Weiler

Mabel Carney at Teachers College: From
Home Missionary to White Ally
KATHLEEN WEILER
Tufts University
This article discusses the career of Mabel Carney, head of the Department of Rural
Education at Teachers College from 1918 to 1941. Carney was deeply involved with
African American and African education, traveling to Africa and the American
South, teaching courses on ‘‘Negro education,’’ and working closely with both African
and African American graduate students. When she retired from Teachers College in
1942, she was given an honorary doctorate from Howard University for her support
of African American education. She died in 1968. Carney is barely mentioned in
educational histories of the period. Her life and contributions to African American
struggles for higher education reveal a little-known history. But her story also illu-
minates the instability of conceptions of race, the uneasy positioning of white women
reformers, and the ways that progressive white educators’ understandings of race
changed in the interwar years in response to broader political events and social
movements.
In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of black students attended Teachers

College, primarily in the summer school, but in master’s and PhD programs
as well. Mabel Carney, head of the Department of Rural Education at
Teachers College during this period, became the mentor and supporter of
these African and African American students. A leading progressive rural
educator and well known in the Southern black academic community, Car-
ney is barely mentioned in educational histories of the period. Born into a
poor white farming family, Mabel Carney began her teaching career in one-
room schools in rural Illinois. In 1912, when she was twenty-seven, she
published Country Life and the Country School, a study of rural school reform,
a book that made her one of the best-known progressive rural educators in
the United States. She was hired to head the newly established Department
of Rural Education at Teachers College in 1918. Although she did not make
gender a central theme in her scholarship, throughout her career she
supported other women educators and worked closely with other women.
Carney’s early teaching experiences and normal school education in Illinois
were in all-white settings. At Teachers College, she became deeply involved
Teachers College Record Volume 107, Number 12, December 2005, pp. 2599–2633
Copyright r by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681
2600 Teachers College Record
with African American and African education, traveling to Africa and the
American South, teaching courses on ‘‘Negro education,’’ and working closely
with both African and African American graduate students.1 When she retired
from Teachers College in 1942, she was given an honorary doctorate from
Howard University for her support of black education. She died in 1968.
Carney is part of the overlooked history of the black students at Northern
universities in the interwar period. Her story also resonates with the early
project of feminist history to recover the lost lives of women in the past.
Carney was typical of a generation of single white women born in the late
nineteenth century who shared the progressive faith in education as a means
of social betterment and who took significant leadership roles in education.
She depended on close friendships with other women and supported and
was supported by a network of likeminded women colleagues. In this respect,
Carney was part of what Robin Muncy called the ‘‘female dominion’’ of social
reform.2 In many ways, Carney seems to fit the pattern of nineteenth-century
white women reformers who sought to save those in need, what Peggy
Pascoe has called ‘‘relations of rescue.’’3 But in her later life, Carney more
closely resembled white women activists who were motivated by moral out-
rage at segregation and racism and who became what have come to be
called ‘‘white allies’’ of the black freedom struggle.4 In her early involve-
ment with African American and African education, Carney accepted a kind
of philanthropic colonialism, but by the end of her career, she supported a
sharp and angry condemnation of white racism. Carney’s life thus exem-
plifies the complex ways in which white women reformers’ conceptions of
race could subvert and support structures of power and privilege.
Carney’s career as a white woman educator can also be viewed within the
context of what have come to be called whiteness studies. Such studies, as
Peter Kolchin commented, ‘‘have underscored the historical process of racial
construction, showing how assumptions about race and races have changed
over time and exploring human agency in the making of race.’’5 Although
Carney did not write theoretical or political accounts of the reasons for the
changes in her thinking about race, her actions in support of African and
African American students and the policies she supported reveal a marked
shift from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s. In part, her changing views of
race may be the result of her close personal relationships with African
American students and scholars. But her beliefs also mirror broader shifts in
the understanding of race and racism in the interwar years. Throughout her
life, Mabel Carney was motivated by a strong ethical sense, but her under-
standing of the world was shaped by the individuals with whom she came in
contact and by the discourses through which she interpreted the social
world. These discourses around both race and gender encouraged her to
see some things and not others, to explain what she saw in certain ways, and
to take up certain political positions and social explanations and not others.
Mabel Carney at Teachers College: From Home Missionary to White Ally 2601
Carney’s life and her contributions to African American struggles for higher
education should be brought to light as part of a little-known history. But
her story also illuminates the instability of conceptions of race, the uneasy
positioning of white women reformers, and the ways that progressive white
educators’ understandings of race changed in the interwar years in response
to broader political events and social movements.
A WOMAN’S WORLD
In 1918, Dean James Russell of Teachers College hired Mabel Carney, then
director of the Rural Education Department of the Illinois State Normal
University, to be head of a new program in rural education.6 In 1912,
Carney had published Country Life and the Country School, which Lawrence
Cremin later called a ‘‘superb example’’ of the progressive rural school
reform movement.7 The rural school had become defined as a social prob-
lem in the late nineteenth century as part of a more general anxiety about
the social changes taking place in the United States—rapid industrialization,
an increasing influx of immigrants, and demographic shifts from rural to
urban areas.8 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a number of
expert studies and impassioned polemics were published, condemning the
existing system of locally controlled one-room district schools and attribut-
ing a wide range of presumed social ills to the inadequacies of rural schools.
One major strand of rural school reform, echoing school reform discourse
more broadly, emphasized the need for scientific management and effi-
ciency.9 But these views of the rural school were contested by a group of
rural school reformers influenced by the ideas of John Dewey and the pro-
gressive education movement.10 Carney’s book is one of the earliest exam-
ples of this democratic approach to rural education. The book was widely
read and widely praised and led to her appointment at Teachers College.
Carney’s positive view and support of women teachers is evident in all
her work, beginning with Country Life and the Country School. Throughout
Country Life and the Country School, she referred to rural teachers as female,
both when she was discussing classroom teachers and when she described
teachers as prospective rural leaders.11 While Carney never directly ad-
dressed the issue of women in educational leadership positions, her as-
sumption that the rural school teachers and leaders would be women made
clear her belief in women’s capabilities and potential in country schools.
Thus, when Carney argued for the consolidated, graded school, she did not
have in mind the urban model of women classroom teachers ‘‘managed’’ by
male principals and experts, but rather assumed that rural women teachers
would take leadership positions as principals and teacher trainers in these
new consolidated schools, much as she herself had moved from a teacher in
a one-room school, to a teacher in a consolidated school, to training teacher,

to normal school instructor.12
It is instructive to compare her work with that of the leading male rural
school reformers. For example, consider Ellwood Cubberley of Stanford,
one of the best-known educational experts of the early twentieth century,
whose two books on rural education—The Improvement of Rural Schools
(1912) and Rural Life and Education (1914)—were almost exactly contem-
porary with Country Life and the Country School.13 Like Carney, Cubberley
advocated school consolidation. One of the greatest failings of rural com-
munities, according to Cubberley, was the inadequate and backward one-
room school. But for Cubberley, the main reason for the lack of ‘‘efficiency’’
in the rural school was the ‘‘poorly trained or entirely untrained’’ woman
teacher:
Without intentional disrespect to teachers now engaged in rural serv-

ice, it must, nevertheless, be acknowledged that the average rural
teacher of today is a mere slip of a girl, often almost too young to have
formed as yet any conception of the problem of rural life and needs;
that she knows little as to the nature of children or the technique of
instruction; that her education is very limited and confined largely to
the old traditional school-subjects, while of the great and important
fields of science she is almost entirely ignorant; and that she not in-
frequently lacks in those qualities of leadership which are so essential
in rural progress.14
The answer to the rural school problem for Cubberley, not surprisingly, was
the consolidated school led by men trained in the most up-to-date scientific
methods.
In comparison with Cubberley, Carney’s sympathy and respect for wom-
en teachers is striking. But Carney did not use feminist arguments or di-
rectly speak to the ‘‘woman question’’ in Country Life and the Country School.
She only directly addressed the question of women in education in one brief
essay, ‘‘Woman’s Contribution to Education,’’ published in 1929 in the
Journal of Education.15 Carney began this essay by noting how small the
contribution of women in education had been. Was this because women
were only capable of the ‘‘mere assistantship’’ of men? Instead of answering
this question in her own voice, Carney called forth the collective voice of
women: ‘‘Most assuredly not! disclaim women of spirit everywhere, point-
ing to the irrefutable evidence of what their sex has already attained in the
few brief years of its intellectual emancipation.’’ Carney then noted the
impact of patriarchal power and the subjugation of women historically. But
when she went on to consider women’s ‘‘contribution,’’ both in the present
and the future, she seemed to assume an inherent moral superiority to
women as a class: ‘‘The distinctive contribution of women to education is

their regard for human values—their basic, innate realization of the fact
that the individual human being is the be-all and end-all, not only of ed-
ucation, but of civilization and of life itself!’’ Why was this? Because woman
was the ‘‘creator of life,’’ and thus valued life. The women Carney cited as
models—Pharaoh’s daughter, the Virgin Mary, Mary Lyon, Adelaide Nut-
ting (founder of the Department of Nursing at Teachers College), and Patty
Hill, the kindergarten educator—were nurturers of the young and helpless.
When women succeed, said Carney, ‘‘they find their highest and best suc-
cess in the realization of this ideal,’’ and when they fail, they betray their
own best selves. Carney noted that some men also have what she calls
‘‘human values’’; she cited Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick as exam-
ples. But ‘‘women, in general, see the vast significance of this matter a little
more clearly and readily than men, in general.’’
Carney ended by saluting her ‘‘masculine colleagues for their notewor-
thy achievements in education! We bow to them in administration, in costs,
and tests, and rating scales; But these are not ends in education; they are but
means to the larger and more important ends of developing personality and
individuality.’’ In the present world, said Carney, these more important
ends are ‘‘gravely endangered.’’ It was up to women, who had a clearer
understanding of the ends of education, to overcome the focus on ‘‘means’’
(which, given Carney’s examples, seems to imply testing and measurement)
to assert higher moral values. Women’s best contribution to education, said
Carney, was to act as ‘‘givers of human life and guardians of human values.’’
In this brief piece, Carney did not explore the question of why women have
a clearer sense of the value of human life, nor did she address the possible
conflicts between the demands of the career of the independent profes-
sional woman and the nurturing care of the ‘‘giver of life,’’ the Virgin Mary,
or the loving mother. In her own professional life, Carney provided nur-
turance and caring for both students and colleagues, to the detriment of
conventional markers of academic achievement such as books and articles.
As a result, compared with the academic ‘‘stars’’ of Teachers College in the
1920s and 1930s, Carney was and remains relatively unknown.
In the Rural Education Program at Teachers College, Carney surround-
ed herself with other women educators. Immediately upon being hired in
1918, Carney wrote to Dean James Russell, asking that her friend Fannie
Dunn, an experienced rural supervisor, also be offered a position.16 Russell
agreed, and Dunn, who was put in charge of Rural Elementary Curriculum,
Supervision, and Research and Rural School Administration and Finance in
the new Department of Rural Education, became Carney’s closest colleague
and supporter. Dunn was an active and energetic school reformer who
traveled widely and spoke almost as frequently as Carney herself. When the
Journal of Rural Education, the official publication of the National Education
Association’s (NEA’s) Department of Rural Education, was established in

1921, Fannie Dunn was named editor in chief, with Carney serving as
business manager. In addition to her other duties at Teachers College,
Dunn oversaw the founding of Teachers College’s experimental rural
school at Quaker Grove, New Jersey.17 In 1927, Fannie Dunn and Marcia
Everett (the head teacher at the Quaker Grove School) published Four Years
in a Country School, an account of these early years.18
Carney also supported women educators on the national stage. She was
closely involved with the rural education group at the NEA. She served as
secretary of the Department of Rural Education between 1920 and 1925
and was elected the first woman president of the department in 1929.19 As a
woman who held a number of key leadership positions, Carney was able to
support the work of other women in progressive rural education. For ex-
ample, Kate Wofford, who became a leading Southern rural school re-
former and who was later elected a South Carolina state senator, was a
student of Carney’s, completing her PhD thesis, An History of the Status and
Training of Elementary Rural Teachers of the United States 1860–1930, under
Carney’s direction in 1934. Through her editorship of the Rural Education
series published by Macmillan in the 1920s, Carney was instrumental in
helping progressive women educators to publish. A good example is Ina
Barnes’s Rural School Management, published in 1923 as part of the Rural
Education Series. In Rural School Management, Barnes, who identified her-
self as ‘‘Rural School Supervisor, La Grange County, La Grange, Indiana,’’
directly set herself against the prevalent view that schools are similar to
factories, in need of scientific management for the production of pupils.
Following Dewey and Carney, Barnes argued that real education must be
grounded in experience, and, echoing the teachings of the country life
movement, claimed that rural schools, led by women teachers, offered a
wonderful opportunity to ground education in the students’ local environ-
ment.20 Barnes and Wofford are only two examples of the many progres-
sive women rural educators Carney supported in the 1920s and 1930s.21
MABEL CARNEY AND RACE
In her essay on ‘‘Women’s Contribution to Education,’’ as in Country Life and

the Country School, Carney defended women’s competence but uncritically
accepted the dominant image of woman as nurturer—but at least she ac-
knowledged women. There is no indication in Country Life and the Country
School that she was even aware of race. Country Life and the Country School was
addressed to an assumed white audience; there is no mention in it of seg-
regation, racism, or even the existence of rural schools and communities
that were not white. But Carney’s blindness to race was challenged when
she became head of the Department of Rural Education at Teachers College

in 1918. As head of the Department of Rural Education, Carney traveled
widely.22 The account in Teachers College Record of Carney’s activities in 1918,
her first year as head of the Department of Rural Education, is typical:
Miss Carney spent the interval between spring and summer sessions
on a western trip speaking fifty-four times on rural school conditions
and needs in war time. Engagements were filled at normal schools,
rural conferences, and state educational associations in West Virginia,
Tennessee, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Idaho, and Washington.23
Although Carney initially spoke to all-white groups, she very quickly be-
came aware of the issues of rural education in the segregated black schools
of the South. Teachers College was just beginning to respond to the ac-
tivities of Northern philanthropic foundations that were increasingly in-
volved with ‘‘Negro education’’ in the rural South. Soon after taking her
position as head of the Teachers College Department of Rural Education,
Carney became introduced to black educators and white reformers. On her
1920 tour, she visited black colleges and gave a lecture at Tuskegee.
In the 1920s, Teachers College began to attract significant numbers of
African American students. Teachers College’s leadership in attracting these
students was the result of a number of factors. Because Southern black
students were excluded from graduate study in the segregated Southern
state universities, some Southern states provided financial support for study
in the North. Teachers College, the most prestigious school of education in
the United States, provided opportunities that attracted these Southern
students.24 Moreover, Columbia’s location in New York City, adjacent to
Harlem must have been important. By the 1920s, a new modernist culture
was developing in New York City, shaped in part by the migration of African
Americans from the South to Harlem. It was in the 1920s, as Ann Douglas
points out, ‘‘that Harlem became ‘Harlem’ in the sense in which we use the
word today; uptown Manhattan was now a black metropolis, what the
African-American writer James Weldon Johnson hailed as ‘Black Manhattan,’
and it hosted the dazzling array of black talent and ambition celebrated by
blacks and whites as the ‘Harlem Renaissance.’ ’’25 The brilliance of the
Harlem intellectuals and artists called into question racist views of African
Americans as ‘‘backward.’’ Harlem itself must have been a strong attraction
for Southern African Americans.
If the black artists and intellectuals of Harlem were creating a cultural
Renaissance and creating a new urban culture, powerful white elites con-
tinued to view the ‘‘Negro problem’’ through a traditional lens. Their con-
cern was the rural black masses of the South. The economic and political
interests of the Northern philanthropic foundations in the segregated
South have been analyzed by a number of historians. W. E. B. Du Bois,

Carter Woodson, and Horace Mann Bond are perhaps the best-known Af-
rican American social critics of the 1930s who analyzed and criticized the
racial politics underlying Northern white support of black segregated
schools and colleges in the South.26 More recently, historians have debated
the motivations and impact of such organizations as the General Education
Board (GEB), the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and the Rosenwald Foundation.27
These philanthropic foundations exercised significant power over black
education in the South in the years between the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson
Supreme Court decision allowing segregated schooling and the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring it unconstitutional. Because
black segregated schools were so poorly supported by states, the private
funds provided by the Northern foundations became essential to the pro-
vision of education to large segments of the African American population. A
number of historians have claimed that the goal of philanthropic education
for the black South was to teach African Americans to accommodate them-
selves to segregation and to prepare them to be a trained, self-regulated
work force.28 Others have argued that despite their undoubted assumptions
of white superiority, the philanthropists’ support of black education was
more nuanced and contradictory.29 For example, by 1930, Northern phil-
anthropic foundations supported academic courses at black colleges, pro-
vided resources for building rural schools, funded training for rural black
teachers, and offered scholarships for Southern black students to attend
college and graduate school in the North. To those, both black and white,
who knew the poverty in which Southern black people were forced to live
and the oppression they experienced, it was difficult to reject well-built
schoolhouses, well-trained teachers, and the opportunity for advanced
study. These contradictions of white philanthropic reform faced ordinary
black Southerners, and they faced Mabel Carney as well.
In 1922, Carney wrote to Dean James Russell about her plan to institute
a ‘‘special program on Negro education.’’ This first event was held on De-
cember 14, 1922, and included performances by the Hampton quartet and
two African students at Teachers College, and addresses by Thomas Jesse
Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and William Pickens, field secretary for the
NAACP.30 In 1924, Carney spent a month visiting segregated black schools
in the South under the auspices of the GEB to gather material for a three-
week normal course she taught that June at Hampton Institute.31 By this
time, she was well acquainted with the activities of the GEB, the Phelps-
Stokes Fund, and other white philanthropic foundations. When Carney
returned from her first trip to the South, she began exploring the idea of a
Teachers College course on race relations organized around a series of five
2-hour lectures by ‘‘outstanding leaders in the field of Negro education.’’
Carney’s own racial views at the time can be seen in her assumption that all
the speakers should be white. In a letter to Dr. Leonard of Teachers College

proposing this idea, she commented, ‘‘For the first year I would choose all
of these speakers among white persons, though later I should like to see one
or two colored lecturers included.’’ Her choice of speakers also shows her
close connection with Northern philanthropists; the five initial speakers she
suggested included Jackson Davis and Leo Favrot of the GEB and Thomas
Jesse Jones, director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund.32 In proposing the lecture
series, Carney was careful to add that she had talked with ‘‘a number of
Southern white students about this matter and there is no question what-
ever but that our Southern students as well as our Northern would appre-
ciate an offering of this kind exceedingly and be glad to attend it.’’33 Both
the lecture series and Carney’s course ‘‘Negro Education and Race Rela-
tions’’ were held in 1925.
THE AFRICAN LETTERS

By the mid-1920s, Carney’s interest in the education of African Americans
led her to become interested in African education as well. Teachers College
attracted a number of African students in the 1920s and 1930s, white and
black South Africans, and black Africans from other parts of the continent.
Many of the black African students were closely associated with missionary
work. Carney’s initial image of Africa was thus shaped by her interactions
with white South African students or black African students trained by mis-
sionaries.34 By this time, she was familiar with and supported the Tuskegee,
or industrial, model of black education—with its assumption that blacks
should be prepared for manual work—and was personally acquainted with
Thomas Jesse Jones.35 Jones, the South African educator Charles Loram,
and J. H. Oldham of the International Missionary Council were the central
figures arguing for the establishment of the industrial model of education in
Africa.36 Carney’s first direct experience with Africa was in 1926. According
to Teachers College Record, she spent eight months in Africa, having been sent
by the International Institute of Teachers College to study the ‘‘conditions
among the native tribes.’’ At the farewell party given to her the evening
before she sailed, according to the Teachers College Record account, Miss
Adendorf of South Africa ‘‘told of Miss Carney’s wonderful help to the
foreign group, and how happy the African students were that she was now
coming out to them.’’ Then, ‘‘Mrs. Whiting, representing the Negro stu-
dents, dwelt especially on Miss Carney’s kindness to Negro students, and
her unusual understanding of and interest in their problems.’’37
Carney sent a series of letters to her students and friends from her
African trip, some of which were privately printed as ‘‘The African Let-
ters.’’38 The letters provide a fascinating insight into Carney’s attitudes
toward race and politics in the mid-1920s. In them, Carney expressed her
awareness of the poverty in which Africans live and her disapproval of the
racism of South African whites, but also her acceptance of segregation in
South Africa (as in the American South), her confidence in missionary
schools and the Tuskegee model of black education, and her belief in the
good intentions of British colonial rule. Carney’s deep Christian beliefs led
her to a kind of orientalism; she viewed religious and cultural difference as
inferiority, while at the same time, she saw individual Africans as intellectually
capable and open to change.39 She was accompanied on her trip by Margaret
Wrong, a Canadian Christian social reformer. Wrong had studied at Oxford
and had worked for the World Student Christian Federation in Geneva. In
1926, she was named missions secretary for the British Student Christian
Movement.40 It is not clear how Wrong and Carney became acquainted, but
their Christian belief must have been a strong bond between them.
Carney took her superiority as a white Christian woman for granted and
wrote unselfconsciously about the sexual and racial dynamics of colonial
African society. Her description in one of the early letters of a trek into the
interior of Liberia with native bearers, for example, could have been taken
from Victorian travel literature. There were ‘‘three white persons’’—her-
self, Margaret Wrong, and a man, James Sibley, the American Education
Advisor to Liberian missions:
Imagine us then stringing along the primitive African highway as so

often shown in magazine pictures—Miss Wrong or myself usually in
the lead and generally walking beside our hammocks though falling
back upon them now and then from sheer fatigue—and with a line of
thirty naked black men trailing behind, each carrying a load of twenty
to forty pounds on his head.41
Carney did not mention the thirty naked black men again, but they remain
in one’s memory while reading her description of her adventures in the
interior, where she felt ‘‘the real pulse and heart of Africa,’’ throbbing with
‘‘the inarticulate lives of 160 million black souls.’’42 She was conscious of the
beauty of Africans but could not escape her own cultural assumptions. She
later described the Kikuyu of Kenya, for example, as ‘‘of a warm chocolate
color and lithe and graceful of physique. The head itself is usually well-
shaped, finely domed, and by no means unintellectual; but invariably
ruined in appearance by the wretched plugs worn in the ears.’’43
Carney believed in the need for an enlightened colonialism, calling co-
lonial rule ‘‘the civilized man’s burden of trusteeship for backward races.’’44
She compared the enlightened and beneficent British to the corrupt and
inefficient Portuguese. The British, she claimed, are ‘‘leagues ahead of that
of any other power in both efficiency and humanitarianism,’’ and she spoke
in glowing terms of the British colonial government in the Gold Coast and
Sierra Leone.45 Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, reminded her of
Santa Barbara, California. Its population included ‘‘the native population
direct from the interior, protected and cared for by government doctors,
hospitals, and dispensaries.’’ The colonial government was providing
drainage, good roads, and railroads, and the political system was stable
and well organized.46 At the same time, Carney was aware of the racial
privilege of the white colonial rulers. In African colonial cities, she noted the
three divisions of African society: ‘‘the primitive black,’’ ‘‘the educated and
clerical Native,’’ and the ‘‘dominating and conventionalized Anglo-Saxon,’’
who was ‘‘surrounded with a bevy of black ‘boys’ (native servants) minis-
tering faithfully if not efficiently to his every whim and need.’’47 And, de-
spite her friendship with white South Africans, she noted the pervasiveness
of racial discrimination in South Africa: ‘‘Race prejudice is here, I regret to
say, even stronger than with us for there is always constant fear of the black
submergence of the small European population.’’48 Nonetheless, in general,
she saw the British as having altruistic motives.
Carney’s faith in the good intentions of white reformers can be seen in
her unquestioning acceptance of the industrial model of black education.
She described the mission schools that she admired as comparable with
schools in the American South, such as Tuskegee and Hampton Institute.
She referred to one native school, Lovedale Institute in South Africa, as ‘‘the
Hampton of Africa,’’ a place where ‘‘heart touches heart in the great upward
struggle toward a richer fullness and happiness of life for those who have so
long been denied.’’49 This was similar to her description of a school that she
visited in the Gold Coast, which she described as ‘‘the best type of rural
school seen thus far in Africa,’’ a boys’ school in which students were given a
four-year course of study with ‘‘marked emphasis upon agriculture, black-
smithing, masonry and carpentry.’’ She compared it with the Smith-Hughes
high schools or county training schools in the South. And she approvingly
noted the construction of a native college and training center in Accra, which
was meant to be ‘‘somewhat similar to our own Hampton and Tuskegee.’’50
The most overt example of cultural superiority and orientalism in the
‘‘African Letters’’ occurs not around race or culture, but around religion—
in her depiction of Islam—as in this description of Egyptian Muslim stu-
dents at El Azhar University in Cairo: ‘‘All I saw at the time of my visit were
groups of men and boys huddled together on mats, sitting on the floor, and
mechanically droning passages from their sacred Book. I was told, however,
that lectures are sometimes given but that no discussion is permitted nor the
least attempt made to develop any thinking.’’51 This caricature of infidel
Muslims reflects her own deep conviction of the truth and superiority of
Christianity and her racial privilege. Compare her description of Muslim
students with that of a South African missionary service: ‘‘As the soft light
gleamed across the thousand upturned brown faces, I thought of the mil-
lions of other dusky countenances here in Africa and elsewhere who are yet
to know the releasing freedom from fear and evil which the adequate
teaching of the matchless word of Christ always brings.’’52
The ‘‘African Letters’’ demonstrate Carney’s benevolent maternalism
around both race and politics. While she was sympathetic toward and con-
cerned to help Africans, she was seemingly unaware of the extent of her
own race privilege and secure in her belief in her own cultural superiority.
Reflecting on her experiences in Africa, Carney considered the future re-
lationship between America and Africa. She argued for greater knowledge
about Africa on the part of Americans and more support for missionary
work. But most interesting for the direction of Carney’s own career is her
reflections on race relations in the United States.
More and more am I coming to realize in these travels that what the
world needs today is a good demonstration of how to solve a few of its
difficulties; and the United States is commonly regarded, and actually
is, the greatest laboratory on the face of the earth for just this purpose.
On the Black and White race question, in particular, we have a con-
tribution to make for which all humanity is waiting and it is my prayer
that we may yet rise to this responsibility in a way worthy of the hope
and faith reposed in us.53
And Carney saw her own role in this great project. Writing from Rhodesia
on Sunday, the Fourth of July, she reflected on the need to build racial
harmony in Africa and the United States. This would be her own mission:
‘‘to this great human question I once more dedicated myself anew here in
the glory of this tropical African Sabbath knowing that any individual’s
share in a task so large must be small . . .’’54
‘‘NEGRO EDUCATION’’ AT TEACHERS COLLEGE

Upon her return from Africa, Carney immediately put her commitment to
addressing ‘‘the Black and White race problem’’ into action. She had first
taught her course on race in the United States, ‘‘Negro Education and Race
Relations,’’ in the 1925 spring semester, just before her trip. When she
returned from Africa, she continued to develop this course and to expand
the lecture series associated with it. In 1927, a Negro Education Club was
established at Teachers College, with Carney named as faculty advisor, a
role she continued to fill until her retirement. By this time, Teachers Col-
lege was attracting increasing numbers of Southern black students, both
during the academic year and in its summer sessions. In the summer of
1927, Carney helped organize the first open meeting on race relations
during the Teachers College summer session. These summer meetings,
which continued through the early 1940s, attracted audiences in the hun-
dreds. Carney’s activities were noted in the Teachers College Record in 1927:
The influence of African interests upon rural Education activities in

the College is still evident. One expression of this interest has been the
varied number of lecture engagements filled by Professor Mabel Car-
ney this fall, including addresses at Hampton Institute; before the
Foreign Missions Conference in Atlantic City; the International Asso-
ciation of Agricultural Missions in New York; the North Carolina State
Association of Negro Teachers at Salisbury; and several local churches
and mission groups in New York, Brooklyn, and other eastern cities.
Another is the offering of special courses and units in rural education
for both missionary and foreign students. Still a third is a special series
of lectures recently presented under the auspices of the Rural Edu-
cation Department on Negro education and race relationships in the
United States. The series included among other speakers Mr. Leo M.
Favrot, field agent of the General Education Board; Dr. W. E. B. Du
Bois, noted Negro lecturer and publicist, New York City; and Mr.
W. W. Alexander, director of the United States Commission on Inter-
racial Cooperation, Atlanta.55
In this description of Carney’s activities, African and African American are

conflated. Here, anything touching on blackness is placed in the same cat-
egory: Carney speaking at Hampton Institute; Carney speaking to foreign
mission societies; special courses offered to foreign students on rural ed-
ucation; or a lecture series including W. E. B. Du Bois. All are examples of
‘‘the influence of African interests.’’
In the spring of 1929, Carney met with Edwin Embree, the new director
of the Rosenwald Fund, to discuss her projects in rural education and race
relations.56 She asked Embree for $1,000 ‘‘to be used during the coming
year in furthering our interracial work between colored and white stu-
dents.’’ She also provided a potential list of speakers for the lecture series.
This time, she proposed both white and black speakers, including Mordecai
Johnson, J. H. Dillard, W. W. Alexander, W. T. B. [sic] Du Bois, Jackson
Davis, John Hope, ‘‘and other individuals of both races and the various
schools of thought.’’ Carney emphasized to Embree that such a series could
have a positive effect on white students at Columbia, most of whom were
living for the first time in a multiracial community:
Every race and nationality of the world is represented among our

student body almost annually. The atmosphere of tolerance thus
created has a pronounced effect upon all who enter it and does much
for our Southern students in particular. All this together with the type
and ability of the colored students themselves, the genuine interest of
our faculty, and the sociological background of Harlem, certainly af-
fords rare opportunity for making a contribution to the solution of this
important problem.57
Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund sent Embree a letter of

support, commending Carney’s work in interracial relations. Embree
agreed to provide $1,000 to support the 1930 lecture series.
In the spring semester of 1930, the first Rosenwald lecture series was
held. The choice of speakers showed the close involvement of Teachers
College with the white philanthropic groups dominating black education in
the South. Among the speakers were James Dillard, president of the Jeanes
Foundation and the John Slater Fund and member of the General Edu-
cation Board (GEB) and the Phelps-Stokes Fund; S. L. Smith of the Rose-
nwald Fund; and Jackson Davis of the GEB. But the series also included
leading African American intellectuals like John Hope, president of More-
house; Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard; and W. E. B. Du Bois, who
was then editor of The Crisis. Mabel Carney, who began the series with a
lecture on ‘‘The General Historical Setting and Present Status of Negro
Education in the United States,’’ was the only woman included.58
Carney initially emphasized the value of the series for white students. In
her report to Embree on the success of the 1930 series, she was particularly
careful to describe the contribution of African American speakers and the
respect with which they had been treated.59 She mentioned that she had
made certain that black and white speakers had the opportunity to meet
with faculty and administrators. When she learned that S. L. Smith could
stay over, she reported to Embree that she ‘‘hastily arranged an informal
luncheon group including Dean Russell, Dr. M. C. Del Manzo, our Provost,
Professor Paul R. Mort, Director of our School of Education, and a few
others responsible for college policies.’’60 John Hope was given a dinner
attended by 120 people, ‘‘both white and colored.’’ Hope’s lecture had an
audience of six hundred. W. E. B. Du Bois, who, along with his wife, Nina,
was an acquaintance of Carney’s, was given a dinner party attended by
fourteen faculty members at the Faculty Club. Carney reported that ‘‘he,
too, gave a very good address.’’61
The Rosenwald Fund continued its support of the lecture series in 1931
and 1932. In 1931, Carney again began the series with a lecture called
‘‘Introductory Survey of Negro Education and Racial Progress in the Unit-
ed States.’’ The 1931 series included three women in addition to Carney:
Rossa Cooley, who described her work as principal of the Penn School in
South Carolina; Lucy Slowe, Dean of Women at Howard; and Rebecca
Davis from the Jeanes Fund. Slowe and Davis spoke jointly on the education
of Negro women and girls.62 The 1932 lecture series included, among
others, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White, secretary of the NAACP.
We can assume that the lectures given by Du Bois and by Thomas Jesse
Jones presented very different views of black education, but there are no
transcripts of these lectures. Carney had asked Embree to support their
publication, but he refused.63 Although the lectures seem to have been a
success and despite Carney’s request for further funding, the Rosenwald
Fund ended its support in 1932. The lecture series was continued but on a
smaller scale, reduced from ten lectures to five.
CARNEY’S SHIFTING UNDERSTANDING OF RACE
One of Mabel Carney’s striking qualities is the way that her understanding
of race and racism continued to develop and change during her lifetime.
Carney’s commitment to bettering race relations in the United States, cou-
pled with her warm and compassionate nature, led her to take a close
interest in the welfare of individual African American and African students
at Teachers College. In one letter to Embree, she described the commit-
ment of some Teachers College faculty members to black students in words
that almost certainly described herself. These faculty members, she wrote,
‘‘act as special advisers and confidants of Negro students in various matters
of student welfare including scholarships, selection of courses, and place-
ment.’’64 Carney’s support of African American students took the form of
academic advice, recommendations, and sometimes direct requests for
scholarships.65 In March 1930, for example, she wrote to the General Ed-
ucation Board (GEB), asking them to provide financial support for two
African American students—Meadustine Dangerfield, who needed only one
summer session to complete her master’s degree, and Edna Colson, who
was seeking a doctorate.66
Carney’s relationship with Edna Colson was particularly close and com-
plex. While Carney worked actively to provide Colson with material and
moral support, their relationship also reveals Carney’s uneasiness about
how to respond to the racist practices of Teachers College. When Colson
received her fellowship in 1930s, Carney wrote to congratulate her. But she
also wrote to Colson that she might like to have a room ‘‘in the apartment
reserved for colored girls’’ at Seth Low Hall. That Carney may have un-
derstood that this offer could have been offensive to Colson is suggested by
her handwritten note on the letter: ‘‘If you have other plans which you
prefer to follow do not hesitate to discard this suggestion. Perhaps you will
prefer to try International House.’’67 It was a common practice to have
African American students live in the International House, a practice that
suggested that African American students were foreigners in their own

country. In the end, Colson seems to have asked for a room in the Inter-
national House rather than in the apartment reserved for colored girls. In
her letter recommending Colson to the International House, Carney de-
scribed Colson as ‘‘a colored girl (very light) of much refinement and ex-
ceptional ability.’’68 In a second letter, Carney noted the value of having
Colson live with the foreign students. ‘‘In living in the house she will be able
to demonstrate the new relationships and attitudes which are beginning to
hold in American life on this entire question of Negro and white. It seems to
me highly desirable to keep a few of our best colored representatives in the
house.’’69 This sequence of letters captures a mix of concern, admiration,
and uneasy acceptance of racist practices in Carney’s dealings with African
American students at this time.70
Both Carney’s support of racial justice and her acceptance of white pa-
ternalism were grounded in her deep Christian beliefs. On a mime-
ographed announcement of the 1932 lecture series on Negro education, for
example, she wrote a note to Dean Capen of the Hartford Seminary, ‘‘This
is another of my special interests—Home missionary work.’’71 In 1928, Car-
ney had been invited to give a course of lectures on ‘‘Problems of Mission-
ary Education’’ at the Hartford Seminary. Dean Capen wrote to Carney,
‘‘For some time we have wished you not only to visit Hartford and the
School of Missions, but to give to some of our students, at least those pre-
paring for Africa, certain lectures along the line of dealing with primitive
peoples.’’72 Given her deep Christian beliefs and her positive view of the
missionaries she had met in Africa, it was natural that Carney would wel-
come this opportunity to become involved with missionary education. And
there is no indication in her correspondence with Capen that she objected
to his description of Africans as ‘‘primitive.’’ Topics in her course included
the aim of the missionary enterprise, the organization and objectives of
missionary schools, and curriculum and methods (with an emphasis on the
progressive project method). In her syllabus, Carney identified the broader
goal of these schools as ‘‘religious education and character training,’’ and
she saw the purpose of the secondary schools in particular as preparing
‘‘village leaders as teachers, catechists, pastors, health agents, agriculturists,
and home demonstrators.’’ 73
Carney’s modesty and self-depreciation is shown in her reaction to the
arrival in the United States of Charles Loram, the well-known South African
educator, who was given a position at Yale in 1932. In January 1932, Carney
wrote to Dean Capen, suggesting that Loram should replace her as the
instructor of the course she was teaching at Hartford:
He has a big reputation in African affairs and might do a much better

job that I am doing. Then, too, he is nearby and could probably give
you more time that I should ever be able to offer. I am not making this
suggestion because I am tired of the work, but because I think he
would give better service to your school.74
But when Loram came to speak at the seminary, Capen was not impressed.
He wrote back to Carney, ‘‘In regard to Dr. Loram, we had him up here for a
chapel talk and conference some weeks ago, but I confess we were not greatly
impressed by him as one who could do the work which you are doing for
our students.’’75 Carney continued to teach at the Hartford Seminary until
1941. She never wavered in her commitment to missionary education.
Although Carney’s support of Christian missionary work remained
strong, her understanding of race and racism in the United States changed
in the 1930s. Because she did not write reflectively about the evolution of
her thinking about race, we can only speculate about the influences on her
thinking. Her own experiences visiting the segregated South and her in-
teractions with African American students, scholars, and activists must have
made an impact. She was obviously aware of the broad critique of racism
and capitalism that emerged in the Depression years and was familiar with
the cultural relativism of Franz Boas and his colleagues in the Anthropology
Department at Columbia. Boas and his students argued that ‘‘racial’’ dif-
ferences were not innate, but developed in response to social, geographical,
and social conditions. They were historical and thus malleable.76 Carney
had been aware of the work of Franz Boas since the 1920s. She sent him a
copy of the ‘‘African Letters’’ in 1926, with a note describing her trip and
asking his help in finding photographs of ‘‘Hottentots and Bushmen’’ for a
forthcoming slide lecture. She wrote,
I have meant for many years to try to get acquainted with you but have
never seemed to find time. You may know that I am the woman in
Rural education here at Teachers College who acted for nearly four
years as faculty adviser to Kamba Simango. I have long had an interest
in Negro education in America, in fact, and have recently had the
privilege of extending this interest to Africa, having just completed a
25,000 mile trip around the dark continent during the last eight
months.77
There is no record of Boas’s response, either to the ‘‘African Letters’’ or to

Carney’s request. But Carney continued to correspond with Boas through
the 1930s, primarily about the needs of African students at Columbia and
Teachers College.
In the early 1930s, Carney gained more firsthand knowledge of condi-
tions in the segregated South. During her 1932 winter sabbatical leave,
Carney spent two months in the South visiting black normal schools and
agricultural colleges, again under the auspices of the GEB. The goal of this
trip was to present recommendations about rural teacher training activities
to the board. This trip, more so than her 1924 trip to the South, seems to
have shocked Carney. In a December 1932 letter to Dean Capen, she com-
mented, ‘‘I had a remarkable trip through the South seeing conditions of
every type in both schools and rural life, many of which I scarcely thought
possible for this day in American society. All this will contribute to my
background for the little course I give at Hartford and be very helpful in my
work here at Teachers College as well.’’78 Because syllabi and accounts of
Carney’s courses have not survived, it is impossible to know how these
experiences shaped her teaching. According to the Teachers College cata-
log, her 1932 course, ‘‘Problems of a Dual System of Education,’’ began by
looking at ‘‘dual systems’’ in South Africa and Quebec, then compared them
with the system in the United States, examining the ‘‘advantages, disad-
vantages and special dangers of dual systems of education.’’ The course
then looked at various aspects of Negro life and education, ending with ‘‘the
contributions and services of philanthropic boards in this field.’’79 From this
description, it is hard to know whether Carney took a critical or simply
descriptive approach to this topic, although the reference to ‘‘special dan-
gers’’ of dual educational systems suggests a critical stance.
Carney’s support of African American students and her commitment to
the study of Negro education more broadly were beginning to be recog-
nized by African American intellectual and political leaders in the early
1930s. On the 1932 trip to the South, she met with Mary McLeod Bethune,
whom she later invited to speak at Teachers College. After their meeting,
Bethune wrote to Carney,
For so many years you have given fully of yourself in one of the more
strategic of educational fields—the training of young people to meet
the needs of rural districts. Your activities have not only been confined
to your post at Columbia University—you have answered the call of all
races and nationalities whose need for enlightenment has come to
your attention. America is proud of the dedication of your life to
educational advancement.80
A mark of the respect with which Carney was held in the African American
scholarly community was her appointment to the advisory board of the
Journal of Negro Education in 1934; she remained a member of the board
until 1965.
In the mid-1930s, Carney again traveled abroad. In 1934, along with
John Dewey and Harold Rugg of Teachers College, she was invited to South
Africa to speak at an international conference on African education. Her
expenses were paid by the Carnegie Foundation. Of 145 speakers at the
conference, only five were black. Carney’s copresentation with South Af-
rican educator Eva Mahuma was the only joint black and white presentation
at the conference.81 In 1935, Carney organized a three-week tour of Mexico
to examine Mexican efforts in rural education. She co-led the trip with
three Mexican educators. She was particularly interested in the ways that
‘‘Mexican educational authorities have especially developed and employed
the ‘cultural mission,’ the community-centered rural school and the rural-
directed normal school.’’82 An indication of Carney’s growing consciousness
of racism was her concern that the group include African American edu-
cators and her insistence to the Mexican government that African American
students be treated exactly like white students. As she wrote to Dr. John
Gandy of Virginia State, she was seeking to enlist five or six of the ‘‘best
[African American] educational leaders of the country’’ to join the trip in
order to show the Mexicans that ‘‘the Southern point of view is not the only
racial attitude held in the United Sates, and that they need not be wholly
influenced by Southern prejudice in their own action.’’83 Her interest in
economic alternatives is shown in the two summer tours of rural cooper-
atives in Nova Scotia that she organized in conjunction with the Cooperative
League of the USA and the Extension Department of St. Francis Xavier
University in Nova Scotia.84
POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE 1930S
By the mid-1930s, the crisis of the Depression had led to the emergence of
much more radical social movements in the United States. Both students
and professors were attracted to Communist and socialist critiques. In 1934,
a group of left educators at Teachers College led by George Counts and
Harold Rugg founded the journal Social Frontier, which published articles
challenging unchecked capitalism and advocating the need for a ‘‘new social
order.’’85 When cafeteria workers at Teachers College picketed to protest
working conditions and job discrimination in fall 1935, they were supported
by a number of students and faculty members. And some Teachers College
professors, most notably George Counts and John Childs, became prom-
inent members of the American Federation of Teachers.86 Although there is
no evidence of Carney’s involvement in these activities, there is no doubt
that the political rhetoric and climate of the college had changed markedly
by the mid-1930s.
While the radical movements of the 1930s led to a broad questioning of
American social institutions, the Nazi rise to power in Germany led to an
increasing concern with both racism and anti-Semitism among Teachers
College faculty.87 One response to the growing white consciousness of racism
in the mid-1930s was the development of the intercultural education move-
ment, an approach to teaching tolerance in the schools. The intercultural
movement, which was centered in New York, was led by Rachel DuBois, (no
relation to W. E. B. Du Bois). DuBois, who was white and a devout Quaker,
seems to have been motivated by the same kind of religious social ethics as
Carney. At a Quaker conference in London in 1920, DuBois found herself
shocked by the depiction of racism in the United States. She returned to the
United States committed to working to address social problems, particularly
those grounded in prejudice and discrimination. In the mid-1920s, she
developed a system of school assemblies and programs celebrating ethnic
cultures, which came to be known as the Woodbury Plan. In the early
1930s, DuBois entered Teachers College, where she began work on a
doctoral degree, and in 1934, she organized the Service Bureau for Inter-
cultural Education, an organization that disseminated materials and infor-
mation about the intercultural approach.88
Although the intercultural movement held an admirable goal of a tol-
erant and equitable society, it has been criticized for its emphasis on chang-
ing cultural perceptions as the means to ending racism. Economic and
political structures were not addressed in the assemblies and school pro-
grams emphasized by Rachel DuBois and other interculturalists. Instead,
the intercultural movement focused on attitudes, arguing that greater un-
derstanding of ethnic differences would lead to tolerance. Nonetheless, in
the mid-1930s, Rachel DuBois was one of the few educators arguing for the
importance of addressing racial and ethnic differences in the school cur-
riculum. Carney’s personal relationship with DuBois is unclear, but Carney
did invite DuBois to speak at various events. In 1935, DuBois conducted a
series of five lectures at Teachers College on ‘‘racial appreciation and cul-
tural backgrounds in elementary and secondary schools.’’89
By the mid-1930s, the Communist Party, which was stronger in New
York City than in most areas of the United States, had developed a powerful
critique of segregation and racism. In 1936, a publication called The Ed-
ucational Vanguard briefly appeared at Teachers College, published by ‘‘the
Teachers College unit of the Communist Party.’’90 The membership of the
Teachers College group is unknown, and it is unclear the extent to which
the views of the Vanguard were shared by other students. In its second issue,
the Vanguard turned to racial issues, accusing Teachers College of ‘‘Jim
Crowism’’ and condemning what it described as both overt racism and
paternalistic policies and practices. The college, the Vanguard asserted,
has developed Negro discrimination into a science. Masked by charity

and paternalism, discrimination flourishes wherever Negro students
move. Negroes are banned from residence in Whittier, Johnson, and
Bancroft Hall. In Seth Low Hall, they are given the smallest, darkest
rooms in the rear. They are not allowed to swim in the Thompson
pool. The Negro Education Club, ostensibly the center of Negro
activities at Teachers College, is dominated by a philosophy of social

inequality. Here, when the Negro students should discuss the prob-
lems that face them in their personal and professional lives, they are
treated like privileged members of a slave race . . . . The Negro Ed-
ucation Club has done nothing to fight Negro discrimination. Its
members should join with the Communist Party in a struggle to make
Negro culture and Negro personality outstanding and alive at Teach-
ers College.91
Although the Vanguard attacked policies and practices throughout the col-
lege, the criticisms of the Negro Education Club were a direct attack on
Carney, the faculty member most closely associated with the club and with
African American students.
At the same time that the Vanguard’s issue on racism at Teachers College
appeared, unnamed (and presumably white) students from Seth Low Hall,
the only integrated dormitory at Teachers College, wrote to Dean Russell,
objecting to the presence of African American students in the dormitory.
They wrote,
We wish to call to your attention that rooms have been rented to

colored women at Seth Low within the last few days and we wish to
protest for we feel that the International House is the place for folk of
different color and race. We also wish to call to your attention that
when our rooms were rented to us, no mention was made of the fact
that we would have to share the hall and parlors with colored people.92
In response to the Vanguard critique and to the question of segregated

housing, an eight-person committee, which included Mabel Carney, was
formed in May 1936 to consider ‘‘the problem of the colored student in
Teachers College.’’
According to the committee’s minutes, Dr. Del Manzo opened the meet-
ing by summarizing the issues before it: ‘‘the Communistic news, The Van-
guard,’’ the situation in the dormitories, the participation of ‘‘colored
students’’ in Foreign Field Courses, and ‘‘the question of colored students’’
at the Horace Mann School and the Lincoln School, the two elementary
schools run by Teachers College. In the discussion of the college’s policy
with regard to dormitories, the committee noted that the present policy was
to reserve one apartment with five rooms in Seth Low Hall for African
American students. One of the committee members suggested that the col-
lege ‘‘take some colored students but try to keep the number down.’’ An-
other mentioned that at Barnard, ‘‘If they apply, Miss Libby tells them they
will be the only colored girl and that there are southern girls in the house
who might make it uncomfortable for them.’’ Another member noted, on
the other hand, that Columbia made no distinction in terms of race in its
dormitory assignments.93
In the end, Mabel Carney made a series of suggestions to the committee.
She suggested that two faculty meetings be held in the winter, one with a
speaker ‘‘of the colored race’’ and one to discuss policies; that more atten-
tion be paid to Negro issues in courses; that Negro activities be encouraged;
and that ‘‘faculty members taking courses abroad should be broad minded
and sympathetic toward the colored people.’’ In the context of the times,
these were sympathetic and liberal suggestions, but in response to the Van-
guard’s accusations, these were weak indeed. The committee’s final recom-
mendations were equally vacillating. The committee made no mention of
integrating the Teachers College dormitories, only recommending the
opening of one additional two-room suite for African American students.
Other issues, such as integrating the Horace Mann and Lincoln elementary
schools, were not mentioned.94
Carney was aware of the increasingly radical critique of racism at Teach-
ers College not only through the Vanguard’s accusations, but through stu-
dent work in her own classes. In spring 1937, Carney seems to have given
students in her course, ED 256D, ‘‘The Education of Negroes in the United
States,’’ a group assignment to prepare reports on various aspects of race
relations and the dual system of education in the United States. These
reports, written one year after the accusations of racism in the Vanguard,
presented strong criticisms of segregation and racism. One paper, entitled
‘‘Critique of the Dual System in the U.S.,’’ argued that the system of sep-
arate schools in the South was never intended to be equal, but was a way of
maintaining social and economic inequality between the races. Moreover,
the impact of segregation was psychologically dangerous to black children,
leading them to believe in their own inferiority. The authors argued that
Negro students in segregated schools were not only faced by ‘‘barriers
which thwart the normal strivings of the ego and lead to psychopathic
disturbances,’’ but also that they were ‘‘neither labor conscious nor polit-
ically conscious.’’95 Another class committee wrote on the topic, ‘‘Some
Things Teachers College Should Do to Promote More Wholesome Attitudes
and Better Relations Toward Negroes.’’ This committee suggested hiring
Negro professors or whites with a ‘‘liberal, modern attitude toward Negroes
and other minority groups,’’ forbidding derogatory remarks toward Ne-
groes in class, including units on Negro education in all educational foun-
dations courses, and insisting that Horace Mann and Lincoln schools be
integrated. They also advocated for the establishment of a faculty commit-
tee to deal with these issues and suggested that Negro students, on their
part, ‘‘do their share to meet the white group half way; to be tolerant and
patient and to avoid growing narrow and bitter, even toward those who do
not try to understand them.’’96
The student authors of both of these reports were careful to acknowl-

edge Carney’s positive contribution, a reasonable move since she was their
professor in this course. But they must also have trusted Carney enough to
present such sharp criticisms. The authors of ‘‘Critique of the Dual System
in the U.S.,’’ in discussing the psychological damage of racism, noted that
‘‘efforts to sublimate or destroy these emotional twists on the Negro stu-
dents at Teachers College constitute a big contribution of Miss Carney to the
general welfare.’’97 And the authors of ‘‘Some Things Teachers College
Should Do to Promote More Wholesome Attitudes and Better Relations
Toward Negroes’’ were careful to acknowledge the value of ‘‘the progres-
sive steps that have been taken such as those by the Department of Rural
Education, the organization of a Negro Education Club, the offering of
courses dealing with the Education of Negroes in the United States, and the
conducting of lectures on Negro Education and Race Relations.’’98 Despite
their sympathetic mention of Carney’s work, both of these reports provide
sharp and politically sophisticated critiques of racist practices at Teachers
College and racism and segregation in general.
Possibly in response to growing student radicalism, there is evidence that
the Rosenwald Fund was becoming less certain that Teachers College was a
good place to send Southern black graduate students by the late 1930s. In
June 1938, Carney wrote to Raymond Paty at the Rosenwald Fund, voicing
her concern about the Rosenwald Fund’s seeming lack of support for
Teachers College and her own work in general. She wrote that she had
heard of three cases of Negro students who were told by officials at the
Fund that they should not attend Teachers College. In her typically polite
but pointed way, Carney wrote that she was not writing in a ‘‘mood of
petulance or criticism,’’ but continued, ‘‘it is simply that I have noted for
some time the lack of moral support for our work from the Rosenwald Fund
and if there is any good reason for this attitude, I need to know what it is so
that our general offerings and activities in the fields touching Negro life
may be strengthened and improved.’’99 But apparently the attitude of the
Rosenwald Fund did not change. In August 1939, Carney wrote again, this
time more bluntly, to Edwin Embree. She began, ‘‘I should like to know
specifically and definitely what you have against Teachers College, especially
against my own work in Rural Education and for the advancement of Negro
welfare.’’100 She was particularly concerned about Albertine Parker, a stu-
dent from Grambling College who had completed part of her work toward
the master’s degree at Teachers College. The Rosenwald Fund awarded her
a fellowship for graduate work at Stanford. Carney wanted to know why the
Fund discouraged Parker from pursuing her doctorate at Teachers College.
Embree wrote back, saying that the Fund had no prejudice toward Teachers
College but was guided by the policy that education should be adapted
‘‘to the given scene.’’ With this in mind, the Fund was averse to sending
students who would return to the rural South to ‘‘the greatest metropolis of
the urbanized and industrialized North.’’101 Since the Fund had supported
Southern African American students at Teachers College for many years,
this argument is rather dubious. There is no record of Carney’s reply.
FINAL YEARS
Carney taught half time at Teachers College in 1941 and retired in the fall
of 1942. In a confidential statement that she sent to friends in February
1942, she wrote that she had been planning to retire in 1945, but because of
falling enrollments, Teachers College was reducing its staff: ‘‘Several mem-
bers of our instructional group must thus be released at the close of the
present academic year and among this number I am included.’’102 She also
mentioned her ‘‘impaired hearing,’’ which may have made it difficult for
her to continue to teach. She called the circumstances of her retirement
‘‘thoroughly cordial.’’ In fact, Teachers College provided her with the pen-
sion that she would have received had she worked until she was sixty-five.
Carney also retired from the Hartford Seminary in 1941, the year before
her retirement from Teachers College.103
By 1941, Carney’s views about race had shifted markedly from her views
of the 1920s. She was increasingly willing to name and condemn racism. In
November 1941, she sent a memo to her colleagues at Teachers College
with an offprint of a New York Times article describing conditions in Harlem.
In the accompanying memo, Carney commented that ‘‘we’’ (meaning
whites) ‘‘seem to have developed a veritable blind spot which distorts our
vision, numbs our conscience, and stays our professional service and sense
of responsibility’’ in relation to the conditions in which Negro Americans live:
How otherwise can we explain the attitude of a great, rich, powerful

nation which professes faith in democracy yet includes within its cit-
izenry 13,000,000 people—one tenth of its total population—who are
economically exploited, politically disenfranchised, and even barred
from the defense and work of their own land? How otherwise un-
derstand the indifference of ‘‘a dream city’’ with all its reform and
social progress which still includes within its limits one of the worst
ghettos to be found anywhere in the world today?104
This analysis, with its condemnation of the economic exploitation and po-
litical disenfranchisement of African Americans and its description of Ha-
rlem as a ghetto, is far from the missionary charity and acceptance of
working within segregated institutions that marked Carney’s earlier writings.
The extent of Carney’s journey and the development of her thinking
about race and racism can been most clearly in the 1942 ‘‘Report on Negro
Education and Race Relations at Teachers College, ‘‘written by Carney with

the input of a selected group of Teachers College faculty, white and black
students, and ‘‘selected Negro leaders of New York City, Washington, D.C.
and vicinity.’’105 The ‘‘Report on Negro Education and Race Relations’’ is a
remarkable document. It began with a summary of the status of Negroes
in the United States in 1942, describing the racist practices shaping black
life in both the North and the South: ‘‘Among all Negroes in the United
States of whatever rank, creed or condition, the greatest single influence
in life is the indefensible American practice of segregation and discrimination
against all persons of African descent.’’106 The report then went on to
document the gross inequalities of education and employment between
black and white. Education and legal treatment, the report pointed out,
are ‘‘the two phases of life where Negroes are supposed to have the pro-
tection of the State,’’ yet ‘‘the rank injustice and travesty of the law still
practiced against the Negro in most Southern courts is notorious all
over the world, and especially among Axis powers seeking to inject the
disruptive idea of color into our present War program.’’107 Teachers
College, the report continued, had a special responsibility to address the
racial problem.
Because of the relatively large number of Negro students, the report
noted, Teachers College offered one of the best opportunities for future
black and white educators to meet and study together, an opportunity par-
ticularly important for white Southern students. The report summarized
the history of Teachers College around the question of race, noting that the
first study of race relations occurred in the Rural Education Department, a
natural development since the South was the most rural region of the
United States, with one third of the population Negro. Of course, ‘‘rural
education’’ meant Mabel Carney. The report went on to list Carney’s two
trips to the South for the General Education Board, the summer course she
taught at Hampton Institute in 1925, her trips to Africa in 1926 and 1934,
the first lectures on Negro education in the early 1920s, the introduction of
a unit course around the lectures in 1925, the founding of the Negro Ed-
ucation Club in 1927–1928, the Rosenwald lecture series, the introduction
of ED 256D, ‘‘Special Problems in the Education of Negroes in the United
States’’ in 1932, and the accomplishments of Negro students, which in-
cluded a number of doctoral dissertations.
When moving to recommendations for the future, the report set out the
principles that should guide future work around race. First, citing Franz
Boas, it asserted the principle that ‘‘all groups or races of mankind, broadly
considered, have been created equal in native intelligence.’’108 A second
principle was equality under the law and equal opportunity to education.
But the Report also noted that despite the goal of equality, people in the
United States continued to experience great inequalities. This difference of
treatment needed to be recognized. There was no difference of ability

among racial groups, but African Americans in the United States still had to
struggle to attain ‘‘the full stature of citizenship and the enjoyment of wor-
thy living.’’ This meant that African American students at Teachers College
should receive an identical education and treatment as all other students,
‘‘except at those points where color discrimination, segregation and injus-
tice, in both their present and their past experience, necessitates extra spe-
cialized provision for the attainment of accepted norms and goals.’’109 The
Report then asked for the establishment of a Committee of the Faculty to
consider the ‘‘the whole matter of Negro student welfare and American
Negro life’’ as ‘‘a subject of consideration and research for the coming year.’’
This was a pressing need ‘‘because of the retirement of the faculty member
who has heretofore carried chief responsibility for this phase of student
welfare.’’110 The report demanded a specific course focusing on Negro
education, the inclusion of units on Negro education and race in founda-
tional courses, and support for doctoral students seeking to work on topics
on race or Negro education. The report also noted the need to provide
advice and support to Negro students and to continue to support the Negro
Education Club, although it might have a new name to broaden its appeal to
white and foreign students.111 The year after Carney’s retirement, the Ne-
gro Education Club was renamed the Intercultural Group, a change that
was intended to appeal to ‘‘other groups as well as the Negro.’’112 But that
seems to have been the most significant immediate change in response to
the report. The other recommendations of the ‘‘Report on Negro Educa-
tion and Race Relations at Teachers College’’ were not taken up until after
the Second World War, and not in any significant way until the growth of
the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
In the 1942 summer session, Carney organized the last of the annual
programs on Negro education and race relations that she had led since the
mid-1920s. There were four events in this final summer, including a mass
meeting on August 4 that attracted an audience of two thousand. Speakers
included Mary McLeod Bethune, Arthur Wright of the Southern Education
Foundation, Walter Daniel from Howard University, George Counts from
Teachers College, and Eleanor Roosevelt.113 In recognition of Carney’s
support of black education, Howard awarded her an honorary doctorate
later that year. After retiring, Carney moved back to her family home in
Illinois. In the first years of her retirement, Carney continued her involve-
ment with Negro education. She taught courses on rural education at
Hampton Institute in the summers of 1943 and 1944 and subsequently
taught summer sessions at Fisk. In 1944, she began a bimonthly news cir-
cular for ‘‘former students and friends,’’ which covered topics in rural and
Negro education. In 1949, she was honored at Tuskegee for her work
supporting Jeanes teachers.
CONCLUSION
Mabel Carney’s life and work illuminates the shifting understandings of

race in the interwar years, but it also shows the capacity of individuals to
grow and change in response to a changing social world. Carney’s basic
democratic sympathies were evident from her early work in rural educa-
tion. Although she never directly challenged conventional assumptions of
gender, she defended the abilities of women teachers and supported wom-
en students and colleagues throughout her life. Her ability to change and
grow is clearest around her understanding of race. In her early work with
the General Education Board, her first trip to Africa, and her involvement
with missionary education, Carney took for granted her privilege as a white
person and saw her role as helping subordinate Negroes and African na-
tives; she accepted the world she saw around her as it was explained by
those in power. Her deep Christianity and conviction of the benefits of the
Western intellectual tradition and its mores led her confidently to support a
‘‘humane’’ colonialism. But Carney’s understanding continued to develop
during her years at Teachers College. As she worked more closely with
African and African American students and scholars and was introduced to
ideas of race as a social and historical construction, she moved from her
early maternal stance to a more respectful and egalitarian relationship with
black students and became less confident of her own superiority and right
to suggest choices to them. By the end of her career, she put forth a strong
condemnation of racist practices and demanded both racial integration and
economic and political equality. In her changing understanding of race, she
took the same path as other white progressive educators who were influ-
enced by the ideas of Boas and his followers and shaken by the radical
critiques of United States society of the 1930s. But Carney not only changed
her thinking, she also acted in the world to support individual students
and eventually to publicly condemn racism and call for fundamental
change.
As Lee Baker notes, ‘‘race in the United States is at once an utter illusion
and a material reality, a fiction and a ‘scientific’ fact. It is a political wedge
and a unifying force. It is structured by legislation yet destabilized by judicial
fiat, shaped by public opinion but also configured by academic consensus.
Though historically contingent, it is constantly being transformed.’’114 Ma-
bel Carney’s life exemplifies the power of race as both material reality and as
fiction. Understandings of the meaning of race in the United States began to
shift in the years between 1918 and 1941. In times like these, individuals
had a choice: they could change their thinking and actions in response to a
changing world and new ways of naming the world, or they could hold onto
the old ways. In considering the life of Mabel Carney and comparing her
with many of her contemporaries—or to ourselves—I believe that we should
have respect and admiration for a person who maintained a consistent eth-
ical stance but who was open to learning from others and whose political and
social understanding continued to deepen and grow throughout her life.
Notes
1 Racial and ethnic terminology in the period covered in this article underwent several
shifts. My choice of terms here reflects these historical changes and the complexity of con-
temporary usage. I want to thank Professors Margaret Crocco and Cally Waite for sharing their
research files on Carney from Fisk and Virginia State Universities.
2 Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1991).
3 Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue (New York: Oxford, 1991).
4 See, for example, Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign
against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
(New York, 1949). For a contemporary discussion of the concept of the White ally, see Beverly
Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about
Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
5 Kolchin, Peter. ‘‘Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,’’ Journal of
American History 89 (June 2002): 170.
6 Mabel Carney was born in 1885 in Carthage, Missouri, the eldest of ten children of
James and Elizabeth Carney. In 1896, when she was eleven, the Carney family moved to
Marseilles, Illinois, eighty-five miles south of Chicago. Although the family experienced hard
times after the Depression of 1896, Carney managed to remain in high school, graduating from
Marseilles High School in 1901. That year, when she was sixteen, she entered Illinois Normal
School at DeKalb. But like many young women with limited resources, Carney had to leave
full-time study at Normal School in order to support herself by teaching in rural schools. Her
most formative experience in these early years seems to have been her time teaching at the
John Swaney Consolidated School, a model rural school developed by the Clear Creek Friends
Community. Between 1906 and 1909, Carney taught at Western Normal School in Macomb,
Illinois. She continued to take summer courses at the Illinois Normal School and finally re-
ceived her teaching certificate in 1909. After completing the course of study at Illinois Normal
School, with eight years’ experience teaching in one-room, consolidated, and normal schools,
Carney entered Teachers College, Columbia, at that time the best-known school of education in
the United States, to study for her bachelor of arts degree. She spent the 1910–1911 academic
year in residence in New York, receiving her B.A. in 1911.
7 Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 84.
8 National Education Association, ‘‘Report of the Committee of Twelve on Rural
Schools,’’ Addresses and Proceedings (1897): 385; James Madison, ‘‘John D. Rockefeller’s General
Education Board and the Rural School Problem in the Midwest,’’ History of Education Quarterly
(Summer 1984): 181–99.
9 See, for example, David B. Danbom, ‘‘Rural Education Reform and the Country Life
Movement, 1900–1920,’’ Agricultural History 53 (1979): 462–74.
10 One of the most influential of these works was Evelyn Dewey’s New Schools for Old (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1919), a study of the introduction of democratic and progressive methods at
the Porter School in Kirksville, Missouri.
11 As Carney commented, ‘‘Intimate experience has so ingrained the realism of country
school conditions upon my point of view that I have disregarded the conventionalities of
literary form, and shall refer to the country teacher throughout this discussion by the use of the
feminine pronoun’’ (37). Mabel Carney, Country Life and The Country School (Chicago: Row,
Peterson and Company), 1912.
12 Carney had no question of the capability of women teachers to hold these positions, as
her description of the opportunity and advantages of the country teacher for community
leadership shows: ‘‘In the first place, the position of the teacher as a director of children
requires that she be at least something of a leader; the more developed her powers of lead-
ership, the greater her influence both within and without the schoolroom. Moreover, people
turn to the school as a center of authority, and look to the teacher, without jealousy or criticism,
as one who has the right to lead . . . . She also embodies a new point of view with often a larger
perspective than any one else, and is sensitive to community needs and conditions . . . . She is
also the guardian of the educational interests of the community and may easily enlarge her
office to include adult instruction and thus introduce ideas of progress relating to all phases of
farm living, social, economic, and scientific. The fact that she usually comes from outside the
neighborhood and has no pecuniary interests to promote also adds to her power’’ (189),
Country Life and the Country School.
13 Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Cubberley (New York: Teachers Col-
lege Bureau of Publications, 1965); Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
14 Ellwood Cubberley, Rural Life and Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 283.
15 All subsequent quotations from Mabel Carney, ‘‘Woman’s Contribution to Education,’’
Journal of Education 109 (May 1929): 529.
16 Mabel Carney to Dean James Russell, March 26, 1917. Box 11, File 184B, James
Russell Papers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
17 ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 27 (March 1927): 752.
18 Dunn continued to be active in rural education through the 1930s. During the De-
pression, she participated in New Deal programs. In March 1933, for example, she attended
the conference of Southern Mountain in Knoxville, proceeding to Berea and Antioch to con-
sult. ‘‘Notes,’’ Teachers College Record (May 1933): 763.
19 National Education Association. Addresses and Proceedings 1907–1940 (Washington: Na-
tional Education Association). As president, Carney encouraged presentations on progressive
and democratic education. In a 1924 article in the Journal of Rural Education, Carney listed the
benefits of the rural school reform that she envisioned: ‘‘A richer social life, school consolidation
and the county unit, better salaries, good supervision, a professionalized county superintend-
ency, a standardized training for rural teachers, and a whole larger vision and idealism of the
possibilities of country life are some, and only some of the essential factors, which must enter
into such a state revival as is here implied’’ (404). Mabel Carney, ‘‘Practical Standards for
Departments of Rural Education in Normal Schools and Teacher’s College,’’ Journal of Rural
Education 3 (May/June 1924): 404.
20 Ina Barnes, Rural School Management (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 2. After her year as
president, Carney continued to be involved in the activities of the NEA’s Rural Education
Department, serving as chair of the Committee on Resolutions in 1931 and as a member of the
National Advisory Committee on Education.
21 Carney was also a close friend of Helen Heffernan, Commissioner of Rural and El-
ementary Education in California, in these years. Heffernan succeeded Carney as president of
the Department of Rural Education of the National Education Association in 1930.
22 The first course on rural education at Teachers College seems to have been offered in
1912; by 1916, students were able to major in Rural Education. According to Carney’s 1918
Teachers College Record article, ‘‘The Service of Teachers College to Rural Education,’’ the new
Department of Rural Education was to be organized into three divisions: the country life
division; the division of rural elementary education, teacher training, and supervision; and the
division of rural secondary education. A laboratory school was to be established in New Jersey
for local field activities. ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 17 (March 1916): 288–91;
Mabel Carney, ‘‘The Service of Teachers College to Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 19
(January 1918): 155.
23 ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 19 (November 1918): 496.
24 Margaret Crocco and Cally Waite, ‘‘The Education of African Americans at Teachers
College, Columbia University from ‘Plessy’ to ‘Brown’: A Research Report.’’ Paper presented at
the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April 2000.
25 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1995), 5.
26 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques and Horace Mann Bond,
The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Octagon Books, 1966). Carter
G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1933). See also
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race: Vol. 2 (New York: Holt, 2000).
27 James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988); William Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education (New York:
Teachers College Press, 2001); Robert Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss, Dangerous
Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1999).
28 For a critical view of the Northern philanthropists, see Anderson, The Education of
Blacks in the South, and Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education. The essays in Philanthropy
and Cultural Imperialism (Ed. Arnove) examine philanthropy more broadly in the context of
international capitalism.
29 For a more sympathetic view of the U.S. philanthropists and race, see Anderson and
Moss, Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930.
30 Mabel Carney to Dean James Russell, November 22, 1922. Box 11, File 184B, James
31 ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 21 (September 1920): 405; ‘‘Rural Educa-
tion,’’ Teachers College Record 25 (May 1924): 256.
32 Jones himself is a controversial figure. W. E. B. Du Bois called him the ‘‘evil genius of
the Black race’’ because of his early support of industrial education for African Americans. For
conflicting evaluations of his career, see Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education; and
Anderson and Moss, Dangerous Donations. Herbert Kliebard explores Jones’s earlier career in
‘‘ ‘That Evil Genius of the Black Race’: Thomas Jesse Jones and Educational Reform,’’ Journal of
Curriculum and Supervision 10 (1994): 5–20.
33 Mabel Carney to Dr. R. J. Leonard, December 10, 1924. Box 11, File 184B, James
34 See Richard Glotzer, ‘‘The Career of Mabel Carney: The Study of Race and Rural
Development in the United States and South Africa.’’ Unpublished manuscript. Box 28, Folder
388, Mabel Carney Papers, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut.
35 Edward Berman, ‘‘Educational Colonialism in Africa: The Role of American Founda-
tions, 1910–1945,’’ in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad,
ed. Robert Arnove (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 179–202.
36 For a summary of Loram’s career, see R. Hunt Davis, ‘‘Charles T. Loram and an Amer-
ican Model for African Education in South Africa,’’ African Studies Review 19 (1976): 87–99.
37 ‘‘Notes,’’ Teachers College Record 27 (March 1926): 666.
38 See James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South (University of North Carolina
Press, 1988), for a discussion of the GEB’s policies.
39 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
40 Wrong later headed the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa.
For discussions of Wrong’s later career, see Ruth Compton Brouwer, ‘‘Books for Africans:
Margaret Wrong and the Gendering of African Writing, 1929–1963,’’ The International Journal
of African Historical Studies 31 (1998): 53–71, and Ruth Compton Brouwer, ‘‘Margaret Wrong’s
Literacy Work and the ‘Remaking of Woman’ in Africa, 1929–48,’’ Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 23 (1995): 427–52.
41 Mabel Carney, ‘‘African Letters.’’ Privately printed, page 2. Historical Reference, Mabel
Carney. Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
42 Ibid., 2.
43 Ibid., 22.
44 Ibid., 20.
45 Ibid., 21.
46 Ibid., 4.
47 Ibid., 2.
48 Ibid., 9.
49 Ibid., 16.
50 Ibid., 3.
51 Ibid., 25.
52 Ibid., 16.
53 Ibid., 8.
54 Ibid., 19.
55 ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 27 (March 1927): 752.
56 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, April 12, 1929. Rosenwald File. Box 185, File 6, Fisk
University Archives. Carney described the meeting in a letter to Dean Russell, noting that Em-
bree was particularly interested in the ‘‘interracial activities’’ at Teachers College. Carney sug-
gested to Dean Russell that they ask the Rosenwald Fund for ‘‘about $1000 a year with which to
develop two good series of unit course lectures on Negro education and Race Relations,’’ building
upon the successful lecture series they already ran. Mabel Carney to Dean Russell, April 22, 1929.
Box 12, File 186, James Russell Papers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
57 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, May 31, 1929. Box 12, File 187, James Russell Papers,
Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
58 ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 31 (March 1930): 593. The pamphlet ad-
vertising the series placed American race relations in the context of international politics,
noting that approximately one thousand foreign students studied at Columbia University each
year. These students were curious about American race relations, ‘‘while American students,
both colored and white, particularly of the younger group, are beginning to comprehend the
seriousness of the situation and the necessity for broader principles and new techniques in its
solution.’’ Teachers College Columbia University, ‘‘Lectures on Negro Education and Race
Relations,’’ February 10 to April 28, 1930, Fisk University Archives.
59 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, March 22, 1930. Fisk University Archives; Mabel
Carney to Edwin Embree, April 10, 1930. Box 12, File 187, James Russell Papers, Milbank
Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
60 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, March 22, 1930.
61 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, April 10, 1930. Box 12, File 187, James Russell
Papers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
62 Teachers College, Columbia University. Lectures on Negro Education and Race Re-
lations. February 4 to April 15, 1931. Fisk University Archives.
63 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, October 10, 1931. Fisk University Archives.
64 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, May 31, 1929. Box 12, File 187, James Russell Papers,
Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
65 In 1929, for example, Carney wrote to Dean Russell, requesting a scholarship for Abra
Asgrey, an African American student. Mabel Carney to James Russell, April 30, 1929. Box 12,
Folder 186, James Russell Papers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
66 Mabel Carney to Jackson Davis, March 13, 1930. Box 33, Folder 1, Special Collections,
Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.
67 Mabel Carney to Edna Colson, May 9, 1930. Box 33, Folder 1, Special Collections,
Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.
68 Mabel Carney to Miss Pauline Benton, May 14, 1930. Box 33, Folder 1, Special Col-
lections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.
69 Mabel Carney to Miss Pauline Benton, May 24, 1930. Box 33, Folder 1, Special Col-
lections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.
70 After Colson left Teachers College to join the faculty of the Virginia State College,
Carney continued to stay in contact with her. Colson was polite and appreciative in her letters in
return. In a letter thanking Carney for materials that she had sent, Colson wrote, ‘‘I hear you
are going to Africa again this summer. Is that true? If so, Africa is fortunate. Your efforts in
behalf of the education of Negroes have certainly won the admiration of those who study the
problem sincerely’’ (Edna Colson to Mabel Carney. April 12, 1934. Box 33, Folder 2, Special
Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University). Carney was a member of
Colson’s dissertation committee and, typically, she went beyond simply reading chapters or
suggesting research methods. In a letter to Dr. John Gandy of Virginia State, for example,
Carney asked whether he might be able to give Colson a lighter teaching load in the fall so that
she would have time to work on her dissertation. When Colson first submitted her dissertation,
two of her readers were highly critical. Carney asked the administration to add a different
reader, arguing that Colson’s work had been misread by professors unfamiliar with her topic
and approach. When Dr. Hallenbeck was asked to join the committee, Carney wrote to him,
volunteering to answer any questions he might have and describing Edna Colson as ‘‘one of the
most able colored women in the United States’’ (Mabel Carney to Dr. W. C. Hallenbeck, May
20, 1936. Box 33, Folder 5, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State
University). But in 1938, Colson wrote again to Carney about the continued criticisms of her
committee. Dr. Hallenbeck also seems to have had serious reservations about Colson’s disser-
tation, although the nature of these criticisms is not clear. In June 1938, Colson wrote to Carney
that she was planning to ask for a leave of absence in order to complete revisions (Edna Colson
to Mabel Carney. June 10, 1938. Box 33, Folder 6, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial
Library, Virginia State University). Colson finally received her doctorate in 1941.
71 ‘‘Negro Education and Race Relations.’’ Mimeograph. Box 28, Folder 381, Mabel
Carney Papers, Hartford Seminary.
72 Dean Capen to Mabel Carney, February 1, 1928. Box 28, Folder 381, Mabel Carney
Papers, Hartford Seminary.
73 ‘‘Problems of Missionary Education.’’ 1928. Box 28, Folder 387, Mabel Carney Papers,
Hartford Seminary.
74 Mabel Carney to Dean Capen, January 23, 1932. Box 28, Folder 381, Mabel Carney
75 Dean Capen to Mabel Carney, January 27, 1932. Box 28, Folder 381, Mabel Carney
76 See the discussion of Boas and his school in Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
77 Mabel Carney to Franz Boas, October 8, 1926. Franz Boas Papers, American Philo-
sophical Society, Philadelphia.
78 Mabel Carney to Dean Capen, December 31, 1932. Box 28, Folder 382, Mabel Carney
79 Teachers College, Columbia University. Courses in Rural Education, Summer Session,
July 10 to August 18, 1933. Fisk University Archives.
80 Mary McLeod Bethune to Mabel Carney, January 4, 1932, Carney Papers, Cited in
Alice Carney, ‘‘Mabel Carney: Adult Educator and Champion of Rural Education’’ (EdD
dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1993). Six years later, Carney was instrumental in
bringing Bethune to Teachers College, where she was one of the speakers at the Negroes in
Africa and America Today program sponsored by the Negro Education Club. A flyer advertised
the program: ‘‘This program will be one of the most interesting and significant productions
ever sponsored by a student group in Teachers College. Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, chief
speaker of the evening, is commonly regarded by those qualified to judge as one of the greatest
living American women today and as a platform orator second to none. Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones
is an authority of international reputation in African affairs while the film presented will be
authentic, colorful, and strikingly informative. ‘‘The Negro in America Today.’’ Mimeograph.
Box 28, Folder 385, Mabel Carney Papers, Hartford Seminary.
81 Richard Glotzer, ‘‘The Career of Mabel Carney: The Study of Race and Rural Devel-
opment in the United States and South Africa.’’ Unpublished manuscript, Mabel Carney
papers, Hartford Seminary.
82 ‘‘Educational Tour to Mexico,’’ Box 28, Folder 388, Mabel Carney Papers, Hartford
Seminary.
83 Mabel Carney to Dr. John Gandy, June 3, 1933. Box 33, Folder 2, Special Collections,
Virginia State University.
84 ‘‘Second Annual Cooperative Conference-Tour of Nova Scotia.’’ n.d. Box 28, folder
387, Mabel Carney Papers, Hartford Seminary.
85 George Counts, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? (New York: John Day, 1932);
Chester Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression (New York: Random House, 1969).
86 Lawrence Cremin, David Shannon, and Mary Evelyn Townsend, A History of Teachers
College Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 166–69.
87 See Ronald Goodenow, ‘‘The Progressive Educator, Race and Ethnicity in the Depres-
sion Years: An Overview.’’ History of Education Quarterly (Winter 1975): 365–394
88 For information about Du Bois’s life, see O. L. Davis, ‘‘Rachel Davis DuBois: Inter-
cultural Education Pioneer,’’ in Bending the Future to Their Will, ed. Margaret Crocco and O. L.
Davis (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 169–85; Nicholas Montalto, A History of the
Intercultural Educational Movement 1924–1941 (New York: Garland, 1982).
89 For an overview of the impact of the intercultural movement, see Abraham Citron,
Collin Reynolds, and Sarah Taylor, ‘‘Ten Years of Intercultural Education in Educational
Magazines,’’ Harvard Educational Review 15 (March 1945): 129–33; Shafali Lal, ‘‘Securing the
Children: Social Science, Children, and the Meaning of Race 1939–1968’’ (PhD diss., Yale
University, 2002).
90 ‘‘Educational Vanguard,’’ Vol. 1, No. 2. Box 12, Folder 186. James Russell Papers,
Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University. According to Cremin, Shannon, and
Townsend (A History of Teachers College, 172), this publication may have appeared earlier under
the names Red Researcher and the Spark, the Columbia Spark, and later as The Vanguard-Scholar.
91 ‘‘Educational Vanguard,’’ Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 1.
92 Seth Low Residents to Dean Russell, April 21, 1936. Box 15, File: Committee on Race
Relations, William Russell Papers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
93 Untitled typescript. Box 15, File: Committee on Racial Relations. William Russell Pa-
pers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
94 Untitled typescript. Box 15, File: Committee on Racial Relations. William Russell Pa-
pers, Milbank Library, Teachers College, Columbia University.
95 ‘‘Critique of the Dual System in the U.S.,’’ n.p. Report by Class Committee in Edu-
cation 246D, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. May 19, 1937, n.p. Fisk Uni-
versity Archives.
96 ‘‘Some Things Teachers College Should Do to Promote More Wholesome Attitudes
and Better Relations Toward Negroes.’’ Report by Class Committee in Education 246D,
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. May 19, 1937, Fisk University Archives.
97 ‘‘Critique of the Dual System in the U.S.’’ Report by Class Committee in Education
246D, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. May 19, 1937, Fisk University
Archives.
98 ‘‘Some Things Teachers College Should Do to Promote More Wholesome Attitudes
and Better Relations Toward Negroes.’’
99 Mabel Carney to Raymond Paty, June 8, 1938, Fisk University Archives.
100 Mabel Carney to Edwin Embree, August 3, 1939, Fisk University Archives.
101 Edwin Embree to Mabel Carney, September 7, 1939, Fisk University Archives.
102 Mabel Carney, ‘‘Confidential Statement for Personal Friends,’’ February 1, 1942. Box
33, Folder 3, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.
103 In 1938, her involvement with the seminary had been curtailed and her course given
to Dr. Mason Olcott, a returning missionary from India. Typically, Carney was gracious
about this change. She wrote to Capen, ‘‘I have greatly enjoyed my association with your
institution, but Dr. Olcott’s long experience in the mission field makes him much better qual-
ified to do this work for you than I can ever hope to be. P.S. In case Dr. Olcott locates elsewhere
I shall, of course, be glad to go on with my present arrangement at Hartford. In this event,
however, I am willing, as previously stated, to have my compensation reduced to $400 because
of the present difference in the cost of foreign travel.’’ In the end, the seminary did hire Olcott
but asked Carney to be part of their staff and to come up to Hartford for a few seminars or
lectures. Carney wrote back in her usual gracious manner, saying that Capen was ‘‘showing
great wisdom’’ in hiring Olcott and that she would be pleased to continue ‘‘an occasional
association which may be desirable.’’ But in 1940, professors at Teachers College took a fifteen
percent pay cut, and when Olcott did not work out, Carney returned to the seminary for the
1940–1941 academic year. Mabel Carney to Dean Capen, October 24, 1938. Box 28, Folder
382, Mabel Carney Papers, Hartford Seminary. Mabel Carney, ‘‘Faculty and Students of
Teachers College,’’ November 19, 1941. Box 28, Folder 386, Mabel Carney Papers, Hartford
Seminary.
104 Mabel Carney, ‘‘Faculty and Students of Teachers College,’’ November 19, 1941. Mabel
Carney Papers, Box 28, Folder 386, Hartford Seminary.
105 ‘‘Teachers College and the Education and Welfare of Negroes.’’ Report submitted to
the Teachers College Administration and Faculty, August 14, 1942, page 2. Vertical File 790716,
Folder 153, Historical Reference Mabel Carney, Special Collections, Milbank Library, Teachers
College, Columbia University.
106 ‘‘Teachers College and the Education and Welfare of Negroes.’’ Report submitted to
the Teachers College Administration and Faculty, August 14, 1942, page 2. Vertical File 790716,
Folder 153, Historical Reference Mabel Carney, Special Collections, Milbank Library, Teachers
College, Columbia University.
107 Ibid., 3.
108 Ibid., 10.
109 Ibid., 11.
110 Ibid., 12.
111 ‘‘Rural Education,’’ Teachers College Record 36 (May 1935): 744. That year, the goals of
the club were stated as (1) to advance the interests of Negro life and education throughout the
United States; (2) to promote fellowship, acquaintance, and esprit de corps among its members,
both colored and white; and (3) to develop greater knowledge, understanding, and appre-
ciation of Negroes and their achievements and needs on the part of white students and faculty
in Teachers College. ‘‘The Negro Education Club.’’ Mimeograph. Mabel Carney Papers, Box
28, Folder 388, Hartford Seminary.
112 ‘‘Concerning Negro Education, Professor Carney and Teachers College, Columbia
University.’’ Mimeographed letter. Box 33, Folder 3. Special Collections, Johnston Memorial
Library, Virginia State University.
113 Walter Daniel, ‘‘Negro Welfare and Mabel Carney at Teachers College, Columbia
University,’’ Journal of Negro Education 11 (1942): 561.
114 Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1.
KATHLEEN WEILER is professor of education at Tufts University. Her

research has focused on the social, historical, and political analysis of ed-
ucation in relation to questions of gender. She is the author of Women
Teaching for Change (1988) and Country Schoolwomen (1998). She has pub-
lished ethnographic studies of classroom teaching, theoretical discussions of
feminist theory and pedagogy, and historical studies of women educators.
She is currently writing a joint biography of two California women pro-
gressive educators.

Weiler

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Mabel Carney at Teachers College: From

Home Missionary to White Ally

In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of black students attended Teachers

a one-room school, to a teacher in a consolidated school, to training teacher,

Without intentional disrespect to teachers now engaged in rural serv-

women as a class: ‘‘The distinctive contribution of women to education is

Association’s (NEA’s) Department of Rural Education, was established in

MABEL CARNEY AND RACE

In her essay on ‘‘Women’s Contribution to Education,’’ as in Country Life and

she became head of the Department of Rural Education at Teachers College

South have been analyzed by a number of historians. W. E. B. Du Bois,

the speakers should be white. In a letter to Dr. Leonard of Teachers College

THE AFRICAN LETTERS

Imagine us then stringing along the primitive African highway as so

‘‘NEGRO EDUCATION’’ AT TEACHERS COLLEGE

The influence of African interests upon rural Education activities in

In this description of Carney’s activities, African and African American are

Every race and nationality of the world is represented among our

Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund sent Embree a letter of

CARNEY’S SHIFTING UNDERSTANDING OF RACE

suggested that African American students were foreigners in their own

He has a big reputation in African affairs and might do a much better

There is no record of Boas’s response, either to the ‘‘African Letters’’ or to

POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE 1930S

has developed Negro discrimination into a science. Masked by charity

activities at Teachers College, is dominated by a philosophy of social

We wish to call to your attention that rooms have been rented to

In response to the Vanguard critique and to the question of segregated

The student authors of both of these reports were careful to acknowl-

How otherwise can we explain the attitude of a great, rich, powerful

Education and Race Relations at Teachers College, ‘‘written by Carney with

treatment needed to be recognized. There was no difference of ability

Mabel Carney’s life and work illuminates the shifting understandings of

KATHLEEN WEILER is professor of education at Tufts University. Her

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