President Jones

Paul Drennan Cravath, millionaire lawyer of Manhattan, has a worthy but troublesome legacy in Fisk University for Negroes (Nashville, Tenn.), of which his father, Rev. Erasmus M. Cravath, was the first president, and of which he is head trustee. Just a year ago he received a telegram from some Fisk undergraduates asking him please to investigate "the situation" (TIME, Feb. 16, 1925, et ante). This latter was created by Dr. Fayette Avery McKenzie, then President of Fisk. The students were striking--indeed 150 resigned and decamped--because of Dr. McKenzie's alleged "Jim Crow" methods: allowing a Negro bishop to be insulted, segregating audiences at college concerts, banning mixed dancing, silk stockings, decollete gowns, leading Fisk entertainers into a white men's club by the kitchen door. The students were striking and they were demanding a new president, a black president.

Mr. Cravath investigated. After a couple of months he sighed relief. President McKenzie resigned. But that meant finding a new president, a white man that would be acceptable to black men, for it was Fisk tradition to have a white president and a white and Negro faculty. It was a long business, but last week Mr. Cravath and his fellow trustees were able to name the man. They had chosen and their invitation had been accepted by one Thomas Elsa Jones, a graduate student in sociology at Columbia, a young man who expects to receive his doctorate in May. An Indianian, graduated by Earlham College (Richmond, Ind.) in 1912, Mr. Jones has studied in England and at Hartford Theological Seminary; has been a missionary to Japan, a Y. M. C. A. man in Vladivostock. On June 1 he will become president of the oldest university (1866) for Negroes in the South.