Mr. and Mrs. T. M. Campbell and Children, ca. 1932
Silver Gelatin
Paul R. Jones Collection, Atlanta, GA

Thomas M. Campbell became the nation's first African-American USDA agricultural extension agent in 1906. Campbell and his family were prominent residents of Tuskegee and had their portrait taken each year at Easter, yet this photograph is the only portrait that remains in the Campbell household. Each member of the family graduated from Tuskegee Institute and went on to have a distinguished professional career.

Pictured from left to right in the front row are: Noel Campbell Mitchell, a member of the Army's first class of black women, who then earned a certificate in Food and Nutrition and worked at Tuskegee's Veterans' Administration Hospital for twenty-seven years before retiring in Tuskegee in 1980; Thomas M. Campbell, author of The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer (1936), who died in 1956; Elizabeth Campbell Clarke, a certified physical therapist who worked in Riverside, California for thirty-nine years before she died in 1997; and Virginia Campbell Hawkins, Miss Tuskegee of 1936-37, a physical education and civics teacher, and a trained nurse who was employed in several hospitals in New York before returning to Tuskegee with her husband, photographer David Hawkins, to accept a twenty-one year nursing position at Tuskegee's VA Hospital.

In the second row are: Bill Campbell, a Tuskegee Airman who attained the rank of Colonel in the U. S. Air Force before he retired to Seaside, California; Carver Campbell (named after his father's colleague, George Washington Carver), who died in 1936 while pursuing a Master's degree in Agriculture at Cornell University; Anna Marie Ayers Campbell, a Chicago-trained nurse who headed the nursing staff at Tuskegee's John Andrews Hospital before marrying Thomas Campbell; and Thomas Campbell, Jr., a pediatrician who served in the military and then returned to practice in Tuskegee for thirty years before he died in 1976.