People

A partial guest list containing names of some 1924 conference participants, as well as their respective schools.

The 1924 conference was entirely student-led. The only people present, other than the delegates, were the hostesses at the Woolman School.¹ Many delegates were actively involved in their communities and colleges. For example, Marion Palmenberg from Swarthmore College was elected freshman representative to the Executive Board of Swarthmore's student government.² F. Eugene Corbie, of the City College of New York, was an esteemed Trinidadian activist (more below). Hugh Victor Brown from Hampton Institute was an educational leader who wrote several books addressing education and people of African descent in America.³ Robert Carroll, of West Virginia Collegiate Institute, was the president of Alpha Zeta, a historically Black fraternity.⁴ 

F. Eugene Corbie

F. Eugene Corbie was a Trinidadian student who attended the 1924 Conference on behalf of The City College of New York.⁵ He spoke on intermarriage, and segregation in voting and purchasing cars. He argued the significant role of African Americans in southern industries and in world history, and that Black people are not “immoral,” but are “nonmoral.”^{6 7} Corbie’s account of the conference proceedings, the article “A Portent”⁸ in The Crisis, is one of the few Black-authored materials we have today on the conference. 

Corbie also spoke at the 1924 Indianapolis conference of “Christian Students and World Problems,” a youth-organized convention which aimed to unify and create a Christian brotherhood by spending several days discussing such controversial topics as war, racial relationships, and religion. At the conclusion of the conference, opinions were summarized in speeches by a select group of students who had been popularly nominated and elected.⁹ Corbie was one of them; he spoke on interracial marriage, the inherent fallacy of discrimination when the difference is an inequality of resources, the critical contribution of Black people and the cotton seed to America, Black racial pride, and the importance of desegregation in higher education.¹⁰ Of the last, he said: 

So when we ask you to stop disciminiation and give us the right to come into the fountain of life, yea into your very colleges where you get your best, so that we may assimilate of your best, we are asking only that we, too, be given the right to develop ourselves as manfully and as womanly as you, in order that in time we, too, may make a contribution to your glorious civilization.¹¹

(View Corbie’s full speech.)

Tragically, Corbie died in 1928 at the young age of thirty-eight, of a lingering illness. His obituary in the Philadelphia Tribune noted that Corbie gained fame two years earlier for questioning a speaker in Union Square about the treatment of American citizens of color--he was then lambasted by leading white journalists as a “radical red.” The Tribune eulogized him as “one of the most brilliant young men of the race.”¹²