The Rise and Fall of West Virginia’s Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, 1921–1957

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In 1955, Ivanhoe S. Wayne, the director of West Virginia’s Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, sued the state auditor for unpaid wages. The state contended that the legislature had not approved Wayne’s appointment and that he was entitled neither to the position he claimed nor to the salary prescribed in the West Virginia Code. The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals concurred that the bureau and its director operated at the legislature’s pleasure. 1 Two years later, not long after Governor William Marland lauded West Virginia’s mostly peaceful desegregation of its public schools in his final address to the legislature, a bill to reestablish the provision for the bureau director’s salary died in the state senate’s finance committee. 2 With the bureau slated for quiet termination, Director Bird R. Forney and Field Deputy William L. Spriggs wrote a final report, a shorter and more indignant one than usual. School desegregation, they pointed out, was taking place alongside increasing black unemployment and a dramatic exodus of African Americans from the state. “In the same manner by which the entire people of West Virginia aided and accepted the integration of schools,” they wrote, “so should its officials and civic leaders search with all diligence for ways to eradicate racial and ethnic discriminatory practices, because we search haplessly for work.”3 If integration were to accomplish anything of value for West Virginia’s African Americans, they argued, it would need to be applied beyond the schoolhouse door. Forney and Spriggs exaggerated in their claim that West Virginia’s “entire people” had accepted the desegregation of schools and state-funded institutions. Members of the state’s political establishment, including Governor Marland and School Superintendent W. W. Trent, had placed their allegiance firmly behind the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. For years the bureau’s leaders had worked for black economic advancement in West Virginia without specifically advocating school integration. Now that such integration was being accomplished, the state government seemed indifferent to increasing black economic inequality.