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<br /> NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No.1024-0018
<br /> (8-86)
<br /> United States Department of the Interior
<br /> National Park Service
<br /> National Register of Historic Places
<br /> Continuation Sheet
<br /> Section number 8 Page 20 North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls
<br /> Orange County,NC
<br /> would become a model for other state-wide systems. Staff explored methods to facilitate equitable
<br /> access to education, health care, housing, and recreational facilities for the state's black residents under
<br /> the auspices of the newly created Division of Negro Work. Seven African American leaders including
<br /> Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Winston-Salem Teachers College president Simon G. Atkins served on
<br /> the division's state-wide advisory commission. NCSBCPW commissioner Kate Burr Johnson,who
<br /> had in 1921 become the nation's first female state commissioner of public welfare and North
<br /> Carolina's first female state department head, appointed African American educator and community
<br /> leader Lawrence A. Oxley to serve as the division's director. Oxley, a Massachusetts native and
<br /> World War I veteran, had been a social sciences instructor at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh since
<br /> 1920. His early division work benefited from connections made while in that position.47
<br /> Oxley orchestrated the Wake County Department of Public Welfare's implementation of the state's
<br /> first county-wide African American social work program. This involved appointing an advisory
<br /> committee of local black leaders and establishing nineteen township committees. Each group was
<br /> charged with soliciting funds from individuals, churches, schools, and fraternal organizations to
<br /> subsidize public welfare projects.48
<br /> NCSBCPW's mission to establish a reformatory for delinquent male African American youth that
<br /> would foster"self-reliance, initiative, and the ability to think and act intelligently"was finally realized
<br /> in 1925. In January of that year, the juvenile court system began paroling young men to Morrison
<br /> Training School in Hoffman, Richmond County. Construction had commenced in 1924 following a
<br /> $25,000 1923 appropriation by the North Carolina legislature. Four buildings stood on almost three
<br /> hundred acres by 1926. An expansive two-story-on-basement brick edifice encompassed
<br /> administrative offices, classrooms, a reception hall, an assembly room,the superintendent's quarters,
<br /> and dormitories. Approximately seventy-five boys initially received academic and agricultural
<br /> instruction. Within ten years, almost two hundred youth cultivated crops and tended pigs, chickens,
<br /> and dairy cows on a four hundred-acre farm. State appropriations for physical plant improvements
<br /> totaled about $150,000 through 1932.49
<br /> NCIHCG,the comparable institution for African American girls, opened with great aspirations in
<br /> October 1925. However, due to limited funding and staffing,NCFCWC struggled to supply residents
<br /> with adequate sustenance, instruction, and oversight. The privately operated reformatory differed
<br /> dramatically from its state-run counterparts in size, budget, and management. The facility received no
<br /> 47 NCSBCPW,Biennial Report of the NCSBCPW, 1924-1926, 104-105;William S.Powell,ed.,Dictionary of
<br /> North Carolina Biography, Volume 4(Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1991),415;Jeffrey J.Crow,Paul D.
<br /> Escott,and Flora J.Hatley.A History of African Americans in North Carolina(Raleigh:North Carolina Department of
<br /> Cultural Resources, 1992), 136-137.
<br /> 48 NCSBCPW,Biennial Report of the NCSBCPW, 1924-1926, 104-105.
<br /> 49 Ibid, 121; Sanders,Negro Child Welfare in North Carolina,9.
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