America's First Negro Boys State: Dr. R. M. Hamlin, Post 89, and a Wheeling Story of Citizenship

There are moments in history when Wheeling appears not at the edge of the national story, but right in the middle of it.

This is one of those moments.

In the 1930s, the American Legion’s Boys State program was becoming one of the nation’s signature experiments in civic education. Young men were invited to gather for a week, form mock cities and counties, create political parties, elect officers, pass laws, run courts, and learn the machinery of democracy by stepping inside it.

But this was Jim Crow America.

Even the teaching of citizenship was segregated.

And in West Virginia, the solution to that exclusion produced a remarkable and historically significant first: the creation of what newspapers called the first Negro Boys State in America. “one of the central figures officially entrusted with bringing that achievement to life was our own Dr. R. M. Hamlin…”

One clipping makes Dr. Hamlin’s role even more extraordinary.

This was not simply a local Wheeling man volunteering from the sidelines. State-level leadership turned directly to him. The newspaper record shows that Dr. R. M. Hamlin of Wheeling was selected to serve as director of the Negro Boys State effort, placing a Black Wheeling physician, veteran leader, and commander of Ohio Valley Post No. 89 at the center of a statewide civic experiment.

In other words, when West Virginia moved to create what would be recognized as the first Negro Boys State in America, it looked to Wheeling, and to Hamlin, to help bring it into being.

That alone would make this story worthy of remembering.

But the arc is even larger. Wheeling was already home to American Legion Post No. 1, recognized as the oldest American Legion post in the United States. Decades later, West Virginia would also move to remove the race barrier from Boys State after Brown v. Board of Education.

And still later, Post 89 would continue selecting young men from Wheeling for Boys State, including, in 1988, the future founder of the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation.

This is a story about segregation.

But it is also a story about ambition, strategy, civic training, Black veterans, and the long insistence that Black boys deserved preparation for full citizenship in a country that had not yet fully honored it.

Boys State and the Promise of Citizenship

The American Legion created Boys State in the 1930s as a practical school for democracy.

The national program taught selected high school boys about local, county, and state government through direct participation. Students did not simply hear lectures about democracy. They built a temporary government of their own.

They formed parties. They campaigned. They held elections. They passed bills. They learned parliamentary procedure. They stepped, briefly but seriously, into the roles of citizens, legislators, judges, and public officials.

The American Legion describes Boys State as a program where participants learn the “rights, privileges and responsibilities” of citizenship through the operation of student-run government. Founded in Illinois in 1935, it quickly spread as one of the Legion’s most recognizable youth programs.

In theory, that mission was expansive and patriotic.

In practice, in much of the country, it was segregated.

That contradiction is the heart of this story. A program designed to teach democracy had to confront the fact that democracy itself was being rationed.

Wheeling, the Legion, and the Black Veteran Tradition

Wheeling’s place in American Legion history is unusually deep. American Legion Post No. 1 in Wheeling is recognized as the oldest American Legion post in the country.

That is not a small footnote. It places Wheeling at the beginning of one of the most influential veterans’ organizations in American life.

But Black veterans in Wheeling also had their own institutional story.

Ohio Valley Post No. 89 became the segregated American Legion post serving Black veterans in Wheeling. Like so many Black civic organizations of the period, Post 89 had to operate within the confines of segregation while still building leadership, service, charity, and public influence.

The post was not simply ceremonial. It was a civic engine.

A 1946 article by Harry H. Jones in “Along the Color Line” described members of Ohio Valley Post No. 89 working to purchase and improve property on Chapline Street for “general legion and community” purposes.

The article also noted that West Virginia had thousands of Black Legion members and that Black posts were active in community work, charity drives, and support for Lincoln High School.

This matters because Post 89 was doing exactly what Black institutions so often had to do in Jim Crow America: serve as veteran organization, civic club, youth sponsor, mutual aid society, political training ground, and community defender all at once.

And at the center of this story stood Dr. R. M. Hamlin.

Dr. R. M. Hamlin Steps Forward

For readers of our Foundation’s work, Dr. Hamlin is becoming a familiar figure.

He appears again and again in the public record as a physician, civic leader, advocate, institution-builder, and forceful voice for Black Wheeling. In this story, he appears in yet another role: commander of Ohio Valley Post No. 89 and one of the men entrusted with building West Virginia’s Negro Boys State.

The 1938 newspaper record shows Dr. Hamlin helping organize the effort from Wheeling. Early that year, local papers reported planning meetings and receptions connected to the Colored Boys State project, with Dr. Hamlin identified as commander of the local post and deeply involved in arrangements.

By May and June of 1938, the vision had become reality.

The first Negro Boys State in America was held at West Virginia State College in Institute, West Virginia.

That location mattered. West Virginia State was one of the state’s premier Black educational institutions, and Institute offered a campus setting where young Black men could gather, learn, organize, and imagine themselves as public actors.

The program was segregated because the country was segregated. But within that constraint, Hamlin and his colleagues carved out something powerful: a place where Black boys were told that government belonged to them too.

The First Negro Boys State in America

The national Black press understood the importance of what had happened.

A July 1938 article in the New Journal and Guide declared that “the first Negro Boys’ State in America” had been established on the campus of West Virginia State College. The article reported that the program was sponsored by the Negro contingent of the American Legion and that the effort had been led with the involvement of leaders including Dr. R. M. Hamlin of Wheeling.

The stated purpose was direct and profound: to train Negro youth in the fundamentals of American government.

That first program was not symbolic. It was fully imagined.

The young men formed political parties, including Federalists and Nationalists. They elected officers. They held court proceedings. They operated a legislature. They heard an annual message from their elected “governor.” They introduced bills. They debated public questions. They adopted official symbols, including a flower and seal. One report noted that they even adopted the Negro National Anthem as the official song of Boys State.

This was civic education with dignity.

The newspaper accounts vary slightly in reported attendance. The Black press reported 75 youths from 19 counties. Later local accounts referred to 56 or 59 boys attending the first camp.

That kind of numerical variation is common in newspaper research, especially across different publications and reporting moments. But the central fact is unmistakable: West Virginia had created a statewide Negro Boys State, and Wheeling’s Dr. Hamlin was one of the men who made it happen.

A Democracy Camp Inside a Segregated Democracy

It is impossible to tell this story honestly without naming the contradiction.

Negro Boys State should not have had to exist.

Black boys should not have needed a separate version of a democracy camp in order to learn democracy. Black veterans should not have had to build parallel institutions to secure opportunities that white boys received through the regular channels of civic life.

And yet, this is the genius of Black institution-building under segregation.

When doors were closed, Black leaders built doors.

When public programs excluded Black youth, Black veterans, educators, ministers, physicians, and civic organizers created pathways anyway.

That is what Dr. Hamlin and Post 89 were doing.

They were not accepting second-class citizenship. They were preparing young men to challenge it.

The Second Year and the Building of a Model

By 1939, the program was no longer an experiment. It was becoming an institution.

A May 1939 Wheeling News-Register article announced the second annual Negro Boys State, again to be held at West Virginia State College in Institute. The article identified Dr. R. M. Hamlin as a central organizer and explained that the program was similar to the Boys State held for white boys at Jackson’s Mill.

The eligibility requirements reflected the seriousness of the program. Boys were to be recommended by schools, American Legion posts, or sponsoring civic organizations. They were expected to be young men of promise, capable of benefiting from training in government and leadership.

Another 1939 article identified Dr. Hamlin as commander of Ohio Valley Post No. 89 and president of the Negro Boys State organization. Other officers included E. W. Browne, G. E. Ferguson of Charleston, and Leonard Barnett of London, West Virginia.

This is important because it shows that Negro Boys State was not a one-time event. It had officers. It had structure. It had statewide ambition. It had continuity.

And it had Wheeling fingerprints all over it.

From Wheeling to the State, From the State to the Nation

The Foundation often returns to one central idea: local history is not small history.

Here, Wheeling’s local Black veteran leadership helped shape a statewide program that national Black newspapers recognized as a first. Dr. Hamlin’s work through Post 89 connected East Wheeling, Chapline Street, Lincoln School, West Virginia State College, and the wider American Legion world.

That is the kind of story that can disappear if we only preserve buildings, names, and dates.

The deeper history is institutional. It is relational. It lives in the networks between schools, churches, veterans’ posts, newspapers, colleges, and civic organizations.

Negro Boys State was not just a camp. It was a Black civic pipeline.

It told boys who were growing up in segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods that they had a claim on government, law, leadership, and public life.

That message was radical.

Brown v. Board and the End of the Color Line at Boys State

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional.

Across the country, many institutions resisted. Some delayed. Some defied. Some searched for new ways to preserve old boundaries.

West Virginia’s Boys State made a different move.

A September 1954 Wheeling News-Register article carried the headline: “Mountaineer Boys’ State Ends Race Ban.” The article reported that Mountaineer Boys State at Jackson’s Mill would be operated in the future “without distinction as to race, creed or color.”

The policy statement was striking. It said Mountaineer Boys State would be conducted in a way that would “effectuate for posterity a 100 per cent Americanism” so that the principles of justice, freedom, and democracy could be made absolute.

That sentence deserves to sit beside the earlier history.

For nearly two decades, Black boys in West Virginia had been trained separately in the very ideals of citizenship and democracy. Now, after Brown, the state moved to remove the formal race barrier in Boys State.

The article noted that the American Legion had operated a week-long citizenship camp for white boys and a separate boys camp for Negro children. The statement marked the end of that divided arrangement for Boys State.

It was not the end of segregation in America. It was not the end of racial inequality in Wheeling. But it was a meaningful institutional turn.

And again, the path runs through the same world: American Legion posts, youth leadership, civic formation, and the unfinished promise of democracy.

Post 89 After Integration

One of the most powerful parts of this story is that Post 89 did not simply fade from the record after formal integration.

A 1955 Wheeling News-Register article shows Post 89 among the local sponsors sending boys to Mountaineer Boys State. In other words, the same Black Legion post that had helped support a segregated Negro Boys State was still participating in the integrated program after the color barrier was removed.

That continuity matters.

It tells us that integration did not erase the importance of Black institutions. Post 89 still had a role to play. It still identified young men. It still sponsored opportunity. It still stood between Wheeling’s Black community and the larger civic world, making sure that access was not just theoretical.

That is one of the great misunderstandings of integration. The goal was never for Black institutions to become irrelevant. The goal was for Black people to have full access without surrendering the organizations that had sustained them.

Post 89’s continued role helps us see that clearly.

A Personal Full Circle

Area Youths Packing Bags for Boys’ State

Thirteen Ohio County students are packing their bags to attend the 1988 American Legion Mountaineer Boys’ State, which will run from Sunday through June 18 at Jackson’s Mill near Weston.

Representing Wheeling’s American Legion Posts No. 1 and No. 89 will be Wheeling Central Catholic High School students Jeff Cabotaje, Eric Kaniecki, Charles Marano and Brad Sorge; Linsly students Brian Campbell and Stephen Tsai; and Wheeling Park High School students Brian Ashbrook, Andrew Dorisio, Ryan Dunlevy, Terrill Gosa, Tom Lash, David Miller and Douglas Whitecotton.

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this story is not only historical. It is personal.

In 1988, decades after Dr. Hamlin’s work and decades after the formal integration of Boys State, Post 89 was still part of the local process of selecting young men for Mountaineer Boys State. A Wheeling News-Register article from that year listed area youth preparing to attend Boys State and identified both Wheeling Post No. 1 and Post 89 among the sponsoring American Legion posts.

That same year, the future founder of this Foundation was selected by Post 89 to represent Wheeling Legion posts.

That is a remarkable circle.

The story begins with a segregated Black veterans’ post helping build the first Negro Boys State in America. It continues through Brown v. Board and the end of the formal race barrier at Mountaineer Boys State. And it reaches into living memory, when Post 89 was still opening doors for young men in Wheeling.

History is often closer than we think.

Sometimes it is not behind glass. Sometimes it is in a newspaper clipping with your own name in it.

Why This Story Belongs to the Foundation

This is precisely the kind of history the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation exists to preserve.

It is local, but nationally significant.

It is Black history, but also American history.

It is a story of segregation, but not only a story of injury. It is also a story of strategy, vision, and institutional brilliance. Dr. R. M. Hamlin and Ohio Valley Post No. 89 did not wait for the country to become fair before preparing Black boys for leadership. They acted inside the world as it was, while pointing toward the world as it ought to be.

They understood something essential: citizenship must be taught before it is fully granted.

And they made sure Black boys in West Virginia were taught.

That is the legacy of Negro Boys State.

That is the legacy of Post 89.

And that is another reason Wheeling’s Black history deserves to be studied not as a side chapter, but as a central thread in the American story.

-T

Sources

• American Legion, “About Boys State / Boys Nation,” describing the founding, purpose, and civic-training model of the national Boys State program: American Legion Boys State and Boys Nation

• American Legion Post No. 1 / Ohio County Public Library background on Wheeling Post No. 1 as the oldest American Legion post in the United States: Ohio County Public Library, American Legion Post No. 1

• West Virginia Encyclopedia, integration context after Brown v. Board and note that West Virginia Boys State changed policy to include representatives regardless of race, creed, or color: West Virginia Encyclopedia, Integration

• Newspaper clippings and archival materials supplied by the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, including 1938-1955 coverage of Negro Boys State, Dr. R. M. Hamlin, Ohio Valley Post No. 89, and 1988 Boys State selections.