Based on research by Brad Kuennen, Iowa State University Vet Med and Animal Science Librarian
From Kansas City, MO.
Edward Bertram Evans was born in Kansas City, Missouri, son of Edward G. Evans I and Ada M. Howard Evans, on 10 May 1894, according to his WW I Draft Card.
Evans and Samuel A. Richardson hold the distinction of being the second and third Black graduates from the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine, graduating in the class of 1918. Evans served as 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I. He was also a member of the Veterinary Medical Society as a student.
After his graduation from Iowa State, Evans returned to his native Texas where he was hired as a veterinarian and instructor at Prairie View A&M College (now University) northwest of Houston where he established a Veterinary Medicine Department. It was at Prairie View where Evans became a mentor to Frederick Douglass Patterson and encouraged him to pursue veterinary medicine at Iowa State.
He was the first licensed Black veterinarian in Texas. (According to the State Fair of Texas Agriculture Hall of Honor https://bigtex.com/supporting-texans/agriculture/hall-of-honor/). In 1941, he was put in charge of all Black extension work in Texas.
In 1945, when Patterson was president of Tuskegee University, he called upon Evans to assist in establishing a veterinary school. Evans served as the first Dean of the Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine before being called back the following year to serve as Prairie View’s eighth president, serving in this role from 1946 to 1967.
Evans was a national leader in extension work at historically black colleges and universities. He led the development of a national school at Prairie View to train Black county and home agents and other extension workers for the South. He reorganized Prairie View in 1951, expanding it into a full Land Grant college. Evans served as a State Department Point IV consultant in 1952 and 1953 where he helped develop a program for livestock disease control and greater food production in North Africa and the Middle East. For all these accomplishments and more, Evans was one of two men named Progressive Farmer magazine’s 1953 Man of the Year in Service to Southern Agriculture.
Edwards B. Evans passed away on 3 July 1976 in Houston, TX, and is buried in Prairie View, TX, where his career began.
Sources
Photo Credit: Prairie View A&M University (1926)
1926 The Prairie(p.32)
Biography available at HBCU Connections at Iowa State University : Edward B. Evans ( http://hbcuconnections.iastatedigital.org/Edward_B._Evans )
