During the early 1920s, the question of who should control the schooling of African American children caused controversy in several Southern states, including Georgia. White educationists and bureaucrats were divided into two groups: the conservatives who called for educational needs to be determined and funded locally, and a growing reformist group, which stressed the urgency of renewing black school buildings and equipment and were content to rely on outside money to make up any immediate shortfall in state funding. Curriculum issues also divided black people broadly into supporters of the late Booker T. Washington and those who agreed with W. E. B. Du Bois's critique of the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education. In 1924, the career of the Georgia state supervisor of Negro schools, Walter B. Hill, became entangled in this clash of educational and racial visions. His case merits close examination for what it revealed about new possibilities in the interactions between education, race, philanthropy, white liberalism, and black ambition during the 1920s.