Frances Feldman MSW ’40

Frances Lomas Feldman focused her career on social policy and administration. Following two decades as a social worker in public welfare and family services, she became a prominent faculty member at the University of Southern California (USC) for 36 years. Feldman’s prolific research centered on the psychological, social and economic meanings of money and work in American families, and her publications on the subject still constitute the seminal work in this field.

Her groundbreaking research projects on discrimination faced by cancer patients in the workplace were the first psychosocial studies funded by the American Cancer Society, and remain the fundamental data on this topic that led multiple states to modify their fair employment legislation.

Feldman was instrumental in establishing the first industrial social work curriculum in the western United States, and the first university-wide faculty and staff counseling center which became a model for employee counseling programs throughout California. In partnership with George D. Nickel, she established the first credit counseling service, which became a network of over 300 nationwide under the National Consumer Credit Association. Feldman’s social work skills were often called upon for high-level consultation on various issues, including by the McCone Commission to examine the Watts riots of 1965 and private corporations to measure the impact of downsizing policies on employees and their families.

She authored 10 books, including “Human Services in the City of Angels: 18502000” which earned her the Wheat Award from the Southern California Historical Society, 2004. Feldman was a founder of the California Social Welfare Archives at USC, an organization dedicated to preserving the history of social work in California, and inducted into its Hall of Distinction in 2005.

Douglas G. Glasgow is nationally recognized as an expert on welfare and underclass formation in urban cities and was a resident scholar for the 21st Century Commission on African-American Males. He served as dean of the School of Social Work at Howard University from 1972 to 1975, and led the creation of the first comprehensive, accredited, graduate-level curriculum modeled from a Black perspective. He helped found and was co-chair of the Center for Study of Afro-American History and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Glasgow spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Ghana at Legon and Makererre University in Uganda. During his time in Africa, Glasgow was a policy analyst and consultant on social development for the Ministry of Social Welfare in Ghana and the Ministry of Rehabilitation in Ethiopia. He traveled extensively in China to study their systems of education, juvenile care and health services, paying particular attention to the processes of social rehabilitation.

He served as vice president of the National Urban League, delivering testimony at congressional hearings, developing regulatory comment, and helping to formulate and debate national policy issues before the public. He helped found multiple community-based and national organizations, including the National Association of Black Social Workers and the United Black Fund of United Way. In Washington D.C., he served as a member of the Mental Health Reorganization Commission, and the Teen Pregnancy Commission. Glasgow published the groundbreaking work, “The Black Underclass,” on the etiology of Blacks’ entrapment in poverty, and was actively involved in Early Action Response (EAR) to Urban Needs providing research services, information and advocacy for vulnerable communities.