College and university records are great resources for family history research. These include yearbooks, catalogs, school newspapers, funeral programs, photographs, and documents donated by families.
Several men in my family attended Biddle University, which became Johnson C. Smith University, an HBCU in Charlotte, N.C. Biddle’s catalogs are digitized and are online at DigitalNC, and I love exploring them because they list the names of students, their hometowns, and their majors. I often get side-tracked and find myself tumbling down rabbit holes researching people who are not related to me but are possibly related to people I know. For example, the 1903-1904 catalog, includes several students from Darien, Georgia – Frank Atkins Brown, Hector Charles Miller, David Andrew Rogers, Hercules Wilson Jr., and Harry Wilson Leake. An older catalog, the 1897-1898 edition, includes Benjamin Monroe Grant of Darien.
In the back pages of the catalogs are lists of alumni, including their cities of residence after graduation and their occupations. Most graduates became ministers or teachers, but some became doctors, mail carriers, merchants, printers, farmers, brick masons, missionaries, and Pullman porters.
South Carolina native Walter I. Lewis, who graduated from Biddle University in the class of 1877, was listed as a news reporter in Jacksonville, Fla. This caught my attention.
A Google search revealed that an essay by Lewis was included in a 1902 book titled Twentieth Century Negro Literature: Or A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro by 100 of America’s Greatest Negroes, edited by Daniel Wallace Culp. The book includes essays by many familiar people, including a Jacksonville native and school principal named James Weldon Johnson.
In Lewis’ essay, The Negro as a Writer, he wrote, “The writings of the Negro are full of soul. … The well nigh inexhaustible field of folk-lore of his own people is ready to be told to the world, whether in the crude dialect of the race, or in Americanized English, it matters little. It will make no difference. The English speaking people of both continents will read it if it is written by a master.”
According to Lewis’ bio in the book, he taught at a public school in Spartanburg, S.C., and at a parochial school in Tennessee, before switching to journalism. He was a field correspondent for The Florida Sentinel in Gainesville, the city editor for The Labor Union Recorder in Savannah, Georgia, and then he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to work for The Jacksonville Advocate, The Daily American, and finally, as a reporter for The Metropolis, an evening newspaper that would become The Jacksonville Journal.
