Born on June 5, 1825, in Lincoln County,
Georgia, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry’s early life was typical of most elite white
Southern men of his generation. His father, William Curry, was a merchant slaveholder and member of the state
legislature who, like most of his peers, raised his son as the presumptive heir
of his slave-dependent estate. J.L.M. Curry graduated from Franklin College
(later the University of Georgia) in 1843 and graduated from the Law School at
Harvard in 1845. He then returned to Alabama...
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Born in 1824 the son of a professor at Washington College, William
Henry Ruffner graduated from the same in 1842. Soon thereafter he moved to Kanawha
County, Virginia (now West Virginia) to revive a family-owned salt mine. He
soon joined the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the
United States (American Colonization Society), which he served for a few years.
His work for the Society was comprised of recruiting African Americans to the idea
of re-colonization to Liberia...
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The Southern Education Board was established in 1901 as the executive branch of the
Conference for Education in the South, which was founded after a series of meetings,
1898-1900, held at Capon Springs, W. Va. The Board worked primarily to promote public
support for schools and better education, especially in the rural South—it chose
not to challenge Jim Crow laws and the era’s systematic disenfranchisement of Blacks,
on the belief that education and work would overcome ignorance and race prejudice...
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