Anna Thomas Jeanes and the Negro Rural School Fund
Near Trenton, Pennsylvania
Anna Thomas Jeanes was a Philadelphia Quaker born in eighteen twenty-two who devoted her wealth to public health and education. Her bequest funded Jeanes Hospital, whose Philadelphia campus later became the home of Fox Chase Cancer Center. But her most far-reaching gift was the Jeanes Foundation, also known as the Negro Rural School Fund.
She appointed Booker T. Washington as a trustee and directed the fund toward training Black teachers for the rural South. Those teachers became known as Jeanes Supervisors, and they brought both academic instruction and vocational education to Black youth in communities that had almost nothing.
Jeanes died in nineteen oh seven, but the teachers she funded were still working decades later.
