Temple Cutler Erwin (31 December 1878–10 November 1951), civic leader, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and was the son of John Quincy Adams Erwin and Hattie Whitesides Erwin. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee. At about age fifteen, he entered the preparatory school of Fisk University, in Nashville. While attending Fisk University, Erwin played both football and baseball and helped edit the college literary magazine, the Fisk Herald. After graduating in 1902, he taught school for two years in Karnes County, Texas, for about two years between 1904 and 1907 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and for one year in Mayesville, Sumter County, South Carolina. From 1907 through the end of 1909 Erwin served as president of Greeneville College, a Tennessee school that the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had founded. On 12 April 1906 he married Xenia Lucile Stewart, of Bowling Green, Kentucky. They had no children but raised two foster sons.
In January 1910, T. C. Erwin moved to Virginia as superintendent of another school that the AME Zion Church sponsored, the Dinwiddie Agricultural and Industrial School. There he met a fellow Fisk graduate, John Manuel Gandy, president of the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (later Virginia State University) and also executive secretary of the new Negro Organization Society, a confederation of community service organizations and benevolent societies. With the motto "Better Schools, Better Health, Better Homes, Better Farms," the society coordinated action on many issues of importance to African Americans, including education and public health. In 1914 Gandy appointed Erwin, who had been serving on the executive committee of the organization, its state field agent.
Erwin traveled throughout Virginia to increase awareness of the society, recruit members, raise funds, and distribute money to schools for their support and repair. He also organized the society's annual Clean-Up Days to encourage aesthetic improvements in Virginia's Black communities. Erwin arranged tours for the society's leaders, who for several days crisscrossed the state to rally support for the organization's mission and to boost membership. The trips regularly featured interracial meetings during which local white leaders publicly praised and endorsed the Negro Organization Society's work. In September 1915 Erwin coordinated a campaign in the Northern Neck that featured John Hope, president of Morehouse College, and would have included Booker Taliaferro Washington had he been able to make the planned trip. Summarizing his work in 1917 at the society's annual meeting, Erwin reported that he had logged nearly 20,000 miles while working with hundreds of educators and farm-demonstration agents in forty-four counties, secured almost $10,000 in donations to schools, and promoted the cleaning and improvement of hundreds of houses, outbuildings, and wells. The Southern Workman frequently reported on Erwin's successes.
Erwin's accomplishments and abilities led to his appointment in June 1918 as supervisor of the Virginia branch of the Division of Negro Economics, a new agency the United States Department of Labor had established. His job was to recruit African American workers for critical war industries and to mediate when racial tensions arose between Black workers and their employers. Erwin's first major challenge came in Norfolk, where the city government had passed a stringent vagrancy law that led to a wave of raids and arrests of African American men, who charged that they were being unfairly targeted. Erwin interceded and with the cooperation of Plummer Bernard Young, editor of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, launched a public education campaign and job fair that secured more than enough workers for the available jobs and stopped the raids. Later in the autumn, Erwin worked with Gandy and others on a patriotic campaign in twenty-six counties to encourage volunteerism and selfless service among possibly disaffected African Americans.
Erwin also lent his influence to the United States Housing Corporation to find housing for African American shipyard workers and their families in Portsmouth. Officially opened in May 1919, the Truxtun community featured 253 family units especially for African Americans, with such notable amenities as electricity, plumbing, and yard space. Erwin assisted in establishing Truxtun's advisory committee, arranged financing for purchases, and later organized support systems for the community's earliest residents. After World War I, Erwin chaired the executive committee of the Conference to Consider Informally the Contribution of the Colored People of Virginia to the War, for the Virginia War History Commission.
An increasing hostility of many influential whites toward the Division of Negro Economics led to the abrupt elimination of Erwin's job in March 1919. Capitalizing on his position as an insider on the Truxtun community project, he entered the world of banking and finance. By the end of the year he had organized Melwin Finance Corporation, in Richmond, with himself as secretary-treasurer until at least 1921. Erwin also served briefly as president of the Commercial Bank and Trust Company, but he had stepped down by February 1922, citing ill health. His successor, James Thomas Carter, merged Commercial Bank and Trust with Consolidated Bank and Trust Company in 1931.
Erwin worked briefly for the Southern Aid Society of Virginia, the oldest African American insurance company in the nation, of which Carter was president. In 1923 Erwin moved to Newport News to become principal of John Marshall School and in 1932 he received a master's degree from Hampton Institute. He worked at John Marshall until 1936 and then at Dunbar School (later Dunbar-Erwin School and still later An Achievable Dream Academy) from 1936 until he retired in 1949. Temple Cutler Erwin died at a Newport News hospital on 10 November 1951 and was buried in Holly Grove Cemetery (later Pleasant Shade Cemetery).
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Arthur B. Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, vol. 5: Virginia Edition (1921), 27–29 (with birth date and portrait facing 28), and Who Is Who in the Fifth Episcopal District in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, With a Supplement of General Information about the Church, May, 1920 (1920), 5; self-reported birth date in World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1917–1918), Record Group 163, and World War II Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1942), Record Group 147, both National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Personnel File, Newport News Public Schools;
Southern Workman 44 (1915): 378–379, 522–523, ibid. 45 (1916): 588–589, ibid. 47 (1918): 36, 410,
471–472, 519–520, and ibid. 48 (1919): 629–630; Richmond Planet, 17 Jan. 1920, 18 Feb. 1922; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 18 Feb. 1922; Elizabeth Cobb Jordan, "The Impact of the Negro Organization Society on Public Support for Education in Virginia, 1912–1950" (Ed.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1978), 49–50, 72–73; Henry P. Guzda, "Labor Department's First Program to Assist Black Workers," Monthly Labor Review 105 (June 1982): 39–44; Guzda, "Social Experiment of the Labor Department: The Division of Negro Economics," Public Historian 4 (1982): 7–37; Death Certificate, Newport News, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituary in Newport News Daily Press, 11 Nov. 1951.
Photograph in Arthur B. Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro, vol. 5.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Tameka Bradley Hobbs.
How to cite this page:
Tameka Bradley Hobbs, "Temple Cutler Erwin (1878–1951)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Erwin_Temple_Cutler, accessed [today's date]).
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