Benjamin F. Hubert

Benjamin Franklin Hubert (December 25, 1884 – April 29, 1958) served as president of Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth continuing when it became Georgia State College from 1926 until 1947. It is now Savannah State University.

Biography According to his New York Times obituary, Hubert was born on December 25, 1884, to Zach and Camilla Hubert. His parents were African-American farmers who owned several hundred acres of land in the northern part of Hancock County, Georgia. The Huberts were surrounded by a dozen other black farm-owning families. Their small community, called Springfield, built a church, a general store, and a rudimentary four-year, elementary grade school.

To educate their children further, the Huberts sent the oldest children away to board in nearby schools. They sent all twelve of their children to college. After the oldest graduated from college, Zach Hubert called him home to expand and develop the local school to include higher grades, through high school. As the sixth child, Benjamin Hubert benefited from this expansion. Like his brothers, he attended Atlanta Baptist (later known as Morehouse College), a private historically black college (HBCU) founded by the American Missionary Association after the Civil War. Hubert earned a high school diploma here before graduating with a B.A. in 1909.

Afterward, he enrolled in the agricultural science program at Massachusetts Agricultural College, where he studied under Kenyon Butterfield, a founder of rural sociology. Butterfield was a member of the Country Life Commission organized by President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1919 Butterfield was elected as the first president of the American Country Life Association. This was highly influential for Hubert. At a time when many people were moving from rural to urban areas, there was national concern about maintaining family farms.

For the rest of his life, Hubert was involved in the Country Life Movement, which sought to find ways to make rural life more attractive to young people. They were taught scientific farming, establishing cooperatives for the community and their economy, and improving rural social institutions. This movement later informed the early agenda of agricultural extension in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. White agents began agricultural extension work in 1902; black agents were hired beginning in 1915.

In 1912, Hubert took a position as professor of agriculture at South Carolina State Agricultural and Mechanical College at Orangeburg; (it has developed as South Carolina State University). He soon became director of Agricultural Extension at the college, and director of the agricultural department.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hubert served on the South Carolina Food Administration Board. He went overseas to help direct the agricultural reconstruction of Europe.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1920, Hubert accepted the directorship of the Department of Agriculture at Tuskegee Institute. He soon became supervisor of the Negro Division of the Agricultural Extension Service for Alabama. There, he made contacts with the philanthropists who would help him in his next position as president of a small, struggling black college in Savannah, Georgia.

President In 1926 Hubert succeeded Cyrus G. Wiley as president of Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth, the first public historically black college (HBCU) in the state.

Legacy The Benjamin F. Hubert Technical Science Center on the university's campus houses the school's chemistry, computer science, and engineering departments and classrooms.

Suggested reading Hall, Clyde W (1991). One Hundred Years of Educating at Savannah State College, 1890–1990. East Peoria, Ill.:Versa Press. Schultz, Mark, "Benjamin Hubert and the Association for the Advancement of Negro Country Life," in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families Since Reconstruction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012, 83-105. Schultz, Mark. "A More Satisfying Life on the Farm: Benjamin F. Hubert and the Log Cabin Community," M.A. thesis, University of Georgia, 1989.