Benjamin F. Hubert

Although records disagree about the year in which Hubert was born, his New York Times obituary places the date at December 25, 1884. Hubert was born to Zach and Camilla Hubert, African American farmers who owned several hundred acres of land in the northern part of Hancock County Georgia. The Huberts were surrounded by a dozen other black farm owning families. The community, called Springfield, built a church, a general store, and a rudimentary four-year grade school. To further educate their children, the Huberts sent the oldest children away to board in nearby schools, and ultimately sent all twelve of their children to college. After he graduated from college, Zach Hubert called his oldest son home to expand the grade school into a high school. As the sixth child, Benjamin Hubert benefited from this expansion. Like his brothers, he attended Atlanta Baptist (later known as Morehouse College). He earned a high school diploma and graduated with a B.A. in 1909.

Afterward, he enrolled in the agricultural science program at Massachusetts Agricultural College where he studied under Kenyon Butterfield, a founder of rural sociology. Butterfield was a member of the Country Life Commission organized by President Theodore Roosevelt , and in 1919, Butterfield became the first president of the American Country Life Association. For the rest of his life, Hubert became involved in the Country Life Movement, which sought to find ways to make rural life more attractive to young people through scientific farming, cooperatives, and improved rural social institutions. This movement later informed the early agenda of agricultural extension in the U.S. Department of Agriculture when agricultural extension work was begun for white agents in 1902 and expanded to black agents in 1915.

In 1912, Hubert took a position as professor of agriculture at South Carolina State Agricultural and Mechanical College at Orangeburg, (now South Carolina State University). He soon became director of Agricultural Extension at the college, and director of the agricultural department.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hubert served on the South Carolina Food Administration Board and then went overseas to help direct the agricultural reconstruction of Europe.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1920, Hubert accepted the directorship of the Department of Agriculture at Tuskegee Institute. He soon became supervisor of the Negro Division of the Agricultural Extension Service for Alabama. There, he made contacts with the philanthropists who would help him in his next position as president of a small, struggling black college in Savannah, Georgia.[4]

The Benjamin F. Hubert Technical Science Center on the university's campus houses the school's chemistry, computer science, and engineering departments and classrooms.[3]

• Hall, Clyde W (1991). One Hundred Years of Educating at Savannah State College, 1890–1990. East Peoria, Ill.:Versa Press.
• Schultz, Mark, "Benjamin Hubert and the Association for the Advancement of Negro Country Life," in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families Since Reconstruction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012, 83-105.
• Schultz, Mark. "A More Satisfying Life on the Farm: Benjamin F. Hubert and the Log Cabin Community," M.A. thesis, University of Georgia, 1989.