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Many scholars have called attention to the need for more studies of the fundraising campaigns of small southern black industrial schools during the early twentieth century. As these scholars point out, the existing historical literature on fundraising and black education focuses almost exclusively on the labors and experiences of the leaders of large institutions, especially Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute agents and administrators, leaving the history of their smaller counterparts badly neglected (Enck, 1976; Anderson, 1988). While a great deal of progress has been made in recent years to address this historiographical shortcoming, the history of fundraising for the smaller black industrial schools remains a severely understudied area. This essay seeks to fill this void.
In order to understand the peculiar challenges associated with fundraising for small industrial schools, this paper uses the northern fundraising experience of Emma J. Wilson, founding principal of the Mayesville Educational and Industrial Institute (established 1882) in Sumter County, South Carolina, as a case study. The paper explores the challenges Wilson faced while soliciting northern financial support for her struggling school, the methods and techniques she employed to obtain funds, and the effect her fundraising activities had on the institutional development of Mayesville. Tracing Wilson's activities clearly illuminates the problems, concerns, and the tremendous obstacles that confronted the African American leaders of the lesser-known industrial schools-the men and women overshadowed by Hampton, Tuskegee, and Booker T. Washington-on the fundraising circuit. The Emma J. Wilson story also enhances our knowledge and understanding of the impact of northern philanthropy on the development of black education in the South; the place of the black school in African American community life; the role of African American teachers in the struggle for black equality; and black self-help in the Progressive Era. Most importantly, it provides a biographical sketch of the life and work of an important early twentieth century race and educational leader whose contributions to black education in the South has not been fully recognized by historians.
Emma Wilson was born a mulatto slave in the mid-1850s in Mayesville, South Carolina, a settlement that grew up along the Atlantic Coast Railroad, about ten miles north of Sumter and thirty miles south of Florence. She secured a secondary education at the Goodwill Mission...