Albert W. Dent
*Albert W. Dent was born on September 25, 1904. He was a Black academic business administrator and community leader.
Albert Walter Dent was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was a day laborer who died shortly before Albert's birth. His mother worked as a domestic servant to support Albert and his two sisters. The Dents had a family friend who mentored young Albert, who was important in a fatherless family. In 1926, Dent graduated from Morehouse College with a degree in accounting.
Dent was extensively involved in campus activities and student affairs while working at the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. After graduation, Dent worked as a branch office auditor for the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Dent became vice president of the Safety Construction Company in Houston, Texas, where he worked for four years. John Hope recruited him, then president of Morehouse College, to return to Atlanta to serve in fundraising and alums relations roles.
During his tenure at Morehouse College, Dent met the acting president of Dillard University in New Orleans. During this time, he married Ernestine Jesse Covington. Dillard University already had a relationship with Flint-Goodridge Hospital in New Orleans, and financial backers of both Dillard University and Flint-Goodridge Hospital were constructing a new campus and hospital building in 1932. Flint-Goodridge Hospital hired Dent to superintendent the new, well-equipped hospital facility, which Dent accepted. During this time of Jim Crow Laws in the Southern United States, this hospital and its administration were particularly important to African-Americans in southeast Louisiana. In 1935, Dent was the business manager and superintendent of Flint-Goodridge Hospital, a role he fulfilled until 1941.
Dent cultivated a close working relationship with New Orleans businessman and philanthropist Edgar B. Stern. Stern was an influential member of the Board of Trustees for Flint-Goodridge Hospital and Dillard University since the two institutions had shared governance. The relationship was useful to Dent in his fundraising efforts since hospitals and universities for African Americans were chronically short of money at the time of the Jim Crow South. His fundraising success included such institutions as the Rosenwald Fund and the General Education Board, in addition to the United States Public Health Service.
He was named president of Dillard University in 1941. At Flint-Goodridge Hospital, Dent raised funds to significantly enlarge Dillard University's financial endowment, which continued to grow, and he applied some of these funds for building improvements and new buildings on the university's campus. Enrollment grew from about 300 students in 1941 to more than 1100 students in 1969. In the 1950s, Dent organized the Edwin R. Embree Memorial Lecture series at Dillard University. Noted speakers included Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Jackie Robinson.
These were later known as the Dillard Presidential Lecture Series. A member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity, Dent was instrumental in forming the fraternity's Theta Sigma Chapter at Dillard in May 1936. He served as the organization's 16th Grand Basileus from 1937 to 1940. Albert Dent, who improved education and health care for Black and poor people in the American South, died on February 13, 1984.
