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The Jackson Davis Collection of African-American Educational Photographs

Graduating Class Wilson Country Training School, 1917 Coleman College, 1918 Girls Jumping Rope at Recess, 1916

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Portrait of Jackson DavisJackson Davis, an educational reformer and amateur photographer, took nearly 6,000 photographs of African American schools, teachers and students throughout the Southeastern United States. His photographs -- most intended to demonstrate the wretched conditions of African American schools in the south and to show how they could be improved -- provide a unique view of southern education during the first half of the twentieth century.
 
The Jackson Davis Collection consists of papers and photographs given to Special Collections in 1948 by Helen Mansfield Lynch and Ruth Elizabeth Langhorne, Davis's daughters, and later supplemented in 1999 by Sally Guy Browne and Helen Langhorne, Davis's granddaughters.

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