Five Years Later: What West Virginia’s 1925–1926 Report Reveals About Black Progress—and the Barriers That Remained

In 1921, West Virginia created its Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics. Its first director, T. Edward Hill, was given the immense responsibility of documenting the lives of Black West Virginians, examining their economic and social conditions, and advocating for their welfare.

The Bureau’s first report, covering 1921–1922, was largely an act of discovery. It gathered population figures, counted schools and professionals, recorded employment, and identified institutions that much of the state had previously overlooked.

By the time Hill submitted the 1925–1926 report, the Bureau had completed five years of work. The later volume is longer, more detailed, and at times more candid. It moves beyond simply asking, “Who is here?” and begins asking harder questions:

Where are Black West Virginians finding opportunity?

Where are they being denied it?

What progress has been made—and what remains unfinished?

The answers reveal a community growing in size, education, professional achievement, homeownership, civic leadership, and determination. They also reveal persistent discrimination in employment, housing, health care, and public education.

Most importantly, the report reminds us that progress is rarely a straight line. Sometimes improvement appears in the numbers. Sometimes the greatest change is that conditions once ignored are finally being measured and placed on the public record.

From a New Office to a Statewide Institution

The 1921–1922 report described a newly established Bureau assembling information and building relationships. Five years later, the Bureau reported conducting surveys and investigations, visiting schools and businesses, mediating disputes, helping families locate farms and homes, and working in 41 of West Virginia’s 55 counties.

That institutional growth matters. A state office led by a Black director was collecting evidence about Black life and presenting it directly to the governor, legislators, public officials, and citizens.

The difference between the two reports can be seen in several important measures:

Measure	1921–1922 report	1925–1926 report	What the difference suggests
Black population	86,345 in the 1920 census	Approximately 98,000 estimated in 1926	Probable growth, although a census count and Bureau estimate are not directly comparable
Black coal-mine workers	20,781 in 1921	23,990 in 1925	Increase of 3,209 workers, or about 15 percent
One-room Black schools	298 in 1922	266 in 1926	A decline of 32 one-room schools
Schools with two or more rooms	132 in 1922	370 in 1926	Major reported expansion, although classifications or reporting coverage may also have changed
First-class Black high schools	6	10	Greater access to classified secondary education
Classified high-school teachers and principals	84	140	A substantial increase in secondary-school staffing
Black farm operators	504 in 1920	715 in 1925	Increase of 211 operators, or nearly 42 percent
Physicians listed	47 in the published 1921–1922 directory	62 in 1925–1926	Growth combined with more complete enumeration
Dentists listed	13	31	Growth combined with broader reporting
Black hospitals and nurse-training schools	4	7	Expansion of Black-controlled medical institutions

These figures should be read carefully. The Bureau’s methods and categories evolved, and some later totals were more comprehensive than those in the first report. Still, the overall pattern is unmistakable: Black West Virginia was building institutions, developing professional leadership, and demanding greater opportunity.

Work at the Heart of West Virginia’s Economy

Coal remained central to the lives of Black West Virginians. The Bureau counted 23,990 Black mine workers in 1925, compared with 20,781 in 1921. The later report estimated that Black workers constituted approximately 21.5 percent of all mine employees.

Those numbers demonstrate how essential Black labor had become to West Virginia’s economy. But the 1925–1926 report also documents the instability and danger behind the totals.

Its investigation of the 1925 coal dispute described Black miners caught between operators seeking replacement workers, unions that officially prohibited racial discrimination, and local white workers who sometimes refused to work beside Black men. The report also identified the growing influence of the Ku Klux Klan in some northern coalfields.

In the Northern Panhandle, the evidence was especially uneven. Ohio County recorded 93 Black mine workers in 1921 and 175 in 1925—an increase of approximately 88 percent. Yet the intervening totals moved sharply up and down, reaching 221 in 1924. Employment was growing, but it was far from secure.

The report also found stark differences between individual operations. It stated that a mine owned by the Wheeling Steel Corporation at Benwood employed no Black workers, while the Locust Grove Mine near Wheeling employed at least 75 Black miners among an estimated workforce of 300.

This was not simply a story of expanding employment. It was a struggle over who could work, under what conditions, and with what protection.

Educational Progress—and an Unfinished Promise

The educational statistics are among the report’s most encouraging findings.

Between 1922 and 1926, the number of one-room Black schools declined from 298 to 266, while the reported number of schools with two or more rooms increased from 132 to 370. First-class Black high schools increased from six to ten, and classified high-school teachers and principals increased from 84 to 140.

The credentialing figures are even more dramatic. The number of Black teachers holding first-grade certificates rose from 200 in 1922 to 807 in 1926, while those grouped under less-standardized “other certificates” fell from 471 to two. Although changes in certification categories may explain part of this enormous shift, the Bureau presented it as evidence of a better-trained teaching force.

College enrollment was also rising. The report recorded 442 students in college in 1926, compared with 60 in 1922. This comparison is not exact—the 1926 figure included normal-school students—but it still reflects a rapidly expanding demand for higher education.

Yet Hill’s report refused to describe the system as equal. It accused some local boards of education of being extraordinarily reluctant to provide modern buildings and documented attempts to evade laws requiring equal salaries for equally qualified Black and white teachers. It also observed that Black young people were largely excluded from apprenticeships in mining, printing, construction, mechanics, and other skilled trades.

Education was advancing, but opportunity after graduation remained restricted.

Wheeling’s Lincoln High School illustrates the need for careful local research. In 1921–1922, Lincoln was named as one of West Virginia’s six first-class Black high schools. The 1925–1926 report again placed Lincoln in its first-class section, listing J. H. Rainbow as principal, but marked it as a “conditioned first class” school. The report does not explain that designation. It should not automatically be read as either progress or decline without additional school-board and state education records.

Even that uncertainty is valuable. It gives us a precise historical question to pursue.

A New View of Black Housing in Wheeling

One of the most important differences between the two reports is the appearance of a detailed Wheeling housing survey.

Conducted in May and June 1926, the survey examined 438 homes occupied by 1,722 Black residents—most of the approximately 2,000 Black residents the Bureau estimated were then living in the city.

The survey found:

• 38 percent of the homes were rated in “good” sanitary condition.

• 53 percent were rated “fair.”

• 9 percent were rated “poor.”

• The average home contained 4.6 rooms.

• The average rent was $22.90 per month.

• Twenty-six percent of the homes were occupied by their Black owners.

• An additional 17 percent were owned by Black landlords and rented to Black tenants.

This means that 43 percent of the Black-occupied housing covered by the survey was owned by African Americans, although only 26 percent represented owner-occupied homes. The Bureau estimated the total value of Black-owned housing in Wheeling at $703,800.

That was an impressive base of property ownership. At the same time, Wheeling’s 43 percent Black ownership share was the lowest among the cities compared in the report.

The listed percentages were 45.8 percent in Charleston, 54.7 percent in Clarksburg, 60 percent in Huntington, and 82.1 percent in Bluefield.

The survey also found that many rental homes lacked bathtubs, indoor toilets, window screens, or modern plumbing. Corporate and estate-owned rental properties were described as being in poorer condition than many individually owned homes.

The 1921–1922 report did not include a comparable Wheeling housing survey. Therefore, the 1926 findings cannot tell us whether local housing had improved or worsened during those five years. What changed was visibility. For the first time in these reports, hundreds of Black Wheeling households were being counted room by room, property by property, and dollar by dollar.

Health Becomes Part of the Record

Health information was also far more developed in the later report.

After West Virginia entered the federal registration area for vital statistics in 1925, the Bureau was able to publish detailed birth and death figures. It nevertheless warned that the data had not been collected for enough years to support firm technical conclusions.

For Ohio County, the report recorded 46 Black births and 52 deaths in 1924. In 1925, it recorded 47 births and 60 deaths.

These figures do not prove that the local Black population was declining. Migration, incomplete registration, and other demographic factors must be considered. They do, however, point toward a serious health burden.

The Bureau identified tuberculosis as the leading reported cause of death among Black West Virginians and argued that public-health programs were failing to reach much of the state’s Black population. It called for trained Black physicians, nurses, and health educators to be employed in communities where trust and direct contact were essential.

This was an important development from the earlier report. Black health was no longer treated only as a general welfare concern. It had become a documented public responsibility.

Wheeling’s Growing Professional and Civic Leadership

The professional directory in the 1925–1926 report names five Black physicians practicing in Wheeling:

• Dr. G. A. Banks

• Dr. John H. Dangerfield

• Dr. E. S. Kennedy

• Dr. K. J. Pronty

• Dr. W. A. Wright

  
  

Four of these physicians—Banks, Kennedy, Pronty, and Wright—also appeared in the 1921–1922 report. Dr. Dangerfield was a new addition to the published Wheeling list.

The city’s Black dentists increased from one named practitioner to two: Dr. M. A. Morrison and Dr. R. M. Hamlin. The later report also identified John J. Davis as a pharmacist and C. W. Moorman as a chiropodist in Wheeling.

These names represent more than professional achievement. In an era when Black students could not freely enter every university, professional school, hospital, or apprenticeship program, each career required navigating barriers that white professionals did not face.

The report also preserves evidence of Black public and civic leadership in Wheeling. William Turner continued to serve as a police officer. Ashby Jackson was listed as a firefighter. Harry H. Jones served as a clerk in the federal Office of the Recorder of Deeds, assisted the Bureau with its statewide study of Black business, held a place on the Republican State Executive Committee, and remained associated with Wheeling’s NAACP branch. Charles Williams was listed as an attendant in the federal court for West Virginia’s Northern District.

Wheeling was also home to a Blue Triangle branch of the YWCA, chaired by Mrs. W. A. Wright.

Together, these entries reveal a Black community participating in medicine, business, government, politics, civil rights, and public service—not at the margins of Wheeling’s history, but within its daily civic life.

Did Conditions Improve?

The most honest answer is: in some areas, clearly; in others, the evidence remains incomplete.

The decline in one-room schools, expansion of larger schools, increase in high-school teachers, growth in farm operators, and larger professional directories all point toward genuine advancement.

But employment discrimination persisted. Skilled apprenticeships remained largely closed. Housing conditions were unequal. Public-health services frequently failed to reach Black neighborhoods. Even the Bureau’s own language sometimes placed responsibility on tenants, workers, or poor families while giving insufficient attention to discriminatory systems, absentee landlords, restricted housing markets, and unequal public investment.

The later report is therefore not a simple celebration of progress. It is a record of progress under pressure.

Perhaps its greatest difference from the 1921–1922 report is that it gives us a fuller picture.

Black West Virginians appear not merely as a population total, but as miners, teachers, students, farmers, physicians, dentists, homeowners, renters, businesspeople, public servants, organizers, parents, and children.

They were building lives and institutions while confronting barriers designed to limit both.

The Meaning of the Record

Five years can seem like a brief moment in history. Yet between the Bureau’s first report and its 1925–1926 volume, hundreds of additional teachers earned advanced credentials. New schools and hospitals appeared. More Black West Virginians operated farms. Professional communities expanded. Wheeling’s Black families accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in property, supported civic organizations, and placed their talents in the service of the city.

These accomplishments did not erase inequality. They made inequality harder to defend.

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, preserving these reports is about more than saving statistics. It is about restoring people to the historical record and recognizing what their numbers represent: years of study, exhausting work, carefully saved wages, homes purchased, children educated, patients treated, businesses opened, and communities strengthened.

The 1925–1926 report leaves us with an enduring lesson. Progress begins when people refuse to remain invisible. It grows when facts are preserved, names are remembered, and unfinished work is carried forward.

The people recorded in these pages did their part.

The record now asks us to do ours.

-T

Sources and Research Notes

Primary source: T. Edward Hill, The Negro in West Virginia: Report of T. Edward Hill, Director, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia, to Governor Howard M. Gore, 1925–26 (Charleston, WV: Jarrett Printing Company, 1926). Digitized copy at HathiTrust.

Comparison source: T. Edward Hill, The Negro in West Virginia: Report of T. Edward Hill, Director, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia, to Governor Ephraim F. Morgan, 1921–1922 (Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1922). Digitized copy at HathiTrust.

Page references in the 1925–1926 report:

• Bureau activities and statewide work: p. 5.

• Population estimates and health findings: pp. 7–16.

• Coal employment and labor investigation: pp. 17–41.

• Physicians, dentists, pharmacists, hospitals, nurses, and lawyers: pp. 42–52.

• Farming and homeownership: pp. 53–61.

• Wheeling Housing Survey: pp. 67–70.

• Education and comparative school statistics: pp. 87–97.

• Federal, state, county, and municipal officials: pp. 135–139.

• Professional, welfare, civic, and political organizations: pp. 139–140.

Important cautions:

• The 1926 population total was a Bureau estimate, while the earlier figure came from the 1920 federal census.

• Some professional increases reflect more complete reporting as well as actual growth. For example, the later report listed 62 physicians but stated that 60 had been counted two years earlier, even though the published 1921–1922 directory contained only 47 entries.

• Educational classifications and reporting practices changed. The report’s totals should be interpreted as historical administrative data, not as perfectly standardized modern statistics.

• The report’s title and quotations retain the historical term used by the source. Modern references in this article use “Black” or “African American.”