His parents were African-American farmers who owned several hundred acres of land in the northern part of Hancock County, Georgia.

Their small community, called Springfield, built a church, a general store, and a rudimentary four-year, elementary grade school.

At a time when many people were moving from rural to urban areas, there was national concern about maintaining family farms.

They were taught scientific farming, establishing cooperatives for the community and their economy, and improving rural social institutions.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hubert served on the South Carolina Food Administration Board.

There, he made contacts with the philanthropists who would help him in his next position as president of a small, struggling black college in Savannah, Georgia.

[2] Hubert used the college's relative proximity to Hancock County, Georgia, to attempt an experiment in rural community building, along the themes of the Country Life Movement.

With backing from northern philanthropists, he worked to transform Springfield into a model black community, blending Butterfield's progressive rural idealism, the economic separatism of Marcus Garvey, and the pragmatism of Booker T. Washington.

Many African Americans had already joined the Great Migration from rural Georgia and the South, to escape Jim Crow laws and its second-class status.

In 1947, Hubert retired from Georgia State College due to tensions over his autocratic administrative style.