Jackson T. Davis - Career - Virginia Public Schools

Virginia Public Schools

Upon graduating from the College of William and Mary in 1902, he first became the principal of the public schools of Williamsburg, a small city where William and Mary is located. From 1903 to 1904, he was assistant secretary of the YMCA in the City of Roanoke. He was next principal of the Smyth County Public Schools in the incorporated town of Marion from 1904-1905.

In 1905, Jackson Davis was named Division Superintendent of Henrico County Public Schools, a school division in the large county which adjoins Richmond, where he served for five years. In 1908, he became professionally involved with another Virginian, Virginia Estelle Randolph, who was also to become well known in African-American education as they led Henrico County's role in beginning the work of the Jeanes Foundation.

Anna T. Jeanes was a wealthy Quaker who lived in Philadelphia. She had outlived her other family members. She has been described as "a remarkable woman with a vision for Christian peace which she used her fortune to promote." As she neared the end of her life, she was approached by Dr. Booker T. Washington and others to see if she would help fund their efforts. If she could, she wanted to help "the little country schools", and set aside $1 million from her family inheritance to establish a fund called the Jeanes Foundation. The purpose was to maintain and assist rural schools for African Americans in the South. The organization provided funds to employ supervisors of teachers who were dedicated to upgrading vocational training programs for teachers of black students.

Virginia Estelle Randolph was the third child of former slaves Sarah Elizabeth Carter Randolph and Edward Nelson Randolph. At the age of 16, she graduated from Richmond Normal School (now Armstrong High School) in Richmond, Virginia. Miss Randolph began her career as a school teacher in Goochland County, and then secured a teaching position with the Henrico County School Board, where she opened the Mountain Road School in the north central part of the county in 1892. As a teacher there, Randolph taught her students woodworking, sewing, cooking, and gardening, as well as academics. In 1908, following a proclamation by Virginia Governor Claude A. Swanson, Miss Randolph founded the first Arbor Day Program in Virginia as she and her students planted twelve Sycamore trees.

That year, Davis, a young (24-years old) Superintendent, enlisted Miss Randolph (who was only 32) to bring her 15 years of experience and talents to the Jeanes Foundation program and appointed her to become the United States' first Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teacher. As the overseer of twenty three elementary schools in Henrico County, Virginia Randolph worked with Davis to develop the first in-service training program for black teachers and worked on improving the curriculum of the schools. With the freedom to design her own agenda, she shaped industrial work and community self-help programs to meet specific needs of schools. She chronicled her progress by becoming the author of the Henrico Plan which became a reference book for southern schools receiving assistance from the Jeanes Foundation, which later became known as the Negro Rural School Fund. The teachers were educated to use the procedures developed by Miss Randolph, Jackson Davis and others in normal schools such as today's Hampton University, Tuskegee University and many other historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Dr. James H. Dillard, president of the Jeanes Foundation, credited Jackson Davis and Virginia Randolph as the inventors of the real Jeanes plan. Their work together with the Jeanes Foundation development project helped both Davis and Randolph to commit the rest of their lives to rural and African American education.

In 1910, Jackson Davis was named State Agent for African-American rural schools for the Virginia State Department of Education. Serving from 1910–1915, during this time, he traveled extensively around Virginia, visiting communities, meeting teachers and pupils, and inspecting facilities. His surviving collection of photographs provided vivid graphical impact to accompany his reports from this period of the racially-segregated schools in Virginia.