George Edmund Haynes

George Edmund Haynes (1881-1959/1960) was a 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.

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). Haynes was one of the first analysts to write about black labor economics.

He later founded the Social Sciences Department of Fisk University. Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, he moved with his mother and sister to New York City during the Great Migration, and lived and worked from there for most of his life.

Born in 1881 and raised in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Haynes attended segregated schools as a child. His mother was a domestic servant. He had a sister. He completed an undergraduate degree at Fisk University, a historically black college. With his mother and sister, he moved to New York City as part of the Great Migration. More than 1.5 million African Americans moved from the rural South to the North and Midwest in this period and up until 1940. Haynes was one of the first to write about that movement. In the second wave of the Great Migration, from the 1940s through 1970, another 4.5 million African Americans left the South, many going to the West Coast where the defense industry had grown.

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