By 1910 the Ala. Dept. of Education had become interested in the competent and systematic supervision of Negro rural schools in the state. Through grants from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, state agents for Negro schools occupied positions as state superintendents whereby they supervised state and philanthropic activities which benefitted Negro rural schools statewide. James L. Sibley was appointed with General Education Board funds as the state agent of Negro schools in 1913. His travels around the state gave the first reliable reports of conditions in Ala. Negro schools and the results of Negro rural school supervision by the Dept. of Education. The first Negro County Training Schools were developed under the Board to offer training in advance of the common schools. The training schools were to specifically improve instruction and achievement among Negroes, give industrial and agricultural training, to prepare boys and girls to make a living, and to prepare teachers for Negro rural schools. The General Education Board also helped extend a philantrophic program known as the Anna T. Jeanes-Negro Rural School Fund for the purpose of school supervision. The Jeanes workers supervised primary instruction in the schools, organized industrial classes, and instructed in handicrafts, home industries, and homemaking. This group of photographs, collected by James L. Sibley, state agent for Negro schools, documents primarily the activities of the Ala. Dept. of Education toward Negro rural schools in Ala., ca.1915. The collection has 690 prints and 584 negatives which include views of rural school buildings, school-age children, education agents, and teachers. While the great majority of photographs and negatives deal with Negro schools, the collection also includes such subjects as orphanages, bands, transportation methods, agriculture, and homesites relating to both white and black Alabamians. A large portion of the collection deals with educational workshops, programs, and conferences set up by the Dept. of Education to assist Negro teachers. Many of the supervisors are workers associated with the Anna T. Jeanes Foundation-Negro Rural School Fund, Inc. The collection is an excellent source of information on the work of the Dept. of Education toward Negro schools. It also documents the rural Ala. countryside, school buildings, churches, homesites, and people of the early twentieth century very well. Some photographs and negatives of particular interest are those of Ala. homemakers clubs, World War I draftees boarding trains in Conecuh County, school building construction, and rural school agricultural property. Fifteen Ala. counties are represented. Two cubic ft. of the collection is unidentified, unidentified-Ala., and non-Ala. photographs and negatives.
