George Edmund Haynes

George Edmund Haynes (May 11, 1880 – January 8, 1960) was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology. Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, he moved with his mother and sister to New York City in the Great Migration, and lived and worked from there for most of his life. During the Woodrow Wilson administration, Haynes was appointed in 1918 as director of the newly established Division of Negro Economics in the Department of Labor, as part of an effort by the Democratic administration to build support from blacks for the war effort. They had been disfranchised by Democratic-dominated state governments across the South around the turn of the 20th century, so millions were without political representation. Haynes was one of the first analysts to write about black labor economics, and later founded the Social Sciences Department of Fisk University. He was a professor there for much of his career. At the NUL, he was also co-founder and patron of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, an academic magazine that also published African-American literature and arts for more than two decades.