Threatening Property by Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant

Author:Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURE 4.16  Simon Atkins’s home in Columbian Heights in 1903.

Source: “Slater Normal School Has Just Observed Its Tenth Annual Commencement Closing a Successful Year,” Winston-Salem Journal, May 15, 1903, 1.

In 1895, the school received $460 from the Peabody Fund and $1,000 from the state legislature, for example; Simon Atkins’s “personal appeal” to an agent of the Peabody Fund was crucial.100 In 1917–1918, a committee chaired by the mayor of Winston-Salem and the treasurer of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company raised over $10,000 from local whites, including $1,000 from R. J. Reynolds, for Slater.101 The strong relationships with local whites built by Atkins and those who worked with him quite literally paid off. A letter written by the president of Slater’s Board of Trustees to North Carolina’s governor Thomas Bickett in 1918 emphasized these relationships in order to encourage Governor Bickett to convince the North Carolina General Assembly to provide the school with $10,000 (which it had promised to do if Slater succeeded in raising the same amount on its own). “The facts really are that while we asked our community for $5,000.00 they have in reality subscribed for $10,000.00, in order to emphasize the cordial realationship [sic] which is existing here between Professor Atkins and the colored people, and the white people of our community,” the letter states.102 Through currying favor, Slater won more money from local whites than from the state of North Carolina and northern philanthropists combined.103

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