Charles H. Thompson: A Bibliography

Abstract

Charles H. Thompson's accomplishments as an educator and as an administrator at Howard University, from 1926 until his retirement in 1966, have been given attention elsewhere,-including recent issues of the Journal of Negro Education. Therefore, background information on his life and career will not be discussed here. Rather, this article will focus on Dr. Thompson's accomplishments as a writer of numerous articles on social issues that affected the lives of Black people internationally, but particularly Black Americans. With the pen as his sword, Dr. Thompson was relentless in his efforts to expose inequities in the treatment of minority groups and to bring about equality of opportunities. Although his main interests were in the field of education, he was also concerned about problems in race relations, civil rights, employment, and so on. To our knowledge, a complete compilation of Dr. Thompson's works has not been published. bibliography included in this article not only lists his editorials and articles in the Journal of Negro Education but his thesis, dissertation, articles in other publications, books, books that mention him, as well as manuscript collections that allude to him. Many of the titles appear to be as appropriate today as they were when written. Although several books have made references to Charles H. Thompson, the two works that devoted most attention to him are Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1976) and Richard Bardolph, Negro Vanguard (1950). Bardolph declares that the Journal of Negro Education, edited by Charles H. Thompson at Howard University, earned its reputation as one of the finest publications of its kind. Kluger points out that though Thompson had almost no money except to pay the printing bills and postage, he launched in 1932, the Journal as a means of fully documenting the conditions of Negro schools and exploring the implications of segregated education. Thompson's magazine seized the torch, according to Kluger, that had been let fall when Crisis lost its founder. He argues: The Journal was, to be sure, far less polemical than Crisis had ever been, but it served a similar purpose: to inform, to arouse, to inspire (p. 168). Howard University contributed office space, clerical help, and about one-third of Thompson's salary. In 1928, three years after he received his doctorate and four years prior to the establishment of the Journal, Dr. Thompson wrote a major article that was published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. This particular issue was devoted to Negro Education and included articles by some of the leading Negro spokesmen of that era: W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, James Weldon Johnson, Charles J. Johnson, Alain Locke, and Kelly Miller. Dr. Thompson's article, The Educational Achievement of Negro Children, declared: A critical examination of the fact presented in this study shows that when Negroes are given equal environmental and school opportunities their educational achievements are equal to or better than that of the whites. (In fact, it is surprising to note that Negroes achieve as much as they do in consideration of the poor environmental and school opportunities they are afforded.) In other words, the educational achievement of Negro children, as with white children, is, in the main, a direct function of their environmental and school opportunities rather than a function of some special inherent difference in mental ability. In conclusion he stated, A critical appraisal of the facts with reference to the educational achievement of Negro children forces one to conclude: 1. That the doctrine of an inherent mental inferiority of the Negro is a myth unfounded by the most logical interpretation of the scientific facts on the subject produced to date. 2. That the mental and scholastic achievements of Negro children, as with white children, are, in the main, a direct function of their environmental and school opportunities rather than a function of some inherent differences in mental'ability. …