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1 Jack Woofter: The Education of a Southern Liberal
- Indiana University Press
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1 Jack Woofter The education of a southern liberal Born in Macon, georgia, in 1893, Thomas Jackson (“Jack”) Woofter Jr. was raised in an atmosphere of new south optimism about public education, economic regeneration , good roads, and the resurgence of the white middle class. an only child, with slight connections to the planter aristocracy in georgia, he was part of the post-Populist generation that assumed responsibility for the modernization of the region and the consignment to history of feudal features of southern life. His father, t. J. Woofter sr., one of eight children of a West virginian farm family distantly related to Thomas “stonewall” Jackson, became a schoolteacher at the age of sixteen and was principal of a normal school at twenty-three. after studying law at the University of West virginia, he crisscrossed the south as a teacher and superintendent until 1893, when he became a mathematics instructor at mercer University in macon. In 1897, he moved to milledgeville, the old state capital about one hundred miles southeast of atlanta, to teach psychology and philosophy at georgia normal and Industrial college. Having completed a Phd by summer study with the american school in chicago, he joined the University of georgia (Uga) in athens in 1903 as a professor of philosophy and education , specializing in rural schools and modern testing methods. He pushed for better funding for black normal schools and the admission of women to Uga, where a colleague described him as “congenial in association and conversation, [but] of rather solemn face”; his students called him “gloomy.” He was to play a key role in the academic and physical growth of Uga until the 1920s. an influential president of the southern education council, he sat on the georgia Board of education from its creation in 1911 until 1919, a period of extensive reform. He was a Freemason, a democrat, and a skilled fundraiser, securing money from the georgia-born Wall street banker george Foster Peabody and governor m. Hoke smith for several new projects. President Theodore Roosevelt commended him for persuading new south universities to undertake social and economic research and train reform-minded public officials.1 In 1904, he told the chancellor of Uga, “The University must furnish the constructive thinkers and leaders. no greater opportunity for genuine service is now open to the university.”2 and yet, as a virginian Baptist who owned no land, t. J. Woofter sr. remained a parvenu in georgia. 17 18 | Race Harmony and Black Progress Jack Woofter’s sense of his southernness came primarily from his mother’s family. He idealized callender (callie) gerdine as “a daughter of slaveholders, whose tender spirit embodied the true soul of the old south, whose sympathy for the weaker race set a high example.”3 The oldest of eight children, she grew up in West Point, mississippi, where her grandfather had settled with slaves he brought from oglethorpe county in georgia. In 1860, the gerdine family plantation at West Point was valued at $48,000 and held more than eighty slaves.4 she married t. J. Woofter sr. when he was the district school superintendent and moved soon afterward to georgia. several of her siblings also moved to georgia, including a sister who married the owner of a large plantation near milledgeville, where Jack and his cousins played with the children of black tenants. as he later recalled, he also began to discover things about whiteness. not far from my uncle Harvie’s plantation a “cracker” whom we shall give the alias of Butch carmody had a small three-tenant farm. I could tell from the tone and expression of my elders whenever the subject of Butch was mentioned that they would have preferred it if he had settled in some other neighborhood. It was not uncommon in passing his place to hear the howls and whacks which floated down the road as the harness strap was applied to bare, black buttocks.5 after her husband’s appointment at Uga, callie Woofter joined the charitable work of the athens Woman’s club, raising funds for the university’s hospital, opened in 1915, and helping to create a circulating library for rural schools.6 she brought her son up in the methodist episcopal church, south, through which he encountered liberal ideas, the social gospel, and networks of reforming women’s organizations. In the 1950s, Jack Woofter claimed, “neither from her nor from any of my other southern relatives do I recall ever hearing any remarks...