The First Rosenwald Scholar at Grinnell

In a previous post I told the story of how, beginning in 1918, the Rosenwald Fund, with the collaboration of Grinnell College, had underwritten the costs of four African American men to attend Grinnell. The "experiment," as documents called the plan, not only provided college educations to these men but also intended to determine if the presence of these men on campus "might have an effect in changing the attitude of the white students toward the Negro" (Anonymous, undated, untitled Summary of the Project, Julius Rosenwald Papers, Box 16, Folder 17, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago). This early effort at affirmative action seems not to have succeeded—at least that was the conclusion of the Trustees of the Rosenwald Fund. Consequently, the Fund declined to underwrite any more African American students admitted to Grinnell. 

But what about the young men who came to Grinnell with Rosenwald funding? How did their experience at Grinnell and their Grinnell education play out in the years after they left Iowa? Little has been written about these men, and I will therefore use the next several posts to tell their stories, one at a time. Unsurprisingly, their biographies follow unique arcs, some more successful than others. But their experience in the American heartland helped define their futures.

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Hosea Booker Campbell (1896-1975), who graduated from Grinnell College in 1922, was the first student to enroll at Grinnell College with financial support from the Rosenwald Fund. 

1922 Grinnell College Cyclone

Born in Quincy, Florida, the sixth of six children, Campbell came to Grinnell in 1918 not from Florida, but from Chicago, Illinois where he had been a student at Wendell Phillips High School (now Phillips Academy High School) (1922 Cyclone). A student at none of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities from which the Rosenwald Fund imagined most candidates would come, Campbell was a beneficiary of the Fund's trustees, who named him as the first Rosenwald scholar. Someone at his high school had warned officials that Campbell would do better to complete another year of high school before beginning college, but this advice, left in the margins of a document from the Rosenwald Fund, went unheeded.

Handwritten comment in margin of July 24, 1918 Letter from William C. Graves to President John H. T. Main (Julius Rosenwald Papers, Box 16, Folder 17, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago)

How Campbell came to live and go to school in Chicago I did not learn; Grinnell publications, like the College Catalog, regularly identified his home as Tallahassee, Florida, so perhaps his Chicago residence was temporary.

1918-1919 Grinnell College Catalog, p. 151

His 1918 registration for the military draft indicates that Campbell spent the summer of 1918 working at the Nash automobile factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin  (Ancestry.com. U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005). But in September he arrived at Grinnell and took his place among the first-year students at the college. American entry into World War I and the establishment of the Student Army Training Corps on campus meant that very soon after arriving in Grinnell Campbell, like almost all the other 250 men on campus, enlisted in SATC. College dormitories were converted to "barracks" and the college curriculum underwent a similar alteration, the better to suit the country's military aims. So far as I could learn, Campbell had nothing to say about these changes.

1918-1919 Grinnell College Bulletin, p. 136

Perhaps it was for the best that SATC did not last long. With the announcement of armistice in November 1918, the urgency of training more American soldiers disappeared. The following month SATC at Grinnell was disbanded, and Campbell, after less than two months as a "student soldier," turned all his attention back to the more usual college curriculum. 

To judge from the few reports available, Campbell was a good, if not excellent, student. The 1922 Cyclone asserted that Campbell "studies very industriously, and is very well read," and that Campbell enjoyed conversations about history, philosophy, or literature. The word "industrious" often carries a negative valence; to work hard is not necessarily to work well, and it may be that the Cyclone intended exactly that distinction. When in 1920 President Main provided Rosenwald officials with brief reports on the progress of the Rosenwald-funded students at Grinnell, he could do no better than judge Campbell's work as "not discreditable." "His lowest grade...is 'D.' There is one 'C.' The other grades are 'A' and 'B,'" the President wrote (July 13, 1920 Letter of President Main to William C. Graves, Julius Rosenwald Papers).

Long after having left Grinnell, a fellow Rosenwald Scholar described Campbell as "aloof" and rarely involved in campus extracurriculars (Memorandum of Record, Telephone Interview with Gordon Kitchen '25, November 1982, Grinnell College Special Collections and Archives, Record Group 5, Series 2.1, sub-series 2, "Blacks at Grinnell," Box 5). Indeed, a search of the Scarlet and Black over the years of Campbell's attendance uncovered few mentions of him: in 1920 he competed in the Hyde Contest in public speaking and a few times he ran intramural track races, but nothing else made it onto the pages of the Scarlet and Black (April 1, 1920; April 28, 1920; May 29, 1920). Off-campus evidence established that in 1920 Campbell wrote W. E. B. Du Bois to solicit help in founding a chapter of the NAACP in Grinnell, although Campbell later dropped the plan, figuring that such a white campus was unlikely to yield many NAACP supporters (Outside In: African-Americans in Iowa, 1838-2000, eds. Bill Silag, et al. [Des Moines: Iowa State Historical Society, 2001], p. 333).

Grinnell College Bulletin, May 1923, p. 167

If not much involved in extracurricular activities, Campbell was nevertheless an able student, graduating from Grinnell in 1922, his academic record good enough to secure him admission to graduate study in history at Harvard University. Assisted by a $500 scholarship from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Campbell began graduate study at Harvard in 1922, working as a research assistant to Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), who had founded the academic study of African American history (Journal of Negro History 7[1922]:454). Asked to study Reconstruction in South Carolina as part of Woodson's big project on the history of Reconstruction, Campbell disappointed his mentor, who soon removed him from the team and cut off his funding (Jacqueline Goggin, Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History [1997, p. 68]; Patricia Watkins Romero, Carter G. Woodson: A Biography [Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1971], pp. 140-41).

1925-26 Harvard University Catalog, p. 160

After having received his MA, Campbell remained at Harvard, completing course work toward the PhD. But no later than 1927 he left Cambridge, and began a cycle of temporary stops that recurred often over the next few decades. In 1927-28 he lived in New York, where he told correspondents that he was trying to finish his degree. Soon thereafter, however, he moved to Wilberforce, Ohio where in Fall 1928 he assumed the position of Vice President and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (U. S. Department of Interior, 1929 Educational Directory, p. 73).

Pittsburgh Courier, September 22, 1928

How Campbell attracted such a position with his graduate study incomplete is unclear. Equally mysterious is why he left Wilberforce so quickly. The archivist at Wilberforce wrote me that an asterisk preceded Campbell's name in the university's annual bulletin, indicating that he had resigned before the document was printed (3 January 2022 email from Mackenzie Snare). Already by June 1929 Campbell was gone and his replacement named. 

The following year found Campbell in New Haven, Connecticut, but the record says little to explain what he was doing. When the 1932 academic year began Campbell moved to Oklahoma to teach history and head the Social Sciences Department at Langston University. Again, however, his appointment was brief, lasting only one year. As at Wilberforce, the circumstances of his departure are unclear. The Langston catalog mistakenly asserted that Campbell had obtained his PhD, an error that might have played a part in his brief sojourn in Oklahoma.

1932-33 Langston University Catalog, p. 6

Among the courses listed in the Langston catalog was one devoted to "The Negro in American History," a course for which Campbell's education had specially prepared him.

1932-33 Langston University Catalog, p. 41

It seems unlikely that Campbell had the chance to teach this course more than once before he left Oklahoma, returning to the East coast. 

Chicago Defender, October 17, 1931

Completion of doctoral work at Harvard increasingly occupied less of his energy than did his idea of founding a private academy for African Americans, something that seems to have occurred to Campbell early in his graduate study. No later than 1931 he was meeting with officials who might endorse or fund his plan. As the years passed, Campbell seems to have concentrated all his energy upon the idea, becoming correspondingly less committed to finishing his PhD. In late 1934 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote Harvard University, seeking confirmation that Campbell had in fact received his Ph.D. Assistant Dean Lawrence S. Mayo (1888-1947) wrote back in early January:

I have your letter of November 6 and am afraid you have been misinformed, if you believe that Hosea Booker Campbell has received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University. According to our records he has not yet fulfilled the requirements for the degree (Letter from Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 8, 1935. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers [MS 312]. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries).

Perhaps Du Bois intended to print news of Campbell's doctorate in The Crisis, as he had published word of Campbell's bachelor's degree in 1923 (The Crisis, 26[1923]:108). If so, he was disappointed with the news from Harvard.

In his memoir John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), among the giants of African American history, reports having encountered Campbell at Harvard in 1935, describing him as a "sixth-year graduate student in history who spoke more frequently about his plans for a preparatory school for Negro boys than about the completion of his graduate studies" (John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin [NY: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005], p. 60). Campbell's hopes for obtaining the PhD seem to have faded, and hopes for an academic appointment faded with them.

Undated Photograph (1930s?) of John Hope Franklin
(https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/collections/creators/people/johnhopefranklin)

In 1935 Campbell returned to New Haven, where he worked for a time as a staff investigator for the Yale Institute of Human Relations, although whether the appointment was full-time seems doubtful. Newspaper reports from that year also place him in New York City, where Campbell taught a class on "Negro History" at St. Luke's Episcopal and also functioned as a Lay Reader (New York Age, January 12, 1935).

1936 Letter to Charles Houston

(Papers of the NAACP, Part 15: Segregation and Discrimination, Complaints and Responses, 1940-1955. Series A: Legal Department Files, Group II, Series B, Civil Rights. New Jersey, 1941-1948)

The year 1936 found Campbell back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but apparently without a job, as his April 3rd letter to Charles Houston (1895-1950) reveals him asking for help in securing a position at City College of New York, a plan that did not succeed. That same year Campbell sent letters to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Harold Ickes, seeking funds for a "private preparatory school for American colored youth." Campbell hoped to get a grant or loan from appropriations directed to the Public Works Administration, but a disappointing denial arrived within a week (National Archives, Department of the Interior [Record Group 48], Office File of Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of Interior, 1933-1942).

Over the next few years Campbell floated across the Northeast, without any steady employment and still seeking funding for the academy of which he had first dreamt in the 1920s. In 1938 he was living in New York City again, reporting to correspondents that he had acquired five houses in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. His letter does not explain where the money came from, but does complain about all the troubles the properties had brought him, perhaps explaining how he had "lost some money" in 1940. Writing his friend, Julian Steele (1906-1970) in 1944, Campbell asked to have a 1933 loan renewed, promising to have money to repay the debt soon (June 16, 1944 letter to Julian D. Steele [Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Julian Steele Collection #727, Box 12C, General Correspondence, 4, 1940-44]).

Campbell's 1942 Draft Registration Card

(Ancestry.com. US World War I Draft Registration Cards 1917-1918 [database on-line], Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, 2005)

When he registered for the World War II draft in 1942, Campbell was living in Elizabeth Union, New Jersey, working for the Packard Motor Car Company, a job unlikely to have depended upon his study of African American history. The local registrar reported him as 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 185 pounds, brown-eyed with black hair, his complexion "dark brown." Somewhere Campbell had picked up a scar on his right arm (ibid.). Late in the war Campbell's stationery identifies his home as Bridgeport, Connecticut; later he lived in East Norwalk. In none of these places did he find work commensurate with his education.

The lowest point in his career came in a Paterson, New Jersey courtroom in February 1956 when Campbell, then about 60 years old, pleaded no defense to a charge of fraud—"accused of converting to his own use a total of $5 from a Passaic housewife." A newspaper account alleged that Campbell "represented to her [that] he was soliciting subscriptions for the Periodical Publisher's Service Bureau of Newark and the Franklin Square Subscription Agency of Englewood." Before sentencing Campbell to the 81 days of jail he had already served (an indication that Campbell could not pay bail), Judge Donald G. Collester lectured the defendant, observing that "A man with your education shouldn't be getting mixed up with this type of thing...you ought to know better." Apparently a similar charge awaited Campbell in nearby Sussex County (The News [Paterson, NJ], February 13, 1956).

A brief note in the February 14, 1962 issue of the Long Branch, New Jersey Daily Record announced that Campbell, then about 65 years of age, was living in Long Branch, and had recently learned that he was appointed as a researcher for the Education Department of the WPA at Newark, focusing upon "special studies in the field of Negro history." The newspaper offered no details on the project or on the precise work in which Campbell would be engaged. The article concluded by mentioning Campbell's Grinnell degree, but erroneously credited him with a degree from Howard University (instead of Harvard), "where he majored in history." Although Campbell must have regarded the new position as better than selling magazines or working in an automobile factory, he could not help but notice that in old age he was replicating the sort of research assistance with which he had begun graduate study almost forty years earlier.

Death came to Hosea Campbell in June 1975 in East Orange, New Jersey (Ancestry.com. U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2014). What caused his death and where he was buried I could not learn. Despite my best efforts, I found no obituary. So far as I know, Campbell never married, never had any children, and left behind no record of publication—historical or political.

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When Hosea Campbell graduated from Grinnell in 1922 and began graduate study at Harvard University, he seemed poised to join that first generation of African Americans who studied and taught the history of African Americans, correcting the inattention and imbalance that had long prevailed in US history books. Soon, however, Campbell's dream of a preparatory school for African American youth displaced all other ambitions, the doctoral degree at Harvard forgotten. America in the 1930s and 1940s—mired in Depression and then World War—was hardly a promising environment in which to seek financial support for founding such an institution, with the result that Campbell's dream was never actualized. During his last years, when his name rarely broke into the historical record, Campbell found himself not teaching "Negro history" at some college or university—not even at a church somewhere—but rather back at work in an automobile factory, just as he had done before he had ever enrolled at Grinnell College. Standing in a New Jersey court room, a sixty-year-old who had spent the previous three months in jail, Campbell had to endure the reproaches of a white judge, who told him, "you ought to know better."

Campbell's death brought no celebration of a life marked by achievement. There was no obituary littered with accomplishments, no institution to repeat and preserve his accomplishments, and no offspring to mourn his passing and preserve his memory. In this respect, Campbell's Grinnell education did little to differentiate him from most African American men who labored under the weight of racism. Hosea Campbell, once having earned special attention because of  his pioneering role as a Black man at very white Grinnell College, later drifted out of the historical narrative; not even the location of his grave earned a spot in the public record.