Creator: Branson, E. C. (Eugene Cunningham), 1861-1933.
Collection number: 2610
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Abstract: Branson was an educator, author, and editor, president of the State Normal School of Georgia, 1900-1912, head of its department of rural economics and sociology, 1912-1914, and founder and head of the rural social economics program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Personal and professional correspondence and writings of E. C. Branson. The collection includes papers pertaining to research into all aspects of rural life in the South and in Europe, including an international correspondence and many writings; to his activities as professor at the University of North Carolina; and to varied other public and civic issues, in particular farm tenancy, illiteracy, and rural credit.He was actively involved in North Carolina movements concerning the reclamation of farm land, better port terminal facilities, and good roads. Few papers pertain to Branson’s teaching career before 1914.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Letters discuss race relations in Orange County, North Carolina, and elsewhere (1914, 1916-1917, 1920); lynchings (1915-1921); African-American land owners (1915); schools for African Americans (1917-1918); the northern migration of African Americans (1917); the University Commission on Race Relations (1918); the search for an African-American “draft dodger” (1918); the work of the Southern Publicity Committee for better race relations (1918); wages of African-American workers (1919); civil rights (1919); meetings of the Inter-Racial Committee (1919); recommendations for interracial work with the YMCA (1920); the increase of racial prejudice in the South (1921); attitudes toward the Ku Klux Klan (1922); fundamentalism and the Klan (1926); and the voting of southern African Americans (1927). The collection also includes addresses and essays on the ownership of farms by African Americans in Georgia (1886-1913); “The Negro Working out His Own Salvation” (1913); surveys of the African-American population in Georgia (1911); information about African-American churches in Georgia (1913); and statistics on slave ownership in North Carolina (1915).