General Education Board

In 1898, a group of Christian ministers and progressive educators gathered in Capon Springs, West Virginia, at the first annual Conference for Education in the South and began a 60-year effort to improve public education in the former Confederate states. Out of their meetings would come an alliance between progressive Southerners and philanthropic Northern industrialists who organized the Southern Education Board (SEB), a research and propaganda organization, and the General Education Board (GEB), a foundation to fund projects advocated by the SEB. Between 1902 and 1964, the GEB appropriated $324.6 million to educational projects in the South. The GEB was the largest of a series of interlocking funds including the Jeanes Foundation, the Slater Fund, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and the Rosenwald Fund. Though the funds advanced the cause of education in the South, they did so on a foundation of White supremacy, segregated schools, and Black industrial training.

In 1901, Robert C. Ogden organized a Pullman train tour for a group of Northern industrialists with an interest in Southern education. The journey included visits to Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes and a public meeting with North Carolina Governor Charles B. Aycock, a proponent of universal education, White supremacy, and Black disenfranchise-ment. The educational tour was an outgrowth of the first three Conferences for Education in the South, which met annually in Capon Springs, West Virginia, from 1898 to 1900. The conference brought together progressive Southern educators and Northern philanthropists who saw education as the vehicle for political stability and economic development in the postwar South. The first three Capon Springs meetings were small, private affairs that excluded the Northern missionaries who had led efforts to educate freed slaves during and after Reconstruction. With the 1901 train journey, the Southern education movement went public. The meeting site was moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the train trip was organized to carry both the Northern industrialists and Southern educators to the meeting. This Fourth Conference for Education in the South was the first of a series of annual forums that continued until 1914.

Among the passengers on the train was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who shared Ogden's enthusiasm for the project with his father, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The senior Rockefeller donated $1 million to establish the GEB and continued as its principal sponsor, obtaining a congressional charter in 1903 and donating a total of $129 million by 1921. Between 1902 and 1964, when it was absorbed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the GEB contributed $324.6 million to the cause of Southern education.

Though the philanthropists and educators who sponsored the GEB were committed to universal education, they were by no means proponents of equitable education for Black and White children. Believing themselves to be pragmatists rather than idealists, they offered no challenge to the South's White supremacist ideology, and directed their support to projects that codified two-tier school systems in all of the Southern states. Their interest in industrial education for Blacks was driven by their need for Black labor for their railroads and cotton mills. They believed that a cheap, efficient Black workforce would promote regional economic development and protect the South against unionization. White industrialists and landowners would be the primary beneficiaries of an educational solution to the “race problem.”

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