1940's Education | Chronicles of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson

Autobiography

By: Frederick Douglass Patterson

Date: 1991

Source: Patterson, Frederick Douglass. Chronicles of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson. Martia Graham Goodson, ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991, 121–23.

About the Author: Frederick Douglass Patterson (1901–1988), born in Washington, D.C., was named after Frederick Douglass, the famous nineteenth-century abolitionist. Orphaned at the age of two, he was raised by an aunt in Texas. Patterson went on to earn a master of science, a doctor of veterinary medicine degree, and a doctorate in philosophy. He became the president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1935 and founded the United Negro College Fund in 1944.

Introduction

For most of this country's history, African Americans who wanted a higher education faced the barriers of outright discrimination and Jim Crow...