Hollis F. Price: Apprenticeship at Tuskegee Institute, 1933-1940

Hollis F. Price: Apprenticeship at Tuskegee Institute, 1933–1940 HOLLIS F. PRICE (1904–82) WAS A DISTINGUISHED African American educator who served as president of LeMoyne College in Memphis— the school’s first black president—from 1943 until his retirement in 1970. He oversaw the building of the modern LeMoyne (now LeMoyne-Owen College) in both physical and academic terms. Price was also an important civic figure in Memphis during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—both a leader in the black community and an essential link between that community and white Memphians. The first stage of his career as a college educator, from 1933 to 1940, was spent at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, where he learned much that would prepare him for service as dean (1941–43) and then president at LeMoyne. Hollis Price’s father, William G. Price (1868?–1941), was also an educator. From 1899 until 1933 he was principal of a private secondary school for blacks, Gloucester Agricultural and Industrial (A&I) School, in the community of Capahosic in eastern Virginia.1 William Price had graduated from Hampton Institute in 1890, in the same class with his fellow Virginian Robert R. Moton, who succeeded Booker T. Washington as principal of Tuskegee Institute in 1915 and served in that capacity until his retirement in 1935. After a year of teaching in Virginia and four years of advanced study at Westfield State Normal School2 in Massachusetts, the elder Price spent 1895–96 G E O R G E F. B A G B Y George F. Bagby, Professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, is writing a biography of Hollis Price. He thanks Ronald Heinemann of the Hampden-Sydney History Department, and the editors and three anonymous readers of The Alabama Review for their helpful suggestions for improving earlier versions of this essay. 1 See George F. Bagby, “William G. Price and the Gloucester Agricultural and Industrial School,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 1 (2000): 45–84. 2 Now Westfield State College. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 30 teaching in the night school at Tuskegee Institute. In 1896 he took a position as assistant principal at Gloucester A&I, and was elevated to the principalship three years later. That school—which, despite its name, never had a significant program of industrial education and in fact sent many graduates on to college—was financed by the American Missionary Association (AMA), an outreach arm of the Congregational Church. As Hollis Price’s seven years at Tuskegee proved, his father’s—and mother’s—ties to the AMA would be essential to the first decade of his career.3 Hollis Price grew up with his father’s school. Until 1915 the family lived in a dormitory, and then in their own house next door to the school. The youngster, an avid reader, was also a help to his father, performing menial and clerical duties at Gloucester A&I and, when he got a little older, becoming his father’s driver. The oldest of three Price children, he easily assumed responsibilities. In 1921, at the age of seventeen, young Price graduated from his father’s school, tied for the highest academic average in his class.4 The next six years saw Hollis Price getting a first-rate education in Massachusetts: two years of additional secondary work at Williston Academy in Easthampton,5 followed by four years at Amherst College. After graduation from Amherst in 1927, Price taught at his father’s school and tried his hand at graduate school in economics, taking two courses at Columbia University in the summer of 1928. By the summer of 1930, with the onset of the Great Depression, all signs indicated that Gloucester A&I was approaching financial disaster. The elder Price—noting the declining enrollment at his school and the recent creation of a publicly operated Gloucester Training School for 3 On the American Missionary Association (AMA), see Augustus F. Beard, A Crusade of Brotherhood: A History of the American Missionary Association (1909; repr. New York, 1972); Frederick L. Brownlee, New Day Ascending (Boston, 1946); Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and...