193 Joseph E Lowery Blvd SW
Atlanta, GA, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Dr. Brailsford R. Brazeal House (Brazeal House)

Statement of Significant:

The Brazeal House is primarily significant at the national level in the related areas of education and ethnic heritage: black as the long-time home of Dr. Brailsford R. Brazeal, a prominent African- American scholar, teacher, and administrator at nearby Morehouse College, who from the late 1920s through the 1960s made significant contributions to research, publication, teaching, and academic standards at this nationally significant African-American institution of higher learning. This house is the extant historic building most closely associated with the life and career of Dr. Brazeal who lived in the house and had his home office here from its purchase in 1940 to his retirement in 1972. It is located about a block west of, but separated by new development from, the historic Morehouse College campus which was listed in the National Register at the national level of significance as part of the Atlanta University Center Historic District in 1976.

Dr. Brazeal's contributions to African-American higher education can be summarized along three lines: through his own educational odyssey, as a teacher and mentor, and as a scholar.

Dr. Brazeal's personal educational odyssey ranged from childhood schooling in the racially segregated public schools in his hometown of Dublin, Georgia, through his doctoral degree in economics from Columbia University. Along the way he attended a state normal school and earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Morehouse College. Complementing his hard work and personal dedication, he availed himself of opportunities for support and assistance, including two fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald Fund (the Rosenwald fund is better known for its financial support for African-American public schools in the South; its individual fellowship program is less well-known). Through his aspirations, perseverance, and achievements, he stood as a paragon of African-American higher education, a clear testimonial to the possibilities of African-American higher education. And through his constant contact with young African-American students, he served as a clear, influential, and undeniable role model for African-American academic accomplishment.

As a teacher and mentor, Dr. Brazeal influenced and informed the educational careers of several generations of African-American students at a nationally prominent African-American institution of higher learning starting in the late 1920s and continuing until his retirement in 1972. Throughout his career, he was constantly and closely involved with his students. Through his many years of teaching at Morehouse College, first as an instructor and later as a professor, he exposed his students to economics, labor history, social history, and race relations, with a focus on the status and accomplishments of African Americans in these fields. As head of the Department of Economics and Business Administration, he directed courses of studies and helped develop curriculum; as Dean of Academics, he promoted high standards for liberal-arts education. Outside the classroom he also mentored generations of students, inviting them into his home for orientation sessions, counseling, tutoring, and discussion. As an elected alumnus member of Columbia University's Delta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1959), he helped make it possible for Morehouse College to be approved for Phi Beta Kappa chapter membership in 1967-the fourth Phi Beta Kappa chapter in Georgia, along with the University of Georgia, Agnes Scott College, and Emory University, thereby enhancing the status of its high-achieving students. In 1961, to further support higher education for African Americans at Morehouse, he served as advisor for the college's new honors program supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation which became second in the state of Georgia in the number of students receiving Woodrow Wilson fellowships.

As a scholar at Morehouse College, Dr. Brazeal achieved national prominence for what has become his best-known work, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (1946), a precedent-setting historical and economic account of the Pullman train-car porters and their labor union. Based on his Columbia University dissertation, this study was the first of its kind to explore the origins and importance of the nation's first African-American labor union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The book received critical acclaim not only in the field of African-American labor history but also in the broader fields of American economic history and race relations, and it stands as the foundation upon which all subsequent studies of this unique American phenomenon have been based.