Benjamin Franklin Seldon, usually referred to as Benjamin F. Seldon or B. F. Seldon, was an African American educator. [1] He served in World War I as a YMCA secretary, taught at the University of Toulouse, and was State Supervisor of Negro Adult Education in New Jersey in the late 1930s. He was a collaborator and correspondent with the Pan-Africanist intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois.
Seldon studied at Centenary Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1903. [2] In a 1924 résumé preserved in the Du Bois papers, Seldon claimed to have been "prepared for college at Phillips Exeter Academy", before studying at New York City College, Boston University and Harvard University. [3] Though his name is not found in the 1787-1903 register, [4] he was writing from Exeter Academy in April 1905, putting himself forward to W. E. B. DuBois as a potential agent for the distribution of The Souls of Black Folk . [5]
In 1905 he was YMCA Secretary at New Haven, a job he took for two years. He then worked at the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York City, and as Principal of the Freehold Grammar School in Freehold, New Jersey. [3] When Du Bois founded The Crisis in 1910 Seldon was an employee for a few months. [6]
In World War I Seldon served as a YMCA secretary with allied military in France, [7] a space in which African American and West African soldiers interacted. Seldon created a set of illustrated drawings of black servicemen, intending to sell them as souvenir postcards:
The painted scenes included American black officers leading men into battle, African American troops taking German prisoners, and an African American and West African soldier exchanging salutes above a caption that read 'Fraternal Salute' In 1919, Seldon sent examples of these poscards to Du Bois, noting on the back of one that he had printed 2,500 copies but 'the colored boys saled before we could get them on the market They are now in a cellar in Paris'. [8]
Seldon stayed in Europe after the war. He attended the first Pan African Congress in 1919. He also offered to help W. E. B. DuBois with organization of the second Pan African Congress in 1921, [9] though in the event was unable to attend the congress. [10] He married a wealthy Frenchwoman and taught at the University of Toulouse, [8] studying social conditions within European countries. [1] There in the mid-1920s, he passed on copies of The Crisis to black students from French colonies. As he wrote to W. E. B. DuBois in 1925, "I have asked myself, and that very seriously, why not an International A.A.C.P.?" [11]
In the late 1920s Seldon returned to the US, working at a new plantation operated by the Southern Sugar Company, Azucar, in Canal Point, Florida, There he established and acted as principal of a grammar school, [12] and established other community institutions:
We have a fine community house for the young girls and mothers which is well furnished; there is a large social hall with pool tables, piano radio, reading room etc. for the men. We did away with prostitution and bootlegging, which almost cost me my life but it was worth it, and in the place of these things we have substituted clean wholesome environments of every kind possible. But best of all, I think, was making the people see that their preachers were not of the right type and the establishment of better homes and unusual fine lawns and public baths and toilets. [13]
Seldon returned to Toulouse in the early 1930s, and for the next few years moved between France and America. He hoped to complete "a comparative study (political, economic, religious, social and educational) of the southern Negro and the European peasant", [14] though the book was never published. He helped supervise an anthology of black poetry, edited by Beatrice F. Wormley and Charles W. Carter. [15] From 1938 to 1941 he was State Supervisor of Negro Adult Education for the New Jersey Works Progress Administration. [1] In 1944 he was working as a 'Promotion Specialist' for the Interracial Section of the War Finance Division of the US Treasury. [16]
Seldon died in Newark City Hospital on August 5, 1949. He was survived by his wife, who continued living in Cier-de-Rivière, France. [2] Seldon's papers are held at the New York Public Library, [1] and correspondence with Du Bois is held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [17]
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo.
The Pan-African Congress (PAC) was a series of eight meetings which took place on the back of the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900. The Pan-African Congress gained a reputation as a peacemaker for decolonization in Africa and in the West Indies. It made a significant advance for the Pan-African cause. One of the group's major demands was to end colonial rule and racial discrimination. It stood against imperialism and it demanded human rights and equality of economic opportunity. The manifesto given by the Pan-African Congress included the political and economic demands of the Congress for a new world context of international cooperation and the need to address the issues facing Africa as a result of European colonization of most of the continent.
The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910, and it is the oldest Black-oriented magazine in the world. Today, The Crisis is "a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.
Alexander Crummell was an American minister and academic. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, Crummell went to England in the late 1840s to raise money for his church by lecturing about American slavery. Abolitionists supported his three years of study at Cambridge University, where Crummell developed concepts of pan-Africanism and was the school's first recorded Black student and graduate.
The term color line was originally used as a reference to the racial segregation that existed in the United States after the abolition of slavery. An article by Frederick Douglass that was titled "The Color Line" was published in the North American Review in 1881. The phrase gained fame after W. E. B. Du Bois' repeated use of it in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.
Henry Alexander Hunt was an American educator who led efforts to reach blacks in rural areas of Georgia. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as the Harmon Prize. In addition, he was recruited in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to join the president's Black Cabinet, an informal group of more than 40 prominent African Americans appointed to positions in the executive agencies.
The Exhibit of American Negroes was a sociological display within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. The exhibit was a joint effort between Daniel Murray, the Assistant Librarian of Congress, Thomas J. Calloway, a lawyer and the primary organizer of the exhibit, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The goal of the exhibition was to demonstrate progress and commemorate the lives of African Americans at the turn of the century.
The Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems was an annual conference held at Atlanta University, organized by W. E. B. Du Bois, and held every year from 1896 to 1914.
The First Pan-African Conference was held in London from 23 to 25 July 1900. Organized primarily by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams, the conference took place in Westminster Town Hall and was attended by 37 delegates and about 10 other participants and observers from Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Alcindor, Benito Sylvain, Dadabhai Naoroji, John Archer, Henry Francis Downing, Anna H. Jones, Anna Julia Cooper, and W. E. B. Du Bois, with Bishop Alexander Walters of the AME Zion Church taking the chair.
Anna H. Jones was a Canadian-born American clubwoman, suffragist, and educator based in later life in Kansas City, Missouri.
Helen Appo Cook was a wealthy, prominent African-American community activist in Washington, D.C., and a leader in the women's club movement. Cook was a founder and president of the Colored Women's League, which consolidated with another organization in 1896 to become the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an organization still active in the 21st century. Cook supported voting rights and was a member of the Niagara Movement, which opposed racial segregation and African American disenfranchisement. In 1898, Cook publicly rebuked Susan B. Anthony, president of the National Woman's Suffrage Association, and requested she support universal suffrage following Anthony's speech at a U.S. Congress House Committee on Judiciary hearing.
Ira Foster Lewis was an American sportswriter, executive editor, president, and business manager of the Pittsburgh Courier. He was involved in the Double V campaign to grant full citizenship rights to African American soldiers serving in World War II and helped integrate major league baseball.
Lionel F. Artis was a civil servant and administrator in the United States. Artis became the first Black person to be appointed to a policy-making municipal agency in Indianapolis when he was a named a member of the Indianapolis Board of Health and Hospitals.
Ruth Anna Fisher was an American historian, archivist, and teacher who played a major role in collecting sources from British archives for the Carnegie Institution and Library of Congress.
Thomas Jesse Jones (1873-1950) was a Welsh-American sociologist and educational administrator. He was Educational Director of the Phelps Stokes Fund from 1917 to 1946. W. E. B. DuBois accused Jones of systematically working to replace Black leaders with white and labelled Jones "that evil genius of the Negro race".
Benjamin Franklin Bowles (1869–1928), commonly written as B. F. Bowles, was an African American civil rights leader, teacher, high school principal, and the founder and president of Douglass University, a 20th-century college for African Americans in segregated St. Louis, Missouri.
Dora Cole Norman was an African-American educator, dancer, theater producer, playwright and sportswoman. As a young woman she played basketball for one of the first African-American women's basketball teams, the New York Girls. She taught for the New York Public School System and was the founder-director of the Colored Players Guild at the Harlem YWCA. She collaborated with W. E. B. Dubois on the 1913 production of his historical pageant The Star of Ethiopia, and gave Paul Robeson his first acting roles in the early 1920s.
