described the first four years experience of the initiative in his response to an inquiry from the chairperson of the Berkeley economics department, Albert Fishlow.

For considerably more on this subject, see:

William Darity, Jr. and Arden Kreeger. The Desegregation of an Elite Economics Department’s PhD Program: Black Americans at MIT in MIT and the Transformation of American Economics (Annual Supplement to Volume 46 of History of Political Economy, edited by E. Roy Weintraub. Duke University, 2014) pp. 371-335.

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M.I.T. Economics Department’s Experience With Expanding Graduate Enrollment of Black Students, 1970-74

September 18, 1974

Professor Albert Fishlow, Chairman
Department of Economics
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720

Dear Professor Fishlow:

This letter is in reply to your letter of August 9, 1974, requesting information on our procedures with respect to qualified minority students.

As background, you should know that we had no special programs for minority candidates (although we had a few such students) until the entering class of 1970. At that time we took seriously an experiment to see if the number in our student body could be expanded. In the admissions process we set aside criteria we had used in the past, on the assumption that they were not as relevant to minority candidates. With the help and advice of several of our Deans for Minority Students and our own contacts with minority groups, we selected three students that first year (1970-71). Subsequently we admitted 3 blacks in 1971, 4 in 1972, 2 in 1973 and 4 this year.

Initially we organized a summer tutorial program that worked on the development of their mathematical skills and gave them a serious taste of what was to come in theory and statistics. This was supervised and participated in by several faculty and graduate students. We now make this a standard offering at students’ options, and this summer, for example, only one entering student requested this special help.

The tutorial program was extended into the regular academic year when students required it. We are still prepared to carry this out, but, in general, it has diminished essentially to zero.

There has been no modification in the academic program or requirements for minority students, nor any tempering of standards. They have been urged to take a less heavy program than the ordinary student—to stretch out preparation for their examinations. Typically they added about a year to the preparations time, but that, too, seems to be less necessary.

We have had many discussions with black students to try to achieve better communication and awareness of mutual problems. What started as essentially a student-faculty committee has evolved into a Black Graduate Economics Association. This association, on its own volition, prepared a video tape presentation for the purposes of encouraging minority high school students to go on to college in economics, to encourage minority college student to go on to graduate school, and to encourage this group to come to M.I.T. There was much informal recruiting by the black students. When admitted candidates visited Cambridge to determine what graduate school to attend, the program would be essentially organized by some of our black students. They have been extremely important in establishing an environment congenial to black students, and conveying their enthusiasm about the program.

The relations have been good with the black students, especially as between faculty and black students. There have been some student problems, feelings of exclusion and the like, that existed last year. The precise source of these difficulties we have not been able to ascertain. We are also aware that black women have had special complaints that neither the black males nor the faculty could fully understand. Our keeping communications open has perhaps depended on luck, but certainly also depended heavily on particular black students here and on particular faculty and the administrative officer who have made substantial amounts of time available to them and who have helped with their social and living problems.

One problem should be pointed out to you. Much of graduate instruction is self instruction by students in study groups. The black students complained at first that they had no leader, no one they could emulate, no one who could answer their problems. This has changed as the quality of preparation has improved, but it is something that I would urge you to keep in mind. A second problem with high incidence is the difficulty of family adjustment (and most of our minority students have families) to the demands of academic life (including work for many of the wives).

We have no special departmental resources for minority students. M.I.T. has some resources, usually for new students, and there are the national minority fellowships that many of our students have won. Otherwise, they are supported by general graduate financial aid at M.I.T. or in the Department.

Finally, you might look briefly at the record of the minority students. Of the three who entered in 1970, on went to another University to get a Master’s degree (after two years here), another transferred to a Master’s program in Urban Studies at M.I.T. (after two years). The third passed his general examinations a year ago, but has made little progress on his dissertation. Of the second year admittees, two have passed generals and are at work on theses, the third is still in school after being out for a year. The 1972 group includes two who partially failed their generals, two who will be taking them this year. Of the 1973 group, one transferred to another graduate school and one will take generals this year.

I am not sure how I would describe our program. It is viable; there are enough students as a group so they do not feel they should drop out or transfer; morale seems to be high. On the other hand, we have put much time and resources into the program and do not yet have candidates who have completed the program. We have had the satisfaction of seeing the quality of preparation and the enthusiasm rise. We are also sure that we will have a half dozen Ph.D.’s from this minority group in the next three or four years.

I am sending you a copy of our current graduate brochure which contains more detailed information than the catalogue. Professor Robert L. Bishop is Chairman of the Graduate Committee on Admissions, and Professor Peter A. Diamond is Chairman of the Graduate Committee.

Sincerely yours,

E. Cary Brown, Head

ECB/ss
Enclosure

 

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute Archives and Special Collections. Department of Economics Records. Box 1, Folder “Women + Minorities”.

Image Source: “E. Cary Brown, fiscal policy expert, dies at 91“. M.I.T. News. June 27, 2007.

Categories
Cornell Economists Harvard Race

Harvard. Economics Ph.D. alumnus, Michael Francis McPhelin, S.J., 1951

 

 

This post in the series, “Get to know an economics Ph.D.”, began unintentionally with a check of the proper capitalization for the name of a relatively obscure Harvard economics Ph.D. alumnus. The crop of 1950-51 Ph.D.’s was large (41) and included Thomas Schelling, Robert M. Solow, and William Parker who already have dedicated posts here at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.  I discovered that the Jesuit priest-economist, whose name I double-checked, had been awarded a bronze star as an army chaplain in World War II and later went on to become the founding faculty member of the department of economics at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. This post presents a variety of artifacts associated with Rev. Michael Francis McPhelin, S.J. that I collected after a half-day’s worth of internet trawling.

In the history of U.S. academic economics Professor McPhelin turns out to be associated with a major moment at the intersection of the politics of race and academic freedom. There are quite a few cases of external forces attempting to influence hiring decisions and curricula involving economists (e.g. Samuelson’s textbook), but McPhelin’s case was an inside-the-ivory-tower-job. He put himself in the cross-hairs of student activists who wanted him dismissed for alleged racism in the classroom. A fairly complete accounting of the “McPhelin affair” that included an occupation of the Cornell economics department offices can be found in:

Downs, Donald Alexander. Chapter 4 “Racial Justice Versus Academic Freedom” in his Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1999. pp. 68-96.
A book review by Jon Porter

With respect to Father McPhelin, Downs gives the benefit of the doubt:

McPhelin was treading into an area of delicate expectations and sensitivities, and he was doing so in front of the leading advocates of Black Power on campus. Worse, McPhelin entered this fray with fewer strategic skills than other professors who managed to get away with similar remarks in class. According to Nathan Tarcov, who lived in the same house as the visiting priest, McPhelin was a friendly, decent man who had the misfortune of being obtuse. “He really just could not fully comprehend what was happening to him,” Tarcov said. “He just didn’t get it.” [Downs, p. 72]

I have included a considerably less than flattering portrayal of McPhelin by a Philippine businessman/politician/journalist who clearly bore an anti-colonial grudge against the Jesuit academics, his “Great White Father(s)”.

The former president of the Philippines (Benigno Aquino III) appears to have had a much higher opinion of McPhelin.

The post ends with a list of papers that Professor Michael McPhelin published in the journal Philippine Studies.

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Michael Francis McPhelin (Ph.D., 1950-51)

Michael Francis McPhelin, A.B. (Woodstock Coll.[Baltimore, MD]) 1935, A.M. (ibid.) 1936, S.T.L. (ibid.) 1942.

Special Field, The History of Economic Thought.
Thesis, “The Meaning and Requirements of Economic Order.”

Source: Report of the President of Harvard College, 1950-51, pp. 111.

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New York Times obituary

The Rev. Michael F. McPhelin, a Jesuit who was a former dean of the Fordham University School of Business, died Jan. 21 in Manila. He was 70 years old.

In 1950 he was assigned to the faculty of Ateneo de Manila and had returned there for service over the last two decades. A native of New York, he completed his seminary studies at Woodstock College in Maryland. He served as a chaplain with the 275th Infantry in World War II and then received a doctorate from Columbia University [sic].

He became an assistant professor of economics at Fordham in 1950 and later taught at Gregorian University, Rome. He became dean at Fordham in 1954.

He is survived by a brother, James, and a sister, Ann Young.

Source: The New York Times, January 31, 1981, section 1, page 11.

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War record as Chaplain in the Infantry

McPhelin, Michael F. (New York)

Born: 16 May 1911. Entered Society: 14 Aug 1929. Ordained: 22 Jun 1941. Present Province: Philippines.

Appointed to the Army 6 Jan 1944. Serial number: 0543081. To the rank of Captain 9 Dec 1944; to Major 21 Aug 1946. Assignments: Harvard Chaplain School (10 Feb 1944) ; Monterey, Cal., and Camp Cooke, Cal. (1944) ; 275th Infantry Regiment, 70th Infantry Division, at Camp Adair, Ore., at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and in France (1944) ; 275th Infantry Regiment, France (1945) ; 23rd Corps Artillery, Germany (1945) ; 30th Infantry Regiment, Germany (1946) ; Division Artillery, 3rd Infantry Division (1946). Reverted to inactive status 20 Oct 1946. Award: Bronze Star.

Source: Woodstock Letters, vol. 89, no. 4 (November 1, 1960), p. 402.

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War Anecdote

Jan 7, 1945 (-4 to +5 deg F!!!)

…following is the story of Father Michael McPhelin…This being Sunday, he is making his rounds to say Mass. In the daylight, the men cannot stick their heads up without being shot at from Germans on higher ground. When he arrives at Co F in the forward-right sector below Baerenthal, he is told that the men could not possibly risk coming together for Mass. Chaplain McPhelin replied, “Well, if that’s the case, I will have to go to them. That’s my job.” While there is every expectation that the Germans will shoot him, since they can clearly see him move from foxhole to foxhole, they don’t.”

Source: Timothy McG. Millhiser and Ross R. Millhiser (June, 2000) “Operation Northwind” History of Company A, 275th  Regiment, 70th Division.

Cf. Charles Whiting. The Other Battle of the Bulge: Operation Northwind. The History Press (2007). Chapter 3.

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Ateneo Economics Department:
A BRIEF HISTORY

Over the past fifty years, the Ateneo Economics Department has distinguished itself with its rich history and the countless contributions its alumni have made to Philippine society.

The Economics Department started out as a subdepartment of Social Science. Although it was recognized as a separate department, Economics had no official head and was under control of the chair of Social Science. When the Economics Department was finally established in 1953, it had only Rev. Michael McPhelin, S.J. as its lone faculty member. He became the first moderator of the Economics of the Ateneo (ESA) when it was founded in 1962.

In the school year 1957-1958, the Economics Department achieved greater autonomy with the appointment of a chair separate from that of the Department of Social Science. This was Rev. William J. Nicholson, S.J., who was one of four faculty members in 1955. A notable faculty member who also became chair of the Department was Dr. Vicente Valdepeñas, who would subsequently become the director-general of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA). He is currently a member of the Monetary Board of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

The year 1970 was significant for the Economics Department. For the first time, it acquired female faculty, among them Victoria Valdez, Ellen Palanca, and later Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The last two would go on to acquire doctorates and continue teaching in the Department. Mrs. Macapagal –Arroyo would eventually leave the academe to become a member of the Aquino cabinet, senator, vice president, and President of the Republic.

Today, the Ateneo Economics Department is widely recognized as one of the most important academic groups in the country. It boasts of faculty members who not only provide analytical assistance to government agencies, multilateral organizations and non-government organizations, but also lead their students into careers that are dedicated to the improvement of the national economy and national well-being.

The Department tirelessly and resolutely charts new directions for growth and development. It continues to offer the bachelor’s and master programs begun in 1951, the Management Economics Program introduced in 1984, and the Ph.D. program initiated in 2002. Three thousand men and women have graduated with degrees in the Department’s various courses, and thousands more will follow in the coming years.

Indeed, the Economics Department of the Ateneo de Manila is keeping alive the Jesuit tradition of academic excellence and service to God and the Filipino people.

Source: Ateneo de Manila University Economics Department website.

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The Great White Father
by Hilarion M. Henares, Jr.

Hilarion

Philippine Daily Inquirer
September 24, 1986

…Abrasive in manner and speech, a cruel glint in his eyes, inveterate party goer, he was a racist who was thrown out of Cornell University for lectures telling the Negroes they were bioogically inferior to the whites. He was Father Michael McPhelin, head of the Economics Department of Ateneo University, suspected CIA agent, a hanger-on at Malacañang as some sort of Rasputin, and the beloved mentor of NEDA Director Vince Valdepeñas…

The first time I met Father McPhelin was as a young businessman just fresh out of college invited to speak before the Ateneo Economic Society. He was the rudest person I ever met, he kept interrupting me, making insulting remarks about the integrity and competence of Filipino businessmen, and made no bones about his conviction that American multinationals should be given free rein to exploit our country…

Finally, I spoke to him thus: “McPhelin, you have me at a disadvantage. In the first place, you are a priest; that means God must be on your side. In the second place, you are a Jesuit priest, which means that you are probably one of the most brilliant of holy men. Above all, you are an American Jesuit priest, which makes you in the worst and most ominous sense of the term, a Great White Father about whom we Ateneans and Filipinos have a colonial mentality. But mark this, McPhelin, from here on, there will be no public forum you will ever attend that I will not grace with my presence.  And I promise you when we meet in debate, I will wipe the floor with the two protuberances of your ischia–that is, with your butt!” He was shocked out of his wits at the first Pinoy that ever talked back to him.

This big bully Father McPhelin browbeat an entire generation of Ateneo students into being Little Brown Brothers, without pride of race or faith in the Filipino. I hounded him for years, challenging him to a debate, questioning him in the open forum period, till he developed diarrhea at the very sight of me. Everywhere he went, he brought his assistant with him, a nice harmless young man named Vicente Valdepeñas Jr.; and when he saw me, he rushed out leaving poor Vince to face me as I complained: “Must I spend the rest of my life debating with altar boys?” And golly I still am….

Source:  From Hiarion M. Henares, Jr. Make My Day

For a personal report about Henares: see the blogpost in honor of his 88th birthday by Bel Cunanan “How to solve a problem like Larry Henares” from April 10, 2013.

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President (2010-2016) Benigno Aquino III
recalls his economics professor

President Aquino “…was the keynote speaker at the opening program of the Ignatian Festival 2013 on his alma mater’s [Ateneo de Manila University] campus in Loyola Heights, Quezon City, with the theme “Lahing Loyola Para sa Kapwa (A Loyola Race for Others)…

…He said he “owed a debt of gratitude” to his former teachers and mentors for molding his character.

Ateneo teaches that “I am in the position to help” improve the lives of others, he said, without adding that state universities and other schools also do the same.

Repeating the age-old dichotomy between success and public service (or servant leadership, as Ateneans like to call it), Mr. Aquino asked: “Isn’t this more sensible than the other institutions’ drive to enhance their students ability to quickly ascend the ladder of wealth and prestige?”

He cited the pivotal role played by his economics professor, Fr. Michael McPhelin, a Harvard alumnus, in enriching his knowledge of the subject.

He recalled debating with McPhelin matters dealing with economics and statistics during the “last 15 minutes of each and every class” held three times a week.

After passing the course, he was told by McPhelin that “he just wanted me to be like my father so he pressured me… into getting used to going through a lot of tests,” Mr. Aquino said.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer Sunday July 21, 2013.

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Papers by Michael F. McPhelin
published in Philippine Studies

Vol 7, No 4 (1959) The Margin Act

Vol 7, No 4 (1959) Economic Freedom: Adam Smith vs. The Papacy

Vol 8, No 1 (1960) Political Transmission 15 I. Economics of the Transmission

Vol 8, No 2 (1960) The “Filipino First” Policy

Vol 8, No 3 (1960) Post-Summit Reflections

Vol 8, No 3 (1960) Inducement to Invest: The United States Investment Guaranty Program and Foreign Investment

Vol 9, No 1 (1961) Financial Achievement of 1960

Vol 9, No 2 (1961) The Chinese Question

Vol 9, No 2 (1961) Where Angels Fear To Tread: Too Many Asians

Vol 9, No 3 (1961) The Purchase of Meralco

Vol 10, No 2 (1962) Not One But Ten: Southeast Asia Today and Tomorrow

Vol 10, No 4 (1962) Boeke’s Thesis Examined: Indonesian Economics

Vol 12, No 2 (1964) A Philippine Economic Geography: Shadows on the Land

Vol 12, No 4 (1964) The Economic Development Foundation

Vol 13, No 2 (1965) A Practical Man’s Economics Guide: The Planning and Execution of Economic Development

Vol 13, No 4 (1965) National Development and Human Resources: Manpower and Education

Vol 14, No 1 (1966) Wages and Justice

Vol 14, No 1 (1966) A Source Book For Economic Geography: World Economic Development

Vol 14, No 4 (1966) Philippine: International Trade and Problems of Modernization

Vol 17, No 2 (1969) Economic Dilemma of Asian Countries Asian Drama

Vol 17, No 3 (1969) On the Diversity of Philippine Geography: The Philippine Island World

Vol 17, No 4 (1969) Manila: The Primate City

Vol 18, No 1 (1970) Economic Nationalism and Planned Stagnation

Vol 18, No 3 (1970) An Inquiry into Economic Nationalism

Vol 20, No 4 (1972) The Philippines: Problems and Prospects

Vol 20, No 4 (1972) Sicat: Economic Policy and Philippine Development

Vol 24, No 4 (1976) The Philippines: An Economic and Social Geography

Vol 24, No 4 (1976) Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: The Philippines

Vol 25, No 4 (1977) The Tropics and Economic Development A Provocative Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations

Categories
Columbia Economist Market Race

Columbia. Economics Ph.D. alumnus, Brailsford Reese Brazeal, 1942

 

Two quick quotes from the brief biographical articles below about Brailsford R. Brazeal, an African American economics Ph.D. (Columbia, 1942), as amuse-bouche for this post.

“Dr. Brazeal conducted some of the research for his dissertation [on the Pullman sleeping car porters] by working as an assistant cook in the trains’ kitchens on the New York City line that traveled south.”

“It was Dr. Brazeal, who first recommended the young minister [Martin Luther King!] for acceptance at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.  Dr.  Brazeal wrote that King would mix well with the white race.” [The letter of recommendation]

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BRAILSFORD REESE BRAZEAL
b. Mar 8, 1903; d. Apr 22 1981

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1942.

TITLE OF DISSERTATION: “The Origin and Development of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.” (published: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

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BRAILSFORD BRAZEAL
A Man of Morehouse

Posted by Scott B. Thompsons, Sr.

When you think of Morehouse College, you think of tradition — a tradition of higher learning for African-American college students.  When you go back seventy-five years, you think of a day unlike today when a mere few, the lucky few, had the opportunity to attend an institution of higher learning, much less one with the honorable tradition as Morehouse.  For nearly four decades, one Laurens County native helped the school rise to the prominence it still retains today.

Brailsford Reese Brazeal was born in Dublin, Georgia on March 8, 1903.  The son of the Rev. George Reese Brazeal and Walton Troup Brazeal, young Brailsford attended Georgia State College and Ballard Normal School in Macon.    Late in his life Dr. Brazeal recalled that it was his Baptist preacher father’s guidance and teachings that kindled his imagination as to what was beyond his neighborhood.  Brazeal recalled that his mother and his oldest aunt, Flora L. Troup pushed him to leave Dublin because he wouldn’t be able to obtain anything but an elementary education in Dublin.  His uncle and namesake Brailsford Troup gave him a job during summers as a carpenter’s helper.  Brazeal realized that the life of a laborer is not what he wanted and promised himself that he would do all that he could to break the barriers of race and segregation.

He completed his studies  at Morehouse Academy, a high school, in 1923.  While at Morehouse College, Brazeal came to know Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who served as his debate coach in college and would later serve as President of Morehouse.   After graduating from Morehouse in 1927, Brazeal continued his studies and obtained a master’s degree in Economics  from the ultimately prestigious Columbia University in 1928.

Brazeal was immediately hired as a Professor of Economics by Dr. John Hope, his alma mater’s first black president.    By 1934, Brazeal was chosen to chair the Department of Economics and Business.  He was also selected to serve as the Dean of Men, a post which he held until 1936.

In his early years at Morehouse, Brailsford met and married Ernestine Erskine of Jackson, Mississippi.  Mrs. Brazeal was a graduate of Spellman College in Atlanta.  An educator in her own right, Mrs. Brazeal held a Master’s Degree in American History from the University of Chicago.  She taught at Spelman and served for many years as the Alumni Secretary.  To those who knew and loved her, Mrs. Brazeal was known to the be the superlative historian of Spelman History, though she never published the culmination of  her vast knowledge.

The Brazeals were the parents of two daughters.  Aurelia Brazeal is a career diplomat and has recently served as the United States Ambassador to Ethopia, Kenya and Micronesia.  Ernestine Brazeal has long been an advocate for the Headstart Program.

The Brazeal home in Atlanta was often a home away from home for Morehouse students.  Especially present were the freshmen who inhabited the home on weekends and after supper for the fellowship and guidance from the Brazeals.  Among these students were the nation’s greatest civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta.   It was Dr. Brazeal, who first recommended the young minister for acceptance at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.  Dr.  Brazeal wrote that King would mix well with the white race. The Brazeal’s bought the four square home near Morehouse in 1940.  Today, the home at 193 Ashby Street (now Joseph Lowery Boulevard) was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

Through scholarships, Brailsford Brazeal was named a Julius Rosenwald Fellow and in 1942, obtained his Ph. D. from Columbia University in economics.  As a part of his doctoral dissertation, Dr. Brazeal wrote about the formation of the of one of the first labor unions for black workers.  In 1946, Brazeal published his signature work The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.    For decades, labor researchers often cited Brazeal’s writings  in his landmark work and other papers and journal articles.

During the 1950s, Brazeal worked in voter registration movements.  He wrote extensively about racial discrimination in voting, especially in his native state. He detailed many of the activities in his home county of Laurens. In his Studies of Negro Voting in Eight Rural Counties in Georgia and One in South Carolina, Brazeal examined and wrote of the  efforts of H.H. Dudley and C.H. Harris to promote more black participation in voting in Laurens County.  He chronicled the wars between the well entrenched county sheriff Carlus Gay and State Representative Herschel Lovett and their desire and competition for the black vote.   He wrote of fair employment practices, desegregation of higher education, voter disfranchisement of black voters, voter registration, and many other civil rights matters.

The members of the National Association of College Deans elected Dr. Brazeal as their president in 1947. Brazeal a member of the Executive Committee of the American Conference of Academic Deans and as a vice-president of the American Baptist Educational Institutions.

During his career Dr. Brazeal was a member of the American Economic Association, the Academy of Political Science, the Southern Sociological Society, the Advisory Council of Academic Freedom Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, the N.A.A.C.P., the Twenty Seven Club, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Sigma Pi Phil, Delta Sigma Rho and the Friendship Baptist Church.

In 1967, Dr. Brazeal was inducted into the prestigious national honor society, Phi Beta Kappa as an alumni member of Delta Chapter  of Columbia University.  He organized a chapter at Morehouse, known to many as one of the “Ivy League” schools for African Americans.

Dr. Brazeal retired in 1972 after a career of more than forty years, many of which he served as Dean of the College.  At the age of seventy eight he died in Atlanta on April 22, 1981. His body lies next to that of his wife, who died in 2002, in Southview Cemetery in Atlanta.

Source:  Laurens County African American History (blog). Monday, February 3, 2014

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HE WAS A MOREHOUSE MAN:
THE LEGACY OF BRAILSFORD REESE BRAZEAL

Jeanne Cyriaque, African American Programs Coordinator
Historic Preservation Division

Brailsford Reese Brazeal was an African American economist and Dean of Academics at Morehouse College. From the late 1920s until he retired from Morehouse College in 1972, Dr. Brazeal’s leadership in research, publications, and academic standards helped Morehouse College achieve national significance as an institution of higher learning. Brazeal was a native of Dublin (Laurens County). He attended Macon’s Ballard Normal School until his family moved to Atlanta, where Brazeal completed high school at Morehouse Academy in 1923. Brazeal received his bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College in 1927, and completed his master’s degree in economics at Columbia University in 1928.

Dr. John Hope, who was Morehouse College’s first African American president, hired Brazeal as an economics instructor in 1928. By 1934, Brazeal was a professor of economics, head of the Department of Economics and Business Administration, and Dean of Men. Brailsford Brazeal was the recipient of two fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to pursue advanced studies in economics. While the history of the Rosenwald Fund community school building program is widely known, the fund also provided fellowships to many African American scholars. With this assistance and aid from Morehouse College, Brazeal received his Ph.D. in economics and political science from Columbia University in 1942.

Brailsford Brazeal published The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1946. This book was based upon his dissertation research on the Pullman train-car porters and their successful efforts to form America’s first African American labor union. This book remains a standard reference in labor history, American economic history and race relations. Brazeal subsequently wrote an unpublished biography about the Brotherhood’s union leader, A. Philip Randolph.

When George Pullman first arrived in Chicago in 1859, he had learned the art of moving buildings from his father, Lewis Pullman, who had patented a device to roll huge edifices away from the banks of the Erie Canal. After successfully applying this skill in a number of public works projects in Chicago, George Pullman envisioned a hotel on wheels with his luxurious, “palace” sleeping cars. To provide overnight accommodations and dining to the emerging middle class traveler, Pullman needed a workforce to provide personal services. This workforce who provided the necessary work of bellhop, cook, dining car attendant, maid and janitor were called Pullman porters, and they were African American men. Dr. Brazeal conducted some of the research for his dissertation by working as an assistant cook in the trains’ kitchens on the New York City line that traveled south.

Pullman porters worked longer hours and made considerably lower wages than whites, as they monopolized other positions such as conductors on the Pullman sleeping cars. Yet, a porter job provided unique employment opportunities that encouraged the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the segregated south. The Pullman porters relied on tips from their expert personal services, and were discouraged from forming unions.

By 1925, the Pullman Company was the nation’s largest private employer of African Americans, and the company used intimidation tactics, company spies, and harassment to deny the porters’ pensions and company benefits. Dr. Brazeal’s book discussed how A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized an eleven-year effort to eventually be presented an international charter by the American Federation of Labor in 1936.

In 1962, Cornelius V. Troup published Distinguished Negro Georgians. Brailsford Brazeal wrote the introduction to this book while he was Academic Dean at Morehouse College. “Although I am a native Georgian and have lived and worked in Georgia virtually all of my life, I have learned for the first time that many distinguished persons whom I know or have read about are also natives of this state. Many of them were born in remote places in the state and had to obtain their education in vicarious ways which were enough to baffle and discourage persons of even extra-ordinary ability.” Brazeal’s comments on African American education in Georgia pointed out the fact that “without private, church-supported schools many of the persons mentioned in this book would never have attained an education which proved to be the key to their achievements.”

In 1933, Brailsford Reese Brazeal married Ernestine Erskine of Jackson, Mississippi. Ernestine Brazeal was a graduate of Spelman College. She received her master’s degree in American history at the University of Chicago. Mrs. Brazeal taught at Spelman and served as the college’s alumnae secretary. In 2003, the Spelman College Messenger featured an article about Mrs. Ernestine Erksine Brazeal that was written by one of her former students, Taronda Spencer. She is the Spelman College archivist and historian. “I learned how to be a Spelman woman from her example. Because of Mrs. Brazeal’s foresight, scholars and researchers are documenting the importance of Spelman’s place in the history of women’s education nationally and internationally. Her legacy and her spirit will forever be an integral part of the essence of Spelman.”

In 1940, Brailsford Reese Brazeal purchased an American Foursquare-type house that is located just west of Morehouse College. Brazeal made few changes to this house during his lifetime. In 1962, a rear addition was added that reflected mid-20th- century ranch house influences, such as built-in bookcases and a stone fireplace.

The home, now on Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard (formerly 193 Ashby Street), was constructed in 1927 by the Adair Construction Company. It was occupied by members of the Adair family until 1939. Charles Hubert, acting president of Morehouse College, leased the home prior to the Brazeal purchase (1940). The home was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on April 8, 2005.

Soon, the Brazeals had two daughters: Ernestine and Aurelia. Though the Brazeals lived in a segregated south, Ernestine Brazeal did not want her children to be born in segregated hospitals, and traveled to Chicago to have both of her daughters. Ernestine and Aurelia Brazeal attended a private girls’ school in Massachusetts, and both are Spelman alumnae.

Aurelia Brazeal is a diplomat in residence at Howard University. She is a former Ambassador to Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Federated States of Micronesia. She promotes job opportunities for the Department of State to students who are pursuing Foreign Service careers. Ernestine Brazeal recently retired from her advocacy career at Head Start in the greater Atlanta area. She lives in the Brazeal home. Ernestine Brazeal supports the work and ideas of the Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center. The center ensures a feminist environment for scholarship, activism, leadership and change.

The Brazeal House was always a place where students could gather for mentoring sessions with Dr. Brazeal in a family atmosphere. One Morehouse tradition that Dr. Brazeal particularly liked was to invite freshmen students to his home during their first week at Morehouse College. The students would have a chance to socialize with distinguished faculty and alumni. Maynard Jackson,Martin Luther King, Jr. and Warner Meadows were guests at these sessions in the Brazeal House during their college careers at Morehouse.

The Delta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa elected Brailsford Brazeal for alumnus membership at Columbia University. Brazeal envisioned a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at his institution, and by 1967, it was approved for Morehouse College. In 1961, while serving as the advisor for the honors program at Morehouse College, Brazeal achieved additional support from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Under his guidance, Morehouse College was second among Georgia institutions in the number of students receiving Woodrow Wilson fellowships.

Brailsford Reese Brazeal was an active participant in voter education and registration drives throughout Georgia in the 1960s. He retired from the faculty of Morehouse College in 1972, after a career that spanned over 40 years. He died in his home in 1981. Brailsford and Ernestine Brazeal are buried at South View Cemetery, an African American cemetery that was established in 1886 by nine Atlanta black businessmen.

Source: Reflections: Georgia African American Historic Preservation Network. Vol. VI, No. 1 (April, 2006).