Emma Hamilton Dancing

George Edmund Haynes was born in 1880 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He attended the State Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes in Normal, Alabama (now Alabama A&M University) in preparation for college before going to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received a BS in 1903. Haynes received a master’s from Yale in 1904, where he studied black labor economics and the Great Migration. He would also later study for periods of time at the University of Chicago in 1906 and 1907, and received a PhD from Columbia University in 1912 with a dissertation on Black labor in New York.

Haynes dedicated his work to education and educational activism, traveling to HBCUs throughout the South to encourage Black students to pursue higher education. It was through this activism that he met his wife, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, who was a sociologist working on Black women’s employment. She would subsequently serve as the first Black national secretary of the YWCA, and also worked with the U.S. Women’s Bureau and the Employment Service.

Following his marriage in 1910, Haynes continued working in education and educational activism, teaching at Fisk University, establishing the Association of Negro Colleges and Secondary Schools, and serving as director of the Bethlehem Center for social work at Fisk University from 1910-1918. He was also co-founder and first director of the Urban League (1911-1918), an organization working for civil rights and Black economic development. From 1918 to 1921 he was director of the Division of Negro Economics in the Department of Labor under the Woodrow Wilson administration. During this time he campaigned for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.

Haynes continued to work at Fisk until 1950, after which he taught at the City College of New York until 1959. He died in Brooklyn in 1960. His papers are distributed between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, Fisk University, and the New York Public Library.