From Statistics to Action: Black West Virginia on the Threshold of War, 1939–1940
In December 1940, Isaac M. Carper, director of West Virginia’s Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, delivered a report to Governor Homer A. Holt.
The United States had not yet entered the Second World War, but the nation was mobilizing for defense. New industries and training programs promised employment. New Deal agencies had reshaped public relief and public works. Black West Virginians had built schools, churches, businesses, professional organizations, and civic institutions across the state.
Yet one question ran through nearly every section of Carper’s report:
Would Black citizens be permitted to participate fully in the opportunities their labor, taxes, and citizenship helped create?
The Bureau’s earlier reports had documented population, education, employment, health, housing, and professional life. The 1939–1940 report did something more. It examined whether government programs were actually reaching Black communities—and recorded what Black West Virginians believed their state must do next.
This was no longer simply an inventory of Black life. It was an argument for accountability.
A Statewide Community of More Than 125,000
The report presented a preliminary 1939 Black population of 125,751.
The largest populations remained concentrated in the coal-producing counties of southern West Virginia:
McDowell County: 24,588
Kanawha County: 13,801
Fayette County: 12,651
Raleigh County: 12,128
Mercer County: 8,269
Logan County: 7,602
Ohio County’s Black population was listed as 2,805, making it the eleventh-largest county population in the Bureau’s table.
The figure of 125,751 suggests substantial growth from the 86,345 Black residents counted in the 1920 federal census. However, the numbers are not perfectly comparable. The earlier figure was an official census count, while the 1939 total was labeled preliminary. Migration, changing classifications, and different collection methods must all be considered.
What is unmistakable is the geographic reach of Black West Virginia. This was not the history of one coalfield, one city, or one institution. It was a statewide story.
Progress Recorded in Numbers
The report documented a substantial network of Black institutions and economic activity:
Measure reported in 1939–1940 | Number |
Black farm operators | 693 |
Black-owned nonfarm homes | 5,101 |
Black-operated businesses surveyed | 507 |
Employees of those businesses | 936 |
Black churches | 606 |
Total church membership | 54,525 |
Value of church property | Approximately $3.46 million |
Black elementary schools in the statistical table | 325 |
Elementary-school enrollment | 19,412 |
Senior high schools | 31 |
Senior high-school enrollment | 7,359 |
Junior high schools | 8 |
Junior high-school enrollment | 1,262 |
Each figure represented years of collective effort.
The 606 churches were not merely places of worship. They were centers of education, charity, organizing, music, fellowship, and political discussion. The 507 businesses reflected capital saved and invested despite restricted access to credit, commercial property, and many markets.
The 5,101 Black-owned homes carried an estimated median value of $2,100. At the same time, the report counted 20,416 rented nonfarm homes, including 12,445 renting for less than ten dollars a month. Low rent did not necessarily mean affordable comfort. It often reflected deteriorated properties, inadequate facilities, and the limited neighborhoods in which Black families were permitted to live.
The report therefore documented both achievement and confinement.
Essential Labor, Restricted Opportunity
Employment remained one of the clearest examples of that contradiction.
Using 1930 census data, the Bureau counted 47,207 Black gainful workers in West Virginia. Almost half worked in mineral extraction, overwhelmingly in the coal industry. Nearly one-quarter worked in domestic and personal service.
Black labor was essential to West Virginia’s economy, but employment remained concentrated in a narrow range of occupations. Access to skilled trades, clerical positions, public employment, management, and many professions remained limited.
Employment Service figures for April 1, 1940, showed 190 Black active employment registrants in Ohio County—110 men and 80 women. These were registered applicants, not a complete count of unemployed Black residents, but they offer a glimpse of local demand for work as the state emerged from the Great Depression.
The report’s employment committee was direct. It found that Black West Virginians had suffered increasing occupational restrictions and losses, including discrimination by employers and labor organizations. Its members called for:
Black employment in state departments and public agencies;
a statewide conference addressing employment discrimination;
expanded vocational and defense training;
placement based on ability and preparation;
and penalties against labor organizations that excluded workers because of race.
The committee understood that training alone could not overcome a closed door. Preparing a person for a skilled occupation meant little if employers and unions refused to let that person practice it.
What Black Young People Wanted to Become
One of the report’s most moving sections concerned the ambitions of Black students.
A vocational survey asked thousands of young people about their preferred careers. They selected 168 different occupations. The most common choices included teaching, nursing, medicine, mechanics, music, and cooking.
These students were not lacking ambition. Their aspirations extended across education, health care, industry, science, transportation, business, and the arts.
The problem was whether West Virginia would provide the training—and whether employers would provide the opportunity.
That distinction matters. Too often, historical accounts have blamed Black communities for occupational patterns created by exclusion. The Bureau’s findings show young people looking toward a much wider world than the labor market was prepared to offer them.
Training for a Changing Nation
The report documented several promising programs intended to widen that world.
A mining-extension program at West Virginia State College had enrolled nearly 1,000 men since 1937. Its annual enrollment increased from 180 in 1937–1938 to 419 in 1939–1940. The program helped miners study for certification and advancement rather than remaining confined to the lowest positions.
National Youth Administration projects offered instruction in printing, carpentry, welding, automotive mechanics, electricity, plumbing, photography, aviation, nursing, and other fields. At the South Charleston Naval Ordnance Plant, the report noted that 60 Black young people worked alongside white youth.
A general machine shop was also proposed for Wheeling.
West Virginia State College’s civilian pilot-training program, conducted with the Civil Aeronautics Authority, was described as having made an “impressive record.” Readers of our series on Dr. Maceo R. Hamlin will recognize the importance of this program. A 1939 Wheeling newspaper reported that Dr. Hamlin had helped secure civilian aviation training for Black men at the college.
The Bureau’s professional directory also listed Dr. Maceo Hamlin and Dr. M. A. Morrison as Wheeling’s two Black dentists.
Here, within a single state report, we see several parts of Dr. Hamlin’s remarkable public life coming together: professional achievement, military and civic leadership, advocacy for young people, and the expansion of opportunities once considered beyond their reach.
Education: Advancement Within a Dual System
Education occupied a central place in the report.
Its statistical tables listed 325 Black elementary schools enrolling 19,412 pupils. Thirty-one senior high schools enrolled 7,359 students and employed 301 teachers. Eight junior high schools enrolled another 1,262 students with 59 teachers.
The Bureau also reported a dramatic decline in Black illiteracy, asserting that the rate had fallen from 18.9 percent to less than eight percent during the preceding decade.
Those numbers reflected generations of work by teachers, parents, churches, colleges, and students. But the report’s educational committee refused to confuse advancement with equality.
Only 158 of the 328 elementary schools found in Department of Education records were classified without conditions. The committee identified poor lighting, inadequate sanitation, insufficient heating, missing libraries, neglected grounds, and deteriorating buildings among the reasons so many schools failed to meet full standards.
Conditions at the high-school level were equally revealing:
Approximately 62.5 percent of Black high schools shared their buildings with elementary grades.
About 38.7 percent had enrollments exceeding their buildings’ capacity.
Nearly half lacked gymnasiums.
Thirteen of 39 listed high schools lacked libraries.
Thirty-four counties had no Black high school.
In 22 counties, Black students could complete the eighth grade but had no local secondary school available to them.
State law theoretically provided a process through which Black students could receive high-school instruction in another district. The committee found that counties administered the law inconsistently and that eligible students were sometimes denied its benefits.
Its conclusion was significant: equal education required enforceable legal protection, not dependence upon the goodwill of local administrators.
Lincoln High School in 1940
For Wheeling, the report preserves an important picture of Lincoln High School near the end of its long campaign for a modern building.
It listed J. H. Rainbow as principal, 204 students, and 12 teachers at Lincoln. Ohio County also had two Black elementary schools enrolling 309 children.
These figures appeared fourteen years after a 1926 newspaper investigation had publicly described Lincoln’s old building as overcrowded and hazardous—and three years before Wheeling finally dedicated a modern Lincoln High School in 1943.
The Bureau’s table does not describe the physical condition of Lincoln’s building. That evidence comes from the earlier newspaper investigation and other local records. Nevertheless, its enrollment figure shows the scale of the educational community still passing through the old school in 1939–1940.
More than 200 high-school students were studying under Principal Rainbow’s leadership while waiting for the building their community had been told was necessary years earlier.
Lincoln’s students were part of the statewide contradiction captured by the report: Black education was expanding, but public facilities frequently failed to keep pace with Black achievement.
Higher Education Was Growing—and Overcrowded
West Virginia State College reported 914 students during the first semester of 1939–1940, up from 765 the previous year. The college also reported that approximately 85 percent of its graduates were being placed in employment.
Yet success created its own crisis.
Approximately 900 students were being housed in dormitories designed for 550. A teacher-education building had been condemned and demolished without replacement. The college requested major appropriations for a new teacher-education building, science facilities, a library, repairs, and additional housing.
Bluefield State Teachers College and Storer College likewise remained essential parts of the educational pipeline.
These institutions did more than award degrees. They prepared the teachers, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, administrators, scientists, and civic leaders upon whom Black communities depended.
Their overcrowding was therefore not simply a campus problem. It restricted the future professional capacity of communities across the state.
A Health Crisis Reaching Patients Too Late
The report’s medical findings were sobering.
Denmar Sanatorium had been established to treat Black tuberculosis patients. Of 152 patients admitted during 1939–1940:
45.9 percent were already in far-advanced stages;
47.5 percent were moderately advanced;
and only 6.5 percent were admitted while the disease was still incipient.
In other words, more than 93 percent arrived after tuberculosis had progressed beyond its earliest stage.
The figures pointed toward delayed diagnosis, limited preventive care, financial barriers, and unequal access to treatment. Conference delegates warned that daily hospital charges prevented some families from admitting children who needed care.
They called for more Black public-health nurses, greater employment of Black physicians, prenatal clinics, tuberculosis education, improved hospitalization, and better access to medical care in coal-mining communities.
The demand was not for charity. It was for a public-health system capable of serving the entire public.
Housing Problems Were Already Known
The report’s housing recommendations carry particular significance when read alongside the later work of Dr. Hamlin.
In June 1949, Dr. Hamlin guided a Wheeling News-Register reporter through Black neighborhoods where families lived amid unsafe stairs, decaying walls, outdoor toilets, inadequate water, fire hazards, and overcrowding. The resulting front-page article called the conditions a “human hell.”
But the 1939–1940 Bureau report shows that the larger problem was already known nearly a decade earlier.
The State Conference’s housing committee called for:
modern building, sanitation, and zoning codes;
meaningful inspection and enforcement;
the repair or demolition of unsafe structures;
Black representation on local housing authorities;
and federal support for low-income housing.
The committee understood that poor housing was not simply the product of individual choices. It involved weak enforcement, discriminatory housing markets, public policy, landlord neglect, and the exclusion of Black citizens from the agencies making housing decisions.
The 1949 newspaper exposé would give Wheeling’s crisis shocking local visibility. The 1940 report demonstrates that government officials had already received a statewide warning.
More Than 200 Delegates Demand Action
The defining event behind the report was the State Conference on the Welfare of the Negro, held May 17 and 18, 1940, in the House of Delegates chamber at the State Capitol.
More than 200 delegates participated.
Their committees addressed education, health, employment, housing, child welfare, state institutions, legislation, and race relations. They demanded Black representation on public boards, employment of trained Black social workers, equal educational facilities, protection against workplace discrimination, access to jury service, better health care, and stronger civil-rights laws.
Holding the conference in the House chamber carried enormous symbolic weight. Black West Virginians were not standing outside the government asking merely to be noticed. They entered the state’s legislative space with research, recommendations, and a program for action.
The conference made clear that the Bureau’s numbers were not abstract.
Behind the employment statistics were workers asking for fair access to jobs.
Behind the school totals were children studying in unequal buildings.
Behind the tuberculosis figures were families struggling to obtain treatment.
Behind the housing data were people living in structures officials had failed to make safe.
How the Bureau’s Story Had Changed
The evolution across the three reports in our series is striking.
The 1921–1922 report built an early statewide inventory of Black population, schools, professionals, institutions, and employment.
The 1925–1926 report expanded that work through detailed surveys of housing, health, labor, business, farming, and civic life.
By 1939–1940, the Bureau was asking a sharper question: Were public institutions treating Black West Virginians as full citizens?
The answer was mixed.
Black West Virginians had created hundreds of churches, businesses, schools, professional careers, and civic organizations. Literacy had improved. High-school and college enrollment had grown. Young people were entering technical and aviation training. Black citizens were purchasing homes, operating farms, practicing medicine, and organizing across political and professional lines.
But segregation remained embedded in education and housing. Employment discrimination limited the value of training. Health services often reached people too late. Government boards made decisions affecting Black communities without Black representation. Civil rights frequently depended upon the discretion of local officials rather than enforceable guarantees.
The 1939–1940 report is therefore neither simply a celebration nor merely an account of suffering.
It is a record of progress under restriction—and of a community increasingly unwilling to accept restriction as permanent.
Standing at the Threshold
Within a year of the report’s publication, the United States would enter the Second World War.
Black West Virginians would mine the coal, manufacture the materials, serve in uniform, care for the wounded, teach the children, and support the institutions upon which victory depended. Their labor would help defend democracy abroad while segregation continued to limit democracy at home.
The Bureau’s report captured the state at that threshold.
Its pages showed that Black West Virginians were prepared. They possessed skill, ambition, institutions, property, professional leadership, and an organized civic voice.
The unresolved question was whether West Virginia was prepared to meet them with justice.
For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, these reports are invaluable because they preserve both the statistics and the demands behind them. They remind us that progress did not arrive as a gift. It came because teachers taught, families sacrificed, professionals served, workers organized, delegates assembled, and communities insisted upon being counted.
The people recorded in the 1939–1940 report were not waiting passively for history to change.
They were presenting their case.
They were proposing solutions.
And from the floor of West Virginia’s own House of Delegates, they were declaring what full citizenship required.
-T
Sources and Research Notes
Principal source: Isaac M. Carper, Report of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia to Governor Homer A. Holt, 1939–40 (submitted December 1940).
Sections consulted include:
Bureau activities, population, and county totals, pp. 3–6.
Agriculture and extension work, pp. 7–10.
Employment, occupations, and mining education, pp. 10–16.
Homeownership, businesses, and churches, pp. 17–19.
Black colleges and National Youth Administration programs, pp. 21–54.
Tuberculosis treatment, public health, and state institutions, pp. 59–67.
Professional and civic directories, pp. 75–82.
Education and school statistics, pp. 44–47.
State Conference committee reports, pp. 94–129.
Comparison sources:
T. Edward Hill, The Negro in West Virginia: Report … 1921–1922.
T. Edward Hill, The Negro in West Virginia: Report … 1925–26.
Important cautions:
The 1939 population table is labeled preliminary and should not be treated as perfectly comparable to a decennial census.
Much of the occupational information came from the 1930 census and therefore described conditions earlier than the report’s publication.
Different sections give slightly different school totals. The statistical table lists 325 elementary schools and 39 senior and junior high schools, while the conference narrative cites 328 elementary schools and 42 high schools. These differences may reflect timing, classification, or reporting methods.
Employment Service registrants were people actively registered for work, not a complete count of unemployment.
The historical word “Negro” is retained only in the Bureau’s formal name, the report’s title, and references to terminology used in original sources. Elsewhere, this article uses “Black” or “African American.”
