Frederick D. Patterson

Educator

• Born: October 10, 1901
• Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
• Died: April 26, 1988
• Place of death: New Rochelle, New York

Patterson rose from an instructor at the Tuskegee Institute to become the school’s third president and began several ambitious educational programs. His most important project was the United Negro College Fund, created in 1944, which became the single greatest independent source of funding for African American students and largely black universities.

Early Life

Frederick Douglass Patterson was born to William and Mamie Patterson in Washington, D.C., on October 10, 1901. He was named after the famous nineteenth century African American abolitionist writer Frederick Douglass, whose old house was located near the Pattersons’ home. Both William and Mamie died of tuberculosis before Patterson was two years old, and he was sent to live with a family friend, Julia Dorsey. After spending a few years attending Birney Elementary School in Washington, Patterson went with his sister, Wilhemina, to Texas, where his parents had relatives. She worked as a teacher while Patterson attended a boarding school.

Patterson enrolled atPrairie View State College, which he attended from 1915 to 1919. After working for months to establish residency in Iowa, Patterson transferred to Iowa State College, where there were only a handful of African American students at the time. Inspired by a veterinarian he had met as a teenager, Edward B. Evans, Patterson earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine in 1923. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, an African American fraternity established at Cornell. Patterson began teaching at Virginia State College in 1925 and earned a master of science degree from Iowa in 1927.

Life’s Work

Patterson rose to the position of director of agriculture at Virginia State, but in 1928 he left that institution to join the faculty of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. The institute was a historically black college founded by Booker T. Washington as a vocational school in 1881. Its reputation was such that Patterson did not even visit the campus before accepting a position at the school.

Patterson’s first position was as head of the veterinary division, but he also taught courses in bacteriology. In 1931, he went on leave to earn a second doctorate at Cornell, which made him the first member of the Tuskegee faculty with a non-honorary Ph.D. After Tuskegee’s director of agriculture died in a shooting, Patterson assumed the post in 1933.

In the spring of 1935, Patterson became the school’s president, succeeding Robert Moton. That year, he also married Catherine Elizabeth Moton, the former Tuskegee president’s daughter. At the time, the head of Tuskegee Institute was viewed as one of the leading representatives of African Americans, and Patterson soon became involved in numerous causes and foundations. In his early years as the school’s president, he dealt with Tuskegee’s budget crisis, created a new four-year program for domestic service, and oversaw the creation of the George Washington Carver Foundation, a research center founded by the scientist Carver in 1940.

In 1943, Patterson wrote an opinion column in The Pittsburgh Courier calling for the creation of a group of African American colleges financed by shared fund-raisers. Later that year, he called together the leaders of many historically African American colleges and put the plan into action. The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) was created through a coalition of twenty-seven colleges (that number had grown to thirty-nine by 2010), all supported by the fund-raising drives of the central organization in New York. UNCF’s motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” became one of advertising’s most iconic slogans.

Patterson was a contributor to the book What the Negro Wants (1945), a collection of essays by leading African American intellectuals. In 1947, he served on President Harry S. Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, which sought more federal funding for colleges.

Patterson stepped down as president at Tuskegee in 1953 but remained active as a professor emeritus and as a trustee of many other schools. He also remained involved in larger causes: In the 1970’s, he created the College Endowment Funding Plan, which called for money from private businesses and the federal government. Patterson also was president and trustee of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, an interracial fund that aimed to improve the social status of minorities in the United States and abroad.

On April 26, 1988, Patterson suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of eighty-six. He died at his home in New Rochelle, New York.

Significance

Patterson has been called the greatest positive influence on modern African American education. In 1987, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan. The UNCF administers hundreds of scholarships, most of which were awarded to students who were the first in their families to attend college. The organization also administers the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, provides internships, and funds its thirty-nine member colleges.

Bibliography

Gasman, Marybeth. Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Comprehensive history of the UNCF that describes its founding and its social and cultural impact.

McQuiston, John T. “Frederick D. Patterson, Founder of Negro College Fund, Dies at 86.” The New York Times, April 27, 1988. This obituary chronicles Patterson’s educational career and includes personal perspectives from those who knew him.

Patterson, Frederick D., and Martia Goodson. Chronicles of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. Patterson tells his own story in a thorough autobiography, adapted from a series of long interviews.