A Moment in Time: Education for Southern Blacks, 1940
Learning a little sometimes reveals a lot.
Tuesday night I attended a screening of a recently discovered film from 1940 that was thought to have been permanently lost. After being on a “lost films” list that is circulated in the industry, two copies of One Tenth of Our Nation were found in the extensive collection of documents, films, and photographs at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
One Tenth of Our Nation was a documentary film commissioned by the General Education Board, a philanthropy created by John D. Rockefeller to aid education in the United States. It premiered at the Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940. The subject was the state of Negro education in the South; its intent was to show both progress and continuing need.
