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George Edmund Haynes (1800 1960) was an African American sociologist and social worker. He received a B.A. from Nashville HBCU Fiske University, an M.A. from Yale, and was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Columbia, graduating in 1912. While in New York, Haynes worked with the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York, and formed the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes with white suffragist Ruth Standish Baldwin. These three groups would merge into the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes shortened to the National Urban League in 1911. He taught economics and created the sociology department at Fiske and served as director of the Division of Negro Economics under the US Secretary of Labor. He also served the Federal Council of Churches and with the Joint Committee on National Recovery, which worked to ensure African Americans got their fair share of the New Deal, and had a role in the formation of the State University of New York. Offered here is a collection of Haynes letters with several photographs and documents. The letters, which are sometimes placed alongside copies of Haynes outgoing correspondence, come from politicians and influential figures in African American higher education. Those from political figures are generally in response to Haynes sending them his thanks for their advocacy for African Americans: Herbert Hoover personally thanks him for his "fine note of friendship" in response to Haynes congratulations on his presidential nomination on the 1928 Republican ticket (June 21, 1928), Franklin D. Roosevelt s secretary Louis Howe for his letter in appreciation of the President s speech against lynching before the Fedral Council of Churches (December 14, 1933), and New York City Mayor Herbert Lehman for his letter in support of the Mayor s mandate to desegregate CCC camps in the state (April 22, 1937). The letters from fellow educators are more personal and substantial. In an early letter, Tuskegee president Robert Russa Moton councils Haynes on an unspecified conflict: "I can see no reason why we should not state your case before the Board. It is quite evident that Mr. Wood misunderstood you. I shall be seeing Dr. Dillard next week at which time I hope to talk over and more in detail the whole situation. [.] The whole thing to me is most unfortunate, especially when the work in hand is so very important and there is so much need for all the forces we can summon to do the work." (July 8, 1919) At the time, Haynes was with the Division of Negro Economics, though it is not clear what misunderstanding had occurred or how it related to Tuskegee s Board. "Dr. Dillard" is almost certainly James H. Dillard, a white advocate for African American education who at the time was the director of the Negro Rural School Fund. Dillard and Haynes seem to have been personal friends, as Dillard laments in a later letter that "I wonder if you and I will ever see each other again. The fates seem against it" (September 24, 1932). Another friend of Haynes , Nathan B. Young, writes him in 1931: "As you may have heard, I am leaving the field of education in Missouri. I am casting about to find something to do. I am still young and healthy with mental powers unabated. I should like to be put into a position where I would have the leisure to write up what I have learned by long and varied experience in the field of Negro education. [.] I am asking my friends to make suggestion[s] as to the best use of the leisure immediately before me. Of course, I must keep on earning in order to keep on eating, for I am a poor man." (May 26, 1931) A newspaper clipping alongside the letter concerns Young s unceremonious ouster from the presidency of Lincoln University, an HBCU in Missouri. Young had been removed from the same post in 1927, at least in part because of his efforts to turn the school away from agricultural and.
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