The Career of Mabel Carney

Abstract

This paper is a survey of the career of Mabel Carney, an American authority on rural education, highly regarded by educational practitioners and academic peers alike. Her areas of special interest and expertise—teacher education and rural school development—broadened over time to include infrastructural and organizational concerns of rural communities, including race relations. Given the opportunity to apply her educational expertise in British colonial Africa in the mid-1920s, Carney gained acceptance as a uniquely qualified educational authority by American foundation executives and prominent figures (both conservative and liberal, as defined at the time) in the race relations establishments of the United States, Britain, and South Africa. Her access to these centers of power and influence was paralleled by her unique ability to form friendships across racial lines with important black leaders in the United States and colonial Africa. For several generations of black students who came to Teachers College, Columbia, from Africa and the United States, she served as a mentor and advocate helping open avenues for achievement in a national context permeated by racism. Because her career and active retirement spanned more than five decades, she was able to see the acceptance of many of her beliefs in the United States, as well as their wholesale rejection in South Africa, a country with which she had multiple involvements.