BOOKER T. WASHINGTON NATIONAL MONU

HISTORIC RESOURCE 

BOOKER T.WASHINGTON

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

and 

SEGREGATED EDUCATION IN VIRGINIA

Historic Resource Study 

Booker T. Washington National Monument 

Scot A. French 

Craig Barton 

Peter Flora 

Prepared under cooperative agreement with the Carter G. Woodson Institute 

for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia 

 

National Park Service 

U. S. Department of the Interior 

Printed June 2007 
Cover illustration: Students of all grades gathered in assembly in Mr. Holmes’ room, the 

school’s largest classroom and library. Courtesy of Gloris Taylor, Booker T. Washington 

School alumnus. 

 
v 

Table of Contents 

Document Approval Page.............................................................................................. iii 

List of Illustrations.............................................................................................. vii 

Foreword.......................................................................................................................... ix

Acknowledgements .............................................................................................xi 

I. Scope and Methodology ....................................................................................1 

II. Historical Data Section ....................................................................................5 

III. Architectural Data Section ............................................................................ 61 

Appendix: Design and Construction Drawings ........................................................ 91 

Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 105 

vii 

List of Illustrations 

Classroom #1 

Eastern Wall (1 photo).................................................................................................. 67

Southern Wall (2 photos) ............................................................................................. 68 

Northern Wall (2 photos)............................................................................... 68

Ceiling (1 photo)............................................................................................................ 69

Classroom #2 

Eastern Wall (1 photo).................................................................................................. 70 

Western Wall (1 photo) ................................................................................................ 70 

Southern Wall (3 photos) ............................................................................................. 71 

Northern Wall (1 photo) .............................................................................................. 71 

Floor (1 photo)............................................................................................................... 71 

Classroom #3 

Eastern Wall (1 photo).................................................................................................. 72 

Western Wall (1 photo) ................................................................................................ 73 

Southern Wall (1 photo)............................................................................................... 73 

Northern Wall (2 photos) ............................................................................................ 73 

Ceiling (1 photo)............................................................................................................ 74 

Kitchen 

Western Wall (2 photos)............................................................................................... 75 

Southern Wall (1 photo)............................................................................................... 75 

Northern Wall (1 photo) .............................................................................................. 75 

Floor (1 photo)............................................................................................................... 76 

Principal’s Office 

Western Wall (1 photo) ................................................................................................ 77 

Southern Wall (1 photo)............................................................................................... 77 

Northern Wall (2 photos) ............................................................................................ 78 

Floor (1 photo)............................................................................................................... 78 
viii 

Girl’s Rest Room 

Eastern Wall (1 photo).................................................................................................. 79 

Southern Wall (1 photo)............................................................................................... 80 

Northern Wall (1 photo) .............................................................................................. 80 

Floor (1 photo)............................................................................................................... 81 

Boy’s Rest Room 

Southern Wall (2 photos) ............................................................................................. 82 

Northern Wall (1 photo) .............................................................................................. 83 

Ceiling (1 photo)............................................................................................................ 83

Public Corridor 

Walls (7 photos)............................................................................................................. 84

Ceiling (1 photo)............................................................................................................ 85

Floor (1 photo)............................................................................................................... 85 

Millwork and Equipment (1 photo) ........................................................................... 85 

Boiler Room/Fuel Room/Pump and Tank Room 

Miscellaneous Interiors (8 photos)............................................................................. 86 

Exterior Building Envelope 

Miscellaneous Exteriors (13 photos).......................................................................... 89 

Design and Construction Drawings 

Floor Plan ....................................................................................................................... 91 

Finish Schedules ............................................................................................................ 92 

Site Plan........................................................................................................................... 93 

Wall Section.................................................................................................................... 94 

East Elevation................................................................................................................. 95 

West Elevation ............................................................................................................... 96

North Elevation ............................................................................................................. 97 

South Elevation.............................................................................................................. 98

Door Detail – Exterior .................................................................................................. 99 

Door Detail – Interior ................................................................................................. 100 

Equipment Plan – Overview....................................................................................... 101 

Equipment Plan – Detail............................................................................................. 102 

Window Detail............................................................................................................. 104 
ix 

Foreword 

Booker T. Washington National Monument, located in Franklin County, Virginia, is 

preserved in public ownership as the birthplace and childhood home of Booker T. 

Washington, a slave who became a prominent educator and influential AfricanAmerican leader in the period between 1895 and 1915. Developed in the 1940s as a 

private memorial and added as a unit of the National Park System in 1956, the site’s early 

history as a memorial is itself a subject of interest and importance. 

In 1952 the trustees of the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial donated to the 

Franklin County School Board six acres of land which had been part of the Burroughs 

Plantation. The donation was for construction of one of the county’s last segregated 

schools for black children, thereby fulfilling one of the memorial’s goals, “to plan for the 

erection of a consolidated elementary school for Negro children.” The school, designed 

to at least partially “equalize” facilities for blacks with those traditionally provided for 

whites, opened in September 1954, four months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 

unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education found the “separate but equal” 

doctrine as applied to public education to be unconstitutional. The school continued to 

operate—as a segregated facility—until the School Board’s Freedom of Choice initiative 

in 1966 led to the transfer of black students into formerly all-white schools. 

The four-room building, accommodating about 90 students, replaced the one-room 

schoolhouses which had previously served the county’s black elementary 

schoolchildren. The local African-American community actively supported the new 

facility, helping to clear the land for its construction and later for a baseball diamond and 

dirt basketball court and raising money for school equipment and educational field trips. 

In 1973 the School Board donated the now-vacant school building and the surrounding 

property to the NPS, thereby reconnecting the land to the monument. Since 1985, the 

NPS has used the building as the park’s administrative headquarters and for 

maintenance operations. Alumni, however, despite the building’s new uses, have 

continued to be interested in their former school. 

This was the background of the NPS decision, made during preparation of the park’s 

new General Management Plan, that the school property both needed and deserved to 

be thoroughly studied to document both its place in the history of the park itself as well 

as its role in Virginia’s segregated educational system during the height of the 

desegregation controversy. The NPS came to realize that the school was likely historic in 

its own right and contributed to the park’s status as a property listed on the National 

Register of Historic Places. As part of the GMP process, the Virginia Department of 

Historic Resources agreed. 

The resulting historic resource study, Booker T. Washington Elementary School and 

Segregated Education in Virginia, concludes that the historical significance of the 

Booker T. Washington Elementary School rests on its relationship to three important 

and interrelated themes: (1) Virginia’s school equalization campaign of the late 1940s 
x

and early 1950s; (2) Booker T. Washington’s post-World World II legacy; and (3) the 

school’s enduring value to alumni and other residents of Franklin County as a site of 

memory and source of community pride. The study also confirms that despite the 

alterations to the building and the site related to its more recent NPS uses, the property 

retains sufficient architectural integrity to be eligible for the National Register of Historic 

Places. 

The study was prepared by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and 

African Studies (CWI) of the University of Virginia (UVA). The Institute promotes 

interdisciplinary and collaborative research and interpretation of the African and 

African-American experience in a global context. The project was begun when the 

University was a member of the Chesapeake Watershed Cooperative Ecosystem Studies 

Unit, and was conducted under a cooperative agreement. It is the successful culmination 

of a good working relationship between CWI, UVA and the NPS. 

Principal Investigator Dr. Scot A. French, the Institute’s Associate Director and later 

Interim Director, is an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at 

UVA and an expert in the racial and social contexts which the school reflects. The 

architectural component of the report was prepared by Craig E. Barton, Associate 

Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, UVA. Research Assistant Peter S. Flora, a 

UVA graduate student, conducted intensive historical research which was combined with 

Dr. French’s research into the final narrative. Park staff, particularly Administrative 

Officer Eleanor Long and Facility Manager Kenneth Arrington, provided valuable 

assistance to the UVA researchers. Ms. Long also assisted in preparing this manuscript 

for publication. 

Rebecca Harriett 

Superintendent 

Booker T. Washington National Monument 

May 2007 
xi 

Acknowledgements 

We would like to thank the National Park Service employees who contributed so 

generously of their time and energy to this collaborative enterprise. 

Northeast Region Historian Clifford Tobias initiated the project and skillfully 

shepherded early drafts of the HDS and ADS through the review process. 

Park Superintendent Rebecca Harriett, Administrative Officer Eleanor Long, and Park 

Ranger Betsy Haynes offered assistance and encouragement throughout the research 

phase of the project. Their knowledge of park history and administrative records proved 

invaluable. 

Northeast Region Historical Architecture Program Manager Peggy Albee and Northeast 

Region Architects Richard Dretsch and Stephen Clark provided insightful comments on 

drafts of the Architectural Data Section. Elizabeth Igleheart, the region’s National 

Register coordinator, reviewed and reorganized the ADS and brought focus to the 

discussion of integrity and the use of National Register criteria. 

Special thanks to Northeast Region History Program Manager Paul Weinbaum, who 

asked probing questions, offered valuable suggestions, and played a crucial role in 

bringing the project to completion. 

While oral histories fell outside the Scope of Work for this project, informal 

conversations with James Jordan and other Booker T. Washington Elementary School 

alumni informed our understanding of the school’s significance as a site of memory and 

source of community pride. Mr. Jordan’s unpublished essay, “The Building of Booker T. 

Washington Elementary School,” documented the crucial role played by black parents 

and community leaders in lobbying for a new school to replace the one-room relics of 

the pre-World War II era. 

Finally, we appreciate the patience and goodwill of everyone involved in this project, 

which took so very long to complete. Perhaps Booker T. Washington spoke for us all 

when he wrote: “We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, 

our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use 

skill; in our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for 

the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet 

simple, high and yet the servant of all.” 

Scot A. French 

Principal Investigator 

Charlottesville, Virginia 

February 2007
xi 
1 

I. Scope and Methodology 

In August 2002, the University of Virginia (UVA) entered into a cooperative agreement 

with the National Park Service (NPS) to prepare a Historic Resource Study (HRS), a 

scholarly report, for Booker T. Washington National Monument (BOWA), Franklin 

County, Virginia. That agreement defined the Scope of Work as follows: 

The HRS will address the history of the former Booker T. Washington 

Elementary School and its role in the era of racial segregation and desegregation 

in Virginia. The primary component of the HRS will be the Historical Data 

Section (HDS); the secondary component will be the Architectural Data Section 

(ADS). 

The HRS provides a historical overview of a park or region – in this case a major 

park resource (emphasis added) – and evaluates that resource within historic 

contexts, defined as historical themes delineated by time periods and geographic 

areas. The HRS synthesizes all available cultural resource information from all 

disciplines in a narrative designed to serve managers, planners, interpreters, 

cultural resource specialists, the general public, and scholars as a reference for 

the history of this resource within the park. In addition, the HRS identifies needs 

for special history studies and other reports and may make recommendations for 

resource management and interpretation. 

The study area for the HRS (for both the HDS and the ADS) will be (1) the 

former school building and its six-acre tract from its origin as part of the historic 

Burroughs Farm through its entire history under successive ownerships 

culminating in acquisition and use by the NPS; and (2) the broader aspect of the 

story – the role of the former school in the history of racially segregated public 

education in Virginia, particularly in Franklin County. Thus there are two 

interrelated contexts to be addressed: (1) the physical property consisting of the 

former school building and grounds: and (2) the place that property occupied in 

Virginia’s campaign to maintain racially segregated public education. Both 

aspects of the study will require the former school to be compared with other 

Franklin County segregated elementary schools of that era, both white and 

Negro. 

The HRS will synthesize existing publications and research materials (books, 

NPS reports such as the CLR, handbooks, planning and interpretive documents, 

academic theses, scholarly and popular articles in academic journals, magazines, 

and newspapers, US, Commonwealth of Virginia, Franklin County, and local 

archives and records, etc.). Primary research will be conducted as appropriate. 

The level of investigation is to be “Thorough,” defined in the next paragraph as 

follows: 

For historical studies this means research in selected published and documentary 

sources of presumed relevance that are readily accessible without extensive travel 

and that promise expeditious extraction of relevant data, interviewing 

knowledgeable persons who are readily available, and presenting findings in no 

greater detail than required by the task directive [in this case, the Scope of Work]. 
2 

The ADS will focus on presenting the physical history of the school building, and 

include an analysis by a historical architect as to whether the building retains 

enough integrity to qualify it for listing on the NRHP. 

Illustrations should appear throughout the HRS as appropriate to correlate with 

the text. NPS will provide reproduction prints for historic photographs and 

illustrations in NPS collections. Research team will be responsible for the cost of 

reproduction of other images and for securing copyright permission from nonNPS sources. All illustrations should be labeled with captions which fully 

identify the subject, where published, and cite the location of the original. 

Illustrations should be numbered consecutively, and this enumeration used when 

citing illustrations in the narrative and other sections. 

Our research methodology combined archival research in public records and 

local/regional newspapers with immersion in prior reports and scholarly literature 

relevant to the central themes of our study: Booker T. Washington’s educational/social 

philosophy, as shaped by his experiences in slavery and freedom; Jim Crow education 

and the post-World War II push for the equalization/desegregation of school facilities in 

Virginia; the relationship between Sidney J. Phillips’ privately owned Booker T. 

Washington Birthplace Memorial and the establishment of the Booker T. Washington 

Elementary School on public land adjacent to Washington’s birthplace; and the closing 

of the school as a consequence of school desegregation. 

Local and regional newspapers, preserved on microfilm at the University of Virginia’s 

Alderman Library, provided general information relevant to the opening and closing of 

the school. Administrative records held by the Park chronicled the transfer of the 

former school property to the Park Service and modifications to the building and 

landscape under Park supervision. At the Library of Virginia in Richmond, information 

on black schools in Franklin Country from 1951 to 1960 was collected from the State 

School Superintendent’s Records. This data provided a general overview of black 

schools in the county, including the number of schools, their size, teacher-to-student 

ratios, funding, and teacher salaries. Similar information was also collected for white 

schools in the county for comparative purposes. 

A tour of Franklin County schools built during the 1950s – the same period as Booker T. 

Washington Elementary – provided us with a basis for a comparison of segregated but 

purportedly “equalized” school facilities. While substantive changes to these buildings 

precluded an exhaustive analysis, enough original features remained to establish 

benchmarks for comparison. The records of the Franklin County school board also 

provided important background information on school construction programs and the 

relationship of segregated education to these efforts. 
3 

Our decision to place the history of the school within the broader context of Booker T. 

Washington’s educational/social philosophy and the racial politics of public schooling in 

Jim Crow Virginia vastly expanded the chronological framework of the study and 

precluded a detailed operational history of the building. In acknowledging the 

limitations of this study, we feel confident nonetheless that it highlights the most 

significant themes for future interpretation and, perhaps, further investigation. 

Though many people contributed to the writing and editing of this report, as detailed in 

the acknowledgements above, its primary authorship may be ascribed as follows: 

• Peter S. Flora, a graduate research assistant in the Corcoran Department of 

History at the University of Virginia, wrote the first draft of the HDS based on 

archival research, interviews with park employees and school alumni, and a 

thorough review of relevant scholarly literature. 

• Scot A. French, Associate Professor of History and formerly the 

Associate/Interim Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for AfricanAmerican and African Studies at the University of Virginia, conducted additional 

research and significantly expanded upon the first draft of HDS in consultation 

with NPS reviewers. 

• Craig E. Barton, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, 

conducted two site visits, reviewed the documentary record, and prepared the 

first and second drafts of the ADS for NPS review.

5 

II. Historical Data Section 

Introduction 

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its most important decision of the 

twentieth century, ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional in the landmark case, 

Brown v. Board of Education.

1

 Just four months later, as part of its ongoing effort to 

forestall court-ordered desegregation, the Commonwealth of Virginia opened a brandnew elementary school for black students in Franklin County’s segregated school 

system. Named for the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” the Booker T. Washington Elementary 

School was located on part of the plantation that had been Washington’s birthplace 

nearly a century before. Sidney J. Phillips, the African American president of the 

privately owned Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial, had donated the six acres 

to the county school board in May 1952, fulfilling a goal he had voiced since his purchase 

of the birthplace in October 1945. Indeed, at the groundbreaking for the memorial in 

April 1946, it was announced that Phillips’ organization planned to: 

restore the cabin in which [Washington] was born; to send out memorial 

shrubbery throughout the country; to set up a Better Workers’ Institute; to 

establish a model demonstration farm; to set up a museum of Negro 

accomplishments in handicraft, music, arts, and science; to establish a radio 

station which will carry coast-to-coast broadcasts based on the teachings of 

Booker T. Washington; and to plan for the erection of a consolidated elementary 

school for Negro children [emphasis added] and a regional vocational school for 

Negro youth.2

While most of these goals either never materialized or proved financially untenable, a 

consolidated elementary school for black students was established at the site. A fourroom building that served around 90 students each year, Booker T. Washington 

Elementary consolidated and replaced the many one-room structures that had 

previously served Franklin County’s black, elementary-age students. During this period, 

the local African American community was deeply involved with the school. They not 

only facilitated Phillips’ donation of the land to the school board, but they also remained 

integral to the continued development and maintenance of the facility and the quality of 

education the school offered their children. This outpouring of support and 

 

1

 See Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 

2

 “Address read by Hon. Walter L. Hopkins at Birthplace,” (Booker T. Washington Birthplace 

Memorial, Inc.: 5 April 1946, 4), Resource Management Records, 1955- (central file), Booker T. 

Washington National Monument, Hardy, Va. (hereafter cited as “BOWA Park records”) 

(emphasis added). 
6 

involvement by the local black community, however, contrasted sharply with the cold 

reception most of Phillips’ other projects garnered. Understanding why Phillips received 

such uneven support from the black community, both locally and nationally, is central to 

appreciating the contested and continued resonance of Washington’s message and 

legacy during the mid-twentieth century. 

Booker T. Washington Elementary served the county’s black students for more than a 

decade until it was closed in 1966 when Franklin County, along with the rest of the state, 

finally began to desegregate its public schools through the one-way movement of its 

black students into formally all-white schools. Spanning the years 1954 to 1966, the 

Booker T. Washington Elementary School offers a unique venue for interpreting and 

understanding this hard-fought period that was the core of the modern civil rights 

movement. Specifically, the school speaks to three important and interrelated themes in 

the history of school desegregation in Virginia. 

• School Equalization in Defense of Segregation. Booker T. Washington 

Elementary was largely a product of Virginia’s eleventh-hour equalization campaign, 

an attempt to eliminate obvious disparities between black and white schools and 

establish legal compliance with Virginia’s “separate but equal” statutes. To the 

untrained eye, there was little to distinguish this segregated Negro elementary school 

from the modern white elementary schools erected at about the same time. Yet, 

however similar they might appear, the black schools would always bear the badge of 

inferiority. It was not by chance, for example, that Booker T. Washington lacked 

some of the physical amenities and finishing touches found in white schools 

constructed in the same period. Court-mandated efforts to “equalize” black and 

white schools, at enormous expense to the Commonwealth, only highlighted the 

absurdity of a dual system. As a model of equalized school facilities for blacks – one 

of many such dubious “monuments” erected by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 

the 1950s – Booker T. Washington Elementary was designed to mask the inequalities 

inherent in racially segregated education. The modular brick schoolhouse bore little 

resemblance to the dilapidated one- and two-room frame structures that it replaced – 

structures far more representative of the impoverished state of black education in 

Virginia from the era of Reconstruction through the mid-twentieth century. Yet, for 

all of Booker T. Washington Elementary’s modern features, its students remained 

trapped within a two-tier system that assumed their inferiority to whites and limited 

their opportunities for education and employment to those reserved, by Virginia law 

and custom, for “Negroes.” 
7 

• Booker T. Washington’s Post-World War II Legacy. Both the name of Booker T. 

Washington Elementary School and its historical relationship to the neighboring 

birthplace memorial speak to the enduring appeal of Washington’s educational 

philosophy and accommodationist politics at the dawn of the modern Civil Rights 

Movement. It is doubtful that Sidney J. Phillips, the African American 

educator/entrepreneur from Tuskegee, could have established his private birthplace 

memorial in Franklin County, circa 1945, without first convincing the white 

segregationist establishment that he fully endorsed “separate but equal” schooling 

and rejected any implications of “social equality.” It is equally doubtful that the 

Franklin County school board would have accepted Phillips’ donation of land 

without an explicit understanding that the public school to be built upon it would be 

segregated. Yet, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, the times they were a-changing. Yoked to 

Washington’s late 19th/early 20th century model of racial diplomacy and dependent 

on Virginia’s segregationist leadership for local, state, and federal patronage, Phillips 

found himself increasingly out of step with mainstream African American leaders and 

the wider African American community on civil rights issues. Bankrupt and 

demoralized by the mid-1950s, he blamed the failure of his private birthplace 

memorial on lack of support from the African American community and, ultimately, 

prevailed upon his powerful white friends to bail him out. Ironically, the 

establishment of the Booker T. Washington National Monument, over the initial 

objections of National Park Service officials, paved the way for a reassessment of 

Washington’s legacy from the integrationist Civil Rights Movement perspective that 

prevails to this day. 

• A Site of Memory and Source of Community Pride. The well-documented 

contributions of Franklin County’s local black community toward the establishment 

of Booker T. Washington Elementary School and, more recently, the efforts of 

school alumni to preserve its history speak to the school’s enduring significance as a 

source of community pride. As a site of memory and reunion, the school is 

associated not with the stigma of Jim Crow but with the inspiring story of African 

Americans’ struggle for educational opportunity through the eras of segregation and 

civil rights. Even Phillips, whose public support for “separate but equal” schooling 

conflicted with the sentiments and attitudes of most black leaders following World 

War II, was motivated (at least in part) by a desire to expand educational 

opportunities for black residents of Franklin County and the surrounding region. 

The greatest challenge facing park administrators as they plan for the future lies not in 

the restoration of the former school building to its 1966 appearance, for the structure 

retains its architectural integrity despite significant changes, but in the development of 
8 

an interpretive strategy that will illustrate these thematic connections between 19th

century birthplace and 20th century school through the Life and Legacy of Booker T. 

Washington. 

The Washington Years – 1856-1915 

The former Booker T. Washington Elementary School building is located on a 5.99-acre 

tract within the Booker T. Washington National Monument, a 239.01-acre park located 

in Franklin County, Virginia, twenty-two miles southeast of Roanoke. Established by 

Act of Congress in 1956, upgraded during the service-wide Mission 66 improvement 

program, and expanded in 1973 to include the former school property, the National 

Monument commemorates the life and teachings of one of the nation’s most prominent 

black leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

It was here, in this sparsely populated region of piedmont Virginia, that educator and 

orator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) entered the world as human chattel, “a slave 

among slaves.” The son of an enslaved black woman and a free white man, Washington 

was condemned by Virginia law to inherit the social and legal status of his mother. For 

the first nine years of his life, through the Sectional Crisis, Secession, and Civil War, 

Washington lived among “the coloured people” who inhabited the slave quarters on the 

Burroughs Family farm. “My life,” he later recalled, “had its beginning in the midst of 

the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.” Such misery and 

desolation sprang not just from the harsh physical conditions of slave life, Washington 

observed, but from the mental and moral degradation of the enslaved. Slavery, as an 

institution, cultivated ignorance, shiftlessness, and hopelessness. The schooling of white 

children from the Burroughs family made Washington acutely aware, at a very young 

age, of the educational opportunities denied to him and other black children. “I had no 

schooling whatever while I was a slave,” he recalled, “though I remember on several 

occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry 

her books. The picture of several dozen boys in a schoolroom engaged in study made a 

deep impression on me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in 

this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.” Thus, for Washington, it was 

the schoolhouse – not the slave cabin – that best symbolized the thwarted ambitions and 

highest aspirations of his people.3

 

3

 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986): xxxix, 1, 2, 6-7. 
9 

Washington made “the struggle for an education” a central theme of his life story. 

Shortly after Emancipation, he and his family left the Burroughs Farm and moved to the 

small town of Malden, West Virginia, located just outside of Charleston. Washington’s 

stepfather had secured a job for himself at a salt-furnace, and young Booker and his 

brother were put to work there as well. Determined to learn how to read, Washington 

embarked on a program of self-education. Without the aid of a teacher – “at that time 

there was not a single member of my race anywhere near us who could read” – he 

acquired a book and, within a few weeks, “mastered the greater portion of the alphabet.” 

About that time, the colored people of the village began to discuss the possibility of 

opening a community-funded school for Negro children. Years later, Washington 

reflected on the historical significance of this grassroots movement, repeated in towns, 

villages, and rural areas throughout the South. 

Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form an exact idea 

of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education. As I 

have stated, it was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and 

none too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could 

be secured, not only the day schools filled, but the night-schools as well. 

Unfortunately, financial circumstance prevented Washington from attending the new 

school. (“I had been working in the salt-furnace for several months, and my stepfather 

had discovered that I had a financial value, and so, when the school opened, he decided 

that he could not spare me from the work.”) Disappointed but undaunted, Washington 

arranged to take private lessons with the new schoolteacher at night. For a short time, he 

was allowed to attend school during the day, but his attendance was irregular and he 

soon found himself back in night school.4

As an émigré to West Virginia, Washington did not witness firsthand the momentous 

changes that Reconstruction brought to all facets of civic life – including public 

education – in his native Virginia and the other states of the Old Confederacy. Outraged 

by the restoration of ex-Confederates to political power and the passage of “black 

codes” that returned the freed men and women to virtual slavery, Congressional 

Republicans seized control of the Reconstruction process from President Johnson and 

wrote black freedom into law. In 1866, they passed, over Johnson’s veto, an act 

extending civil rights to African Americans. They also passed the Fourteenth 

Amendment, which conferred citizenship on all persons born or naturalized in the 

United States, punished those states that denied black men the right to vote, and 

disqualified from state and national office all ex-Confederates who had held office 

before the war. To ensure ratification of the amendment, Congress passed the 

 

4

 Washington, Up From Slavery, 29-30. 
10 

Reconstruction Act of 1867, which placed the South under military rule until new state 

governments – committed to the protection of black voting rights – could be formed. 

Black men would be allowed to participate in the election of delegates to state 

constitutional conventions; white men who were disqualified from office-holding under 

the Fourteenth Amendment would be banned from participation in the state 

constitutional conventions as well. Once a state adopted a new constitution that 

guaranteed black suffrage and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, it could apply for 

readmission to the Union. 

Though Washington publicly bemoaned what he considered the misguided principles of 

Reconstruction in his autobiography, he shared with its architects a commitment to free 

public education as the key to racial advancement and regional progress. During the 

brief era of biracial Radical Republican rule in Reconstruction Virginia (1867-69), 

delegates to the federally mandated constitutional conventions adopted provisions for “a 

uniform system of free public schools, and for its gradual, equal, and full introduction 

into all counties of the state by 1876, or as much earlier as practical.” The new system of 

taxpayer-funded public education withstood the restoration of white conservative rule 

in 1869, though new provisions were added in 1870 (after the state’s readmission to the 

Union) to ensure segregation of schools by race. The language of the statute prefigured 

the Jim Crow-era doctrine of separate but equal: “This act provides for a system of free 

public schools for persons between five and twenty-one years, that white and colored 

persons shall not be taught in the same school but in separate schools, under the same 

general regulations as to management, usefulness and efficiency.” Though the law 

established a new state agency – the Department of Public Instruction – to supervise the 

system, the ultimate control over curriculum and facilities rested with localities. Here is 

how historian William A. Link, author of A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, 

Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920, describes public school facilities in late 

19th century Virginia: 

Housed in makeshift buildings – often barns, churches, and homes – nineteenth 

century schoolhouses did not project the primacy of state power but blended 

into the topography. Indeed, schools embodied central features of their social 

surroundings. In an isolated, rural society, they were intensely local; in a culture 

that valued family above all, they were family-dominated; in a society based on 

strict racial and class rankings, they reflected widespread social inequality; and in 

an impoverished agricultural economy, they were poor and makeshift. 

Yet for all of its shortcomings, Virginia’s public school system grew dramatically 

between 1870 and 1900. By Link’s calculation, “the numbers of black and white schools, 
11 

teachers, and enrolled and attending pupils tripled” during that period.5 In his history of 

public education in Franklin County, Harold W. Ramsey, superintendent of schools 

from 1927-1968, noted that prior to 1900, “the Superintendent, the County Board and 

the District Board members were faced with a gigantic task – namely to get popular 

approval for a system of free education for black and white alike.” “The sentiment” 

among the county’s white residents, however, was “at best . . . apathetic.” His 

description of the state of education in Franklin County at the turn of the century could 

have applied to almost any rural Southern school district: “During the reconstruction era 

and for many years following, funds were almost nonexistent. There were few persons 

in any way qualified to teach; few buildings existed and these were obsolete or 

inadequate. [White] people had to be convinced of the wisdom of educating Negroes.”6

 

“With all of this to over come,” Ramsey concluded, “it is little short of miraculous that” 

the belief in the need for a well-funded and comprehensive system of public education 

ever “took root, not only in Franklin County but over the state as well.”7

The establishment of segregated elementary schools for black children in the postemancipation South dramatically increased the demand for trained black teachers. 

During Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Schools served as the primary training ground 

for prospective teachers. A new model of teacher training schools, endorsed by white 

Northern missionaries and conservative white Southerners alike, emerged in 1868 with 

the establishment of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, 

Virginia. The Hampton Model, as it came to be known, combined teacher training with 

manual labor and moral instruction. Its founder, former Union general Samuel C. 

Armstrong, believed that the colored freedmen should be educated for second-class 

citizenship and a permanent place at the bottom of the new industrial order. He 

envisioned an army of black Hampton graduates, steeped in his conservative philosophy, 

spreading the gospel of industrial education among the Negro masses through their 

work as teachers in the public elementary schools.8

Armstrong and his vision of industrial education found a ready disciple in Booker T. 

Washington, whose formal education had stopped at the elementary school level. In 

1872, while at work in a West Virginia coal mine, Washington overheard two of his co-

 

5

 William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural 

Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986): 23, 21. 6

 Harold W. Ramsey, Franklin County Public Schools: A Century of Progress (Rocky Mount, VA: 

Franklin County School Board, 1975), 11. 

7

 Ramsey, Franklin County Public Schools, 11. 

8

 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill and London: 

The University of North Carolina Press, 1988). See especially Ch. 2, “The Hampton Model of 

Normal School Industrial Education, 1868-1915, pp. 33-78. 
12 

workers discussing a “great school for coloured people somewhere in Virginia.” 

Established for the benefit of the colored race, the school offered “poor but worthy 

students” an opportunity to “work out all or part of the cost of board, and at the same 

time be taught some trade or industry.” Washington saved his money and, with the 

blessing of his mother, traveled hundreds of miles – much of the way on foot – to enroll 

in the Hampton Institute. Washington never forgot the lessons he learned there. The 

most important one? Make yourself useful to the society in which you live. “At 

Hampton,” he recalled, “I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but 

learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own sake and for 

the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world 

wants done brings.”9

In 1881, Washington accepted an invitation to establish a new, state-chartered normal 

school for Negroes in Tuskegee, Alabama. Like Armstrong’s Hampton Institute, 

Washington’s Tuskegee specialized in training African Americans for gainful 

employment in a rapidly industrializing New South economy. White Southerners, while 

generally hostile to public education for Negroes, found the Tuskegee model acceptable 

because, in their eyes, it trained blacks for second-class citizenship and did not threaten 

the existing social order. As principal of Tuskegee, Washington espoused a strategy for 

racial advancement that emphasized the importance of industrial education, moral uplift, 

and self-help. He solicited small gifts from local people “of both races” while reaching 

out to wealthy white benefactors, North and South, who shared his faith in industrial 

education. Their financial contributions ensured the success of the school and 

contributed to Washington’s growing fame. Washington burnished his credentials as a 

national “race leader,” worthy of white Southern patronage and white Northern 

philanthropy, with his famous address to the 1895 Cotton States and International 

Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. There, to the extended applause of those assembled, 

Washington proclaimed that the progress of the South depended on an alliance of skilled 

black labor and white capital, rooted in the historical “friendship” between slave and 

master. 

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or 

who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the 

Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down 

your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way 

of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in 

agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. 

And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the 

South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in 

 

9

 Washington, Up From Slavery, 42, 73-74. 
13 

the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in 

nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our 

greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook 

the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail 

to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and 

glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of 

life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the 

superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No 

race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in 

writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. . . 

To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and 

strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I 

would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” 

Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose 

fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant 

the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, 

without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded 

your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the 

earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress 

of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and 

encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, 

hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom 

the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can 

be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded 

by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world 

has seen. 

Lest anyone confuse Washington’s plea for interracial cooperation with a more radical 

agenda of “social equality,” Washington added this disclaimer: “The wisest among my 

race understand that agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly. . . . In 

all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in 

all things essential to mutual progress.” No statement did more to raise Washington’s 

stature in the eyes of white racial conservatives, North and South. They congratulated 

him profusely and urged the Negro masses to follow his lead.10

Washington’s rise to race leadership on an accommodationist platform corresponded 

with the steady erosion of federal support for civil rights enforcement in the South and 

the declining status of African Americans throughout the nation. In 1896, just one year 

after Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 

landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which condoned the segregation of blacks and 

whites in public places under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” When Louisiana 

adopted a railroad segregation law in 1890, a group of mixed-race citizens from New 

Orleans decided to pursue a test case. They prevailed upon Homer Plessy, described as 

 

10 Washington, Up From Slavery, 219-221, 223. 
14 

“seven-tenths white,” to buy a ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad and sit in the 

“white” car. Railroad officials, alerted to his identity, ordered Plessy to leave, but he 

refused. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Plessy was not denied equal protection of 

the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, since the railroad provided a separate car 

for Negroes and the segregation law applied equally to both races. The plaintiffs had 

argued that “enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored man with the 

badge of inferiority. If this be so,” the court ruled, “it is not by reason of anything in the 

act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.” Justice 

John Marshall Harlan, a former slave-owner, issued the lone dissent: 

The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked, and the 

interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the 

seeds of race hate to be planted under sanction of law. What can more certainly 

arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust 

between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground 

that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to 

sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? 

The Plessy decision gave constitutional sanction to the passage of segregation laws 

governing virtually every facet of public life. The Commonwealth of Virginia ushered in 

the twentieth century with a series of separate-but-equal laws governing railroads (1900), 

steamboats (1900), and streetcars (1901), followed by public schools (1902), residential 

neighborhoods (1912), meeting halls and theaters (1926). Signs designating spaces 

reserved for “Colored” and “White” became commonplace throughout Virginia and the 

“Jim Crow” South.11

Once a potent swing vote in Southern state politics, African Americans had little 

recourse at the ballot box. The loyalty of black voters to the Republican Party and their 

support of third-party challenges to white Democratic rule spurred a regionwide 

campaign of disfranchisement beginning in the 1890s. Southern progressive “reformers” 

argued that competition for the votes of black men forced white men to engage in 

systematic fraud and bribery. The elimination of the black vote, they maintained, would 

reduce corruption and remove a major source of friction between the races. To 

circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, which banned discrimination on the basis of 

“race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the disfranchisers proposed various 

“race-neutral” mechanisms – poll taxes, literacy tests, property requirements – to sharply 

reduce, if not entirely eliminate, the black electorate. The disfranchisers attached special 

clauses to allow for the exemption of poor, illiterate whites and the disqualification of 

wealthy, educated blacks. The “grandfather” clause exempted from literacy and 

property tests those whose fathers or grandfathers were eligible to vote on January 1, 

 

11 June Purcell Guild, Black Laws of Virginia (Lovettsville, Virginia: Willow Bend Books, 1995). 
15 

1867. This exemption did not apply to African Americans, who were ineligible to vote in 

any Southern state until passage of the Reconstruction Act later that year. The 

“understanding” clause required prospective voters to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of 

a local registrar, that they understood a passage from the U.S. Constitution or some other 

document. A discriminating white registrar could eliminate black voters with impunity. 

Delegates to Virginia’s 1902 convention used a combination of “color-blind” 

mechanisms – property qualifications and a poll tax – to prevent all but a fraction of the 

state’s black population from voting. By 1908, every state of the old Confederacy, with 

the exception of Florida, had passed laws and constitutional amendments with the aim 

of disfranchisement.12

The disfranchisement of black citizens freed white Southern “progressives” to embark 

on tax-funded school improvement campaigns with little or no regard for segregated 

black schools or the local communities they served. At the 1901-02 Virginia 

constitutional convention, some delegates lobbied for the “separation of the school tax” 

in order to legalize racial discrimination in school funding. (The diversion of state and 

local funds from black schools to white was commonplace in turn-of-the-century 

Virginia; historian Louis Harlan cites “official reports to the convention showing an 

expenditure of $3.78 per white child and $1.89 per Negro child of school age, or twice as 

much for whites as for Negroes.”) Leading members of the convention’s Education 

Committee warned that the division of public school funds by race might violate the 

equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and invite Northern intervention 

in Southern affairs. They recommended instead the adoption of an ostensibly raceneutral policy, with state funds to be apportioned to cities and counties on the basis of 

total school population “for the equal benefit of all the people of the state.” Opposition 

to this race-neutral formula evaporated when its backers made clear that local officials 

would have wide latitude over how to allocate state and local funds among local schools. 

White schools in counties with large black populations stood to benefit most, as 

disfranchised black citizens – effectively barred from county school boards and other 

appointed offices -- were helpless to challenge local authorities’ discriminatory practices 

and claim their fair share of the funding.13

 

12 For a state-by-state study of disfranchisement, see Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: 

Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 

For a brief overview, see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim 

Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 1998): 218-229. 13 Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern 

Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (New York: Atheneum, 1969): 140-141. 
16 

Not surprisingly, Southern educational reform movements of the early twentieth century 

focused almost exclusively on the modernization of white schools. Beginning in 1902, 

the whites-only Southern Education Board (SEB) campaigned in Virginia and other 

Southern states on behalf of increased public support for rural school reform. With 

religious zeal, SEB agents linked rural school improvement to the advancement of white 

Southern civilization and the maintenance of white supremacy. The Co-operative 

Education Association (CEA) of Virginia, founded 1904, served as an auxiliary of the SEB 

with the aim of establishing strategic alliances between local civic groups, political 

reformers, and school officials. Out of the CEA’s grassroots efforts arose “rural school 

improvement leagues” that pushed for modernized school facilities and curricula at the 

local level. These leagues, while devoted to white education, inspired similar efforts 

among black school reformers who recognized the value of organizing local 

communities on behalf of school reform.14

From his post at Tuskegee, Washington lobbied for the inclusion of black schools in the 

early twentieth-century Southern educational reform movement. He and other black 

school reformers found a staunch ally in Anna T. Jeanes, a white Philadelphia Quaker 

who helped bankroll their efforts. In 1904, Jeanes donated $10,000 apiece to 

Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and Hollis Frissell’s Hampton Institute in support of 

their efforts to improve black elementary schools in the South. Jeanes urged other 

Northern philanthropists, most notably John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to put more resources 

into black education in the South. In 1905, she donated $200,000 to the Rockefellerfunded General Education Board (GEB) to expand upon the Hampton-Tuskegee school 

improvement campaign. In 1907, at the behest of Washington and others, Jeanes added 

$1 million to the GEB’s coffers for the “rudimentary education” of black Southerners.15

The Jeanes Fund, as it came to be known, fostered grassroots organizing among 

disfranchised black Virginians on behalf of state- and locally funded improvements to 

rural schools. At Hampton, Frissell used Jeanes’ initial $10,000 contribution to organize 

rural school improvement leagues throughout the state “to do for the colored people 

what the Co-Operative Educational Association” had done for white people.” In 1911, 

Frissell’s Hampton campaign merged with a similar campaign organized by James Hugo 

Johnson at Petersburg’s Virginia Normal and Collegiate to form the Negro Teachers’ 

and School Improvement League, dedicated to the Washingtonian principle of regional 

progress through interracial cooperation.16

 

14 Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place, 98-115. 

15 Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place, 182-184. 

16 Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place, 183-185. 
17 

A more far-reaching consequence of the Jeanes Fund was the employment, beginning in 

1908, of “supervising industrial teachers” to serve as liaisons between the Southern 

states’ white educational bureaucracies and local black communities. Virginia E. 

Randolph, a black teacher acclaimed for establishing a model school in Henrico County, 

Virginia, became the first Jeanes supervisor. White reformers viewed these “Jeanes 

supervisors” – typically black females educated at Hampton or Tuskegee – as crucial 

agents in bringing Booker T. Washington’s program of industrial education to the rural 

elementary schools. Yet the prime movers of Southern school reform quickly 

discovered that rural black schools had far more pressing needs than a new industrial 

curriculum. They found themselves lobbying, for improved school facilities as a first, 

essential step to more fundamental reform.17

The reluctance and, in some cases, outright refusal of local white officials to pay for 

black school improvements prompted Booker T. Washington to propose an 

experimental new method of funding that would link local governmental support to 

Northern white philanthropy and African American community organizing. In 1913, 

Washington prevailed upon Sears Roebuck magnate Julius Rosenwald to fund 

construction of six model schools in Alabama, on the premise that local black 

communities would donate their own money, materials, labor, and land toward the 

enterprise. One year later, Rosenwald gave Washington $30,000 to expand the program 

with the goal of building one hundred small schoolhouses. Under the terms of the 

Rosenwald Rural School Building Program, historian James D. Anderson writes, 

black residents of the selected school district were required to raise enough 

money to match or exceed the amount requested from the Rosenwald Fund, 

which initially was a maximum of $350; the approval and cooperation of the state, 

county, or township school officers were required; all property, including the 

land, money, and other voluntary contributions by blacks, was to be deeded to 

the local public school authorities; the school building to be erected had to be 

approved by Tuskegee’s Extension Department; and the efforts in each state 

were to be coordinated by the state agents of Negro education and the Jeanes 

Fund supervisors.18

Between 1914 and 1932, the Rosenwald Fund helped finance the construction of more 

than 5,000 rural black schools with a combined student capacity of more than 660,000 – 

more than two-and-a-half times the total number of black children that attended school 

in 1900. More than 360 such schools were built in Virginia during this time, providing 

classrooms for 952 teachers and nearly 43,000 students – almost double the state’s 

 

17 Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place, 185-188. 

18 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South ,158. 
18 

number of black children in school in 1900.19 While the Rosenwald Fund was integral to 

this accomplishment, on average it contributed only about 15 percent of the total cost. A 

far larger portion of the funding came from rural blacks themselves in the form of private 

donations and public tax monies.20 In Virginia, 62.4 percent, or just under $1.2 million, 

of the nearly $1.9 million spent on the construction of Rosenwald Schools came from 

public taxes. Black Virginians contributed an additional $408,000 out of their own 

pockets between 1914 and 1932. At more than 20 percent of the total cost, this 

accounted for more than white private donations and the Rosenwald Fund combined.21 

Washington was blunt in describing what he saw as gross inequalities in school facilities 

for blacks and whites. Shortly before his death in 1915, he delivered an address before 

the American Missionary Association and National Council of Congregational Churches 

in which he called for a massive infusion of state and local funds to meet the basic needs 

of black schoolchildren: 

Although there has been great progress in Negro education during the past fifty 

years, the equipment and facilities in Negro schools are, on the whole, far below 

those in white schools. The majority of the rural schools in the South are still 

without school buildings, and the average length of their terms is three to five 

months. The Negroes constitute about 11 percent of the total population of the 

country. A little less than 2 percent of the expenditures of over $700,000,000 

expended annually is spent upon them. Of the $600,000,000 spent on public 

schools the Negroes receive about 1 1⁄2 percent. . . . 

There is sometimes talk about the inferiority of the Negro. In practice, however, 

the idea appears to be that he is a sort of superman. He is expected, with about 

one fifth of what the whites receive for their education, to make as much progress 

as they are making. Taking the Southern states as a whole, about $10.23 per 

capita is spent in educating the average white boy or girl, and the sum of $2.82 per 

capita in educating the average black child. 

In order to furnish the Negro with educational facilities so that the two million 

children of school age now out of school and the one million who are unable to 

read or write can have the proper chance in life, it will be necessary to increase 

the nine million dollars now being spent annually for Negro public school 

education in the South to about twenty-five or fifty million dollars.22

Though Washington openly acknowledged and publicly condemned racial inequalities 

in public school funding, his rejection of political action and his inability to influence 

 

19 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 154-155. 

20 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 156. 

21 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 155. 

22 Booker T. Washington, An Address Before the American Missionary Association and National 

Council of Congregational Churches, New Haven, Conn., Oct. 25, 1915; Booker T. Washington 

Papers, Vol. 13., 1914-15 (University of Illinois Press): 412-413. 
19 

public policy through behind-the-scenes negotiations with white leaders and powerbrokers rendered him largely irrelevant to the emerging Civil Rights Movement. His 

death in 1915 signaled a shift in black leadership that would ultimately transform the 

social and political landscape of the South. 

The general deterioration of race relations in the United States and the steady migration 

of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest brought a 

new generation of black leaders to the fore. These leaders, born and raised outside of 

the South, openly rejected the accommodationist philosophy of Washington in favor of 

more militant strategies for social change. Harvard-educated W.E.B. Du Bois, an early 

and eloquent critic of Washington’s leadership, emerged as the spokesperson for African 

Americans who were unwilling to accept “submission and silence” as the price of racial 

peace in the United States. In July 1905, he joined with twenty-nine black delegates from 

fourteen states to create the Niagara Movement, dedicated to free speech, equal rights, 

and ceaseless agitation. As the Niagara Movement waned, Du Bois joined forces with 

white radicals and progressives to found the National Association for the Advancement 

of Colored People. Established in May 1910, the NAACP set out to make African 

Americans “politically free from disfranchisement, legally free from caste, and socially 

free from insult.” Ultimately, it was the threat of NAACP legal action – not 

Washingtonian appeals for “interracial cooperation” -- that accelerated the 

“equalization” of segregated public schools in the South and led to the court-ordered 

dismantling of the dual education system. 

School Modernization and Civil Rights in Virginia, 1900-1945 

It is difficult to convey with any precision the relative status of black and white public 

schools in Franklin County before World War II, as statistical data compiled by the 

Superintendent of Public Instruction was intended to mask rather than reveal racial 

inequities. There is no question, however, that the educational reform movement 

favored white schools at the expense of black schools until the Commonwealth of 

Virginia – under legal pressure from the NAACP – embarked on the school equalization 

campaigns after World War II. 

Under the direction of a district school board consisting of state appointees, Franklin 

County focused its limited resources on the consolidation of white schools, replacing old 

one-room structures with new, multi-room graded schools. As its contribution to the 

1907 Jamestown Exposition, the county sent “pictures of old schools and a new school 

showing consolidation of four schools into one, thus providing for the better grading of 

pupils and their consequent advancement.” Over the next twenty years, the number of 
20 

white county schools declined steadily as new, consolidated schools replaced the old, 

widely dispersed one- and two-room structures. 

The first major appropriations of funds for black educational facilities in Franklin 

County did not come until after World War I. In 1924, the county erected a new, fiveroom school for Negroes to accommodate both elementary and high school students. 

According to long-time superintendent Harold W. Ramsey, the wood-frame structure 

was built to replace “the old school known as Booker T. Washington School, which was 

owned and was operated for many years by the Pigg River Baptist Association.” 

Apparently the new building could not accommodate all of the students assigned to it; 

some of the high school classes, Ramsey noted, were held “in the old building which 

stood nearby.” The Franklin County Training School for Negroes was also built during 

this time and “was financed through local funds and grants from Rosenwald and other 

philanthropic organizations.”23 

The erection of these new secondary schools did little to address the uniformly poor 

condition of the county’s black elementary schools. In 1927, when Ramsey began his 

four-decade tenure as superintendent, all but two of the 27 public schools for black 

residents of the county were located in one-room buildings. Some black neighborhoods 

of the county had no schools at all. In his autobiographical history of Franklin County, 

white county native Marshall Wingfield described the intransigence of the white county 

school board when approached by a local black leader seeking school facilities for a 

neighborhood that had none: 

In the Snow Creek District of Franklin County is a section known as Briar 

Mountain. In 1928 there were forty-three Negro children in the Briar Mountain 

area who were suffering for lack of educational advantages. There was not a 

school in the area, and there had not been one in that section in twenty one years. 

A first-class highway had been built through the Briar Mountain community, and 

the Rev. Morton H. Hopkins, a Negro Baptist minister, thought it a shameful 

thing for such an illiterate group of people to be exposed to the eyes of the 

nation. He went to County authorities and asked for a school in the Briar 

Mountain community. Though the request was not acted upon favorably, he 

repeated it annually for three or four years. When he had almost lost hope of 

favorable action, he met with W. D. Gresham of the State Board of Education. 

He told Mr. Gresham the story, and was advised to make one more effort, and 

report results. When Pastor Hopkins reported that this effort was also unavailing, 

the State Board of Education came into the matter and instructed the county 

School Board to either build a school house in the area or provide bus 

transportation for the children of the area to enable them to attend school. In the 

 

23 Harold W. Ramsey, Franklin County Public Schools: A Century of Progress (Franklin County 

School Board, 1975). 
21 

year 1929, Pastor Hopkins saw his long efforts crowned with success when 

Franklin County’s first school bus for Negro children was put into operation.24

As the Great Depression hastened the end of that era of school construction for 

southern blacks, the NAACP began a concerted legal campaign against segregated 

education. Developed between 1930 and 1931, the NAACP’s legal strategy was most 

clearly articulated in the Margold Report of 1931. Rather than attack the 

constitutionality of segregation directly, the report proposed just the opposite: require 

states to provide black educational facilities equal to those afforded whites. Rather than 

targeting unequal facilities at the primary and secondary school levels, the report 

suggested that the NAACP focus first on inequalities at the graduate and professional 

school levels. Indeed, as historian Richard Kluger notes, besides Howard University in 

Washington, D.C., and Meharry Medical College in Nashville, there were no graduate or 

professional schools at any black college in the South in 1931. “Here was an area,” 

Kluger writes, “where the educational facilities for blacks were neither separate nor 

equal but non-existent.” If successful, this strategy would force southern state 

legislatures to either provide separate graduate and professional schools for blacks – a 

financially impossibility – or allow them to attend white ones. At worst, NAACP lawyers 

reasoned, the plan would improve all-black professional and graduate schools. At best, 

the strategy would result in actual desegregation that, while small, could serve as a 

beachhead for later efforts.25

In June 1935, the NAACP scored its first major victory using this equalization strategy. In 

Murray v. Maryland, Judge Eugene O’Dunne of the Baltimore City Court ordered the 

University of Maryland’s law school to admit Donald Gaines Murray, a black graduate of 

Amherst, because the state did not provide a law school for blacks. The Maryland Court 

of Appeals later upheld the decision in January 1936.26 Just six months after the Murray

decision was upheld, Lloyd Gaines, a black resident of St. Louis, applied for admission to 

the University of Missouri law school. Unlike Murray, the lower court ruled against the 

plaintiff. The NAACP appealed, however, and in Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada was 

finally brought before the Supreme Court in November 1938. The Court confirmed the 

principle established in the Murray ruling that African Americans had the right to attend 

white professional and graduate schools if the state did not provide institutions of equal 

quality for blacks. Gaines was a crucial victory not only because it established a national 

 

24 Marshall Wingfield, Franklin County, Virginia: A History (Berryville, Va.: Chesapeake Book 

Company, 1964): 92. 

25 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s 

Struggle for Equality, (New York: Vintage Books, 1977): 132-136. 26 Kluger, Simple Justice, 187-194. See, Murray v. Maryland, 182 A. 590 (1936); 169 Md. 478 (1937). 
22 

precedent through which further equalization could occur, but also because it opened 

the door to larger questions about the fundamental equality of segregated education.27

Along with Maryland, the NAACP also targeted Virginia as a site to test its new legal 

strategy. While black education had witnessed significant improvement during the first 

few decades of the twentieth century, the slowing of this process due to the economic 

strains of the Great Depression combined with the determination of whites to maintain a 

separate and unequal system of public education encouraged black Virginians to seek 

new methods for improving black educational opportunities. 

Motivated by the NAACP’s victory against the University of Maryland, Alice Jackson 

applied to the University of Virginia’s graduate program in August 1935, just weeks after 

the Murray decision. The school rejected her application a month later, stating that “the 

education of white and colored persons in the same schools is contrary to the long 

established and fixed policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”28 State officials then 

took two steps in the hopes of deterring legal action by appeasing Jackson and the black 

community. The State Board of Education authorized a graduate school at the black 

school, Virginia State College. Secondly, the General Assembly passed the 1936 

Educational Equality Act, which provided financial aid to qualified black students to 

attend out-of-state universities. Though unsuccessful, Jackson’s attempt to enroll at the 

University was part of a larger trend by African Americans in Virginia to pressure public 

officials in their own communities to meet the impossible burden of making separate 

primary and secondary education equal in all ways. 29

The campaign for pay parity for black teachers was also a large part of the movement to 

equalize education during the second half of the 1930s. The all-black Virginia Teachers 

Association became increasingly vocal during the 1930s, speaking out against unequal 

teacher salaries and formally endorsed the NAACP’s campaign for salary equalization in 

1937. In 1939, Melvin O. Alston, a black high school teacher in Norfolk, petitioned the 

school board to set his salary by the same pay scale used for Norfolk’s white high school 

teachers. When the school board denied the request, NAACP attorney Thurgood 

Marshall took the case looking to build on recent victories in equal-pay suits he had won 

in Maryland. After the district court ruled against Alston and Marshall, the Fourth 

Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision ruling that the Norfolk School Board was 

“perpetually enjoined and restrained” from such discrimination,” and set out specific 

steps by which the salaries of white and black teachers were to be “completely 

 

27 Kluger, Simple Justice, 202-204, 212-213. See Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 

(1938). 

28 Quoted in Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 246. 

29 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 248. 
23 

equalized” by January 1943. The ruling encouraged similar petitions around the state, 

including the cities of Petersburg, Danville, Newport News, and Richmond, and the 

counties of Chesterfield, Mecklenburg, and Goochland. By the mid-1940s, African 

American teachers in Virginia generally enjoyed salaries comparable to their white 

peers.30

By the start of WWII then, Virginia’s African American community, encouraged by these 

gains, had already begun to fight for fundamental changes in the state’s race relations. 

The growth of the NAACP in Virginia during the first half of the twentieth century 

illustrates this change in attitude and the growing activism among the state’s black 

population. The first two branches opened in 1915 in Richmond, the state capitol, and 

Falls Church, a suburb of the nation’s capitol, Washington, D.C. By 1935, the state had 

20 local chapters and had established the Virginia State Conference of Branches to foster 

increased membership and coordinate strategy. Within fifteen years, the number of local 

chapters had tripled, with sixty across the state.31 

Membership in mainstream civil rights organizations surged during World War II. Adolf 

Hitler’s goal of world domination by the so-called “Aryan master race” discredited 

scientific racism in the United States and provided civil rights activists with new 

ammunition for an assault on Jim Crow laws and customs. Their patriotic “Double V” 

campaign called for victory over racism at home and fascism abroad. African American 

labor organizer A. Philip Randolph joined with civil rights leaders to push for the 

desegregation of the military and defense-related industries. The threat of a peaceful 

March on Washington prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to establish the 

Committee on Fair Employment Practices to investigate complaints of racial 

discrimination. Wartime demand for labor created new opportunities for rural black 

Southerners to enter the industrial economy. Two million African Americans found 

work in newly desegregated defense plants; black membership in labor unions doubled 

by the war’s end. 

 

30 Quoted in Doxey A. Wilkerson, “The Negro School Movement in Virginia: From ‘Equalization’ 

to ‘Integration’,” Journal of Negro Education 29:1 (Winter 1960), 18-19. See, Alston v. School 

Board of City of Norfolk, 112 F. 2d 992, (1940), and Kluger, Simple Justice, 214-217. For the 1940-

41 school year, Virginia’s black female teachers’ salaries on average were only 68.7% of their 

white peers ($553 versus $805). Black male teachers’ salaries were even more unequal as they 

made only 57.1% of what white male teachers made ($726 versus $1,272). By the 1948-49 school 

year, however, five years after Alston, black female teachers actually made more than their white 

counterparts on average ($2,124 versus $2,081). Black male teachers’ salaries were nearly equal at 

97.2% of the average white male teacher salary ($2,434 versus $2,613). (Quoted in Wilkerson, 19.) 

31 J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002): 243. 
24 

The civil rights successes and economic gains of African Americans during World War II 

heightened expectations of more substantial reforms after the war. The G.I. Bill, by 

subsidizing returning veterans’ college tuitions, made it possible for a much larger 

number of Americans – black and white – to attend school. For southern state 

governments whose segregated undergraduate and graduate institutions for blacks – 

when they existed – were at best inadequate, the unprecedented numbers of applicants 

following the war made them even more vulnerable to the NAACP’s renewed attacks. 

While the NAACP continued to target graduate and professional schools, their legal 

arguments now began to explicitly question the constitutionality of “separate but equal.” 

In 1946, Ada Sipuel, a recent graduate of Oklahoma’s State College for Negroes, applied 

to the University of Oklahoma Law School. After the university refused to admit her, 

both the district court and Oklahoma’s Supreme Court denied Sipuel’s request for 

admission. While the precedent set in Gaines ten years earlier all but assured that Sipuel 

and the NAACP would win their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, in writing his 1948 

brief in Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents, Thurgood Marshall took his argument 

one step further. In eloquently concise terms, Marshall argued, “the terms ‘separate’ and 

‘equal’ can not be used conjunctively in a situation of this kind; there can be no separate 

equality.”32

It was into this tense and increasingly combative atmosphere that Sidney J. Phillips 

entered when he journeyed to Virginia in the fall of 1945 to purchase the birthplace of 

his hero, Booker T. Washington. 

Sidney J. Phillips and the Washingtonian Tradition, 1945-1950 

Sidney J. Phillips arrived in Franklin County, Virginia, in October 1945. The farm where 

Booker T. Washington was born more than eighty years earlier was up for auction, and 

Phillips hoped to purchase the land and establish a memorial to the “Wizard of 

Tuskegee.” Phillips’ bid for the birthplace was successful, and six months later, at the 

groundbreaking for his newly chartered Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial, he 

outlined his ambitious vision for the site: 

In memory, then, of this great man, the Booker T. Washington Birthplace 

Memorial plans to restore the cabin in which he was born; to send out memorial 

shrubbery throughout the country; to set up a Better Workers’ Institute; to 

establish a model demonstration farm; to set up a museum of Negro 

accomplishments in handicraft, music, arts, and science; to establish a radio 

 

32 Quoted in Kluger, Simple Justice, 259. See Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents, 332 U.S. 

631 (1948). 
25 

station which will carry coast-to-coast broadcasts based on the teachings of 

Booker T. Washington; and to plan for the erection of a consolidated elementary 

school for Negro children and a regional vocational school for Negro youth.33

This statement, with its focus on nationally promoting Washington’s program of 

industrial and vocational education, illustrates the style, substance, and scale of Phillips’ 

plans for the memorial. Examining where he was and was not successful in realizing 

these goals provides an opportunity to better understand the continued relevance of 

Washington’s political strategy and educational philosophy to the postwar dismantling 

of Jim Crow between 1945 and 1965. Specifically, Phillips’ ability to garner political 

patronage and privilege among Virginia’s white leaders on the one hand, and inability to 

gain similar support from the African American community on the other, are evidence of 

both the political and economic power brought to the defense of Jim Crow following 

WWII, and the contested meaning of Washington’s message and legacy more than thirty 

years after his death. 

In many ways, Phillips seemed the perfect candidate to oversee the creation and 

development of a memorial to Booker T. Washington. Born around the turn of the 

century in rural Pike Road, Alabama, he was not only geographically near Washington’s 

Tuskegee Institute, but also part of the generation of rural, southern blacks Washington 

sought to uplift through Tuskegee. Phillips’ own father provided his first example of 

what was possible if one followed Washington’s ideals faithfully. A tenant farmer in 

rural Alabama, his father was “so inspired by the teachings and abiding faith that Booker 

T. Washington had in the ownership of land and in work well done,” Phillips recounted 

in a 1946 congressional hearing, “that [he] went home after his first visit to Tuskegee 

Institute and purchased 20 acres of land and later purchased 300 more acres in the black 

belt of Alabama.” “From that time [on],” he continued, “the teachings of Booker T. 

Washington have been a great force for good in my life.”34

This influence was also evidenced by the educational and professional experience 

Phillips acquired before coming to Virginia. In 1922 he graduated from Tuskegee 

Institute with a degree in agriculture. Between 1922 and 1927 Phillips taught vocational 

agriculture for the state of Alabama. He then served as a County Agricultural Agent for 

the state of Arkansas from 1927 to 1931. In 1931, Phillips joined the staff at Tuskegee 

serving for six years as both head of the Division of Farm Management and Agricultural 

Engineering and also superintendent of farming operations. In 1939, he left Tuskegee to 

work for the Nehi Corporation. At Nehi, makers of Royal Crown Cola, he worked as a 

 

33 “Address read by Hon. Walter L. Hopkins at Birthplace,” BOWA Park Records, 5 April 1946, 4. 34 Congress, House, Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Commemorative Coins: 

Hearings before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures on H. R. 6528, 79th Cong., 2nd

sess., 28 June 1946, 5. 
26 

marketing consultant to help the company increase its sales to African Americans. 

Phillips remained on their payroll throughout his time in Virginia.35 His work for Nehi is 

significant for two reasons. First, on a material level, it was Nehi that later funded his 

efforts to purchase Washington’s birthplace. Phillips no doubt convinced the soft drink 

company that their association with a memorial to the “Great Educator” would go far in 

establishing them within the African American community. Secondly, this relationship 

with Nehi parallels the kind of white patronage that Washington developed with white 

northern and southern elites at the turn of the century, and that Phillips himself 

developed with Virginia’s white political leaders during the 1940s and 1950s. 

In short, Phillips not only shared an educational philosophy with Washington, but also 

matched the Wizard of Tuskegee in terms of his ambition and political acumen. Both are 

important to understanding Phillips’ success in promoting the memorial and garnering 

the patronage of Virginia’s white elite. Phillips tirelessly preached Washington’s message 

to any who would listen, and throughout the decade he spent working at the memorial, 

he never wavered from this position. Like Washington, it is impossible to know how 

much of his own message Phillips truly believed and how much was simply a calculated 

political strategy. What is clear, however, is that by embracing not only the ideals of 

Washington, but also his political strategies, Phillips secured the patronage of Virginia’s 

white elite – support necessary for the memorial to have any hope of success. 

Unfortunately for Phillips, this message and model of race relations had precisely the 

opposite effect on Virginia’s black community. Indeed, Phillips’ failures to realize most 

of his goals for the memorial were due largely to his own overestimation of the amount 

of support he and his message would receive from the black community, both locally and 

nationally. 

Both black and white Virginians felt strongly about protecting and advancing the 

national legacy of their native son, but differed over exactly what that legacy should be. 

While both sides heralded Washington for his record as an educator, they disagreed over 

whether his message of uplift should continue to be tied to an endorsement of 

segregation. As an African American without immediate ties to the state and the financial 

backing of a well-known white corporation, neither whites nor blacks initially knew 

exactly where to place Phillips within this debate. 

In order to ensure that they would be able to directly shape and protect Washington’s 

legacy, the local black community planned to purchase the birthplace themselves. The 

Negro Organization Society (NOS), a group of African American business and political 

leaders from across the state had long worked to improve the quality of education for 

 

35 “The Message of Booker T. Washington for Today,” BOWA Park records, 1950. 
27 

Virginia’s black students, was the best organized of these groups and, before Phillips’ 

arrival at least, seemed the most likely party to obtain the birthplace. As native 

Virginians and local leaders within their communities, NOS members had already 

proven themselves to Virginia’s black community and earned their respect. The two 

men that represented the NOS at the birthplace auction, T. C. Walker, an attorney based 

in Gloucester County, and Lee M. Waid, a local businessman from Franklin County, are 

especially illustrative of this point. As Phillips struggled to generate financial support 

from the African American community during the mid-1950s, both Walker and Waid 

had schools named after them by their local communities in recognition of their efforts 

to achieve educational equality.36

Conversely, Virginia’s blacks remained wary of Phillips and his intentions for the 

birthplace. Throughout his time in Virginia, Phillips and the black community had an 

uneven relationship that was, at its best, cooperative, and at its worst, outright 

antagonistic. This hesitation to embrace Phillips stemmed not only from his political and 

educational philosophy, but also from the fact that from the beginning, questions 

surrounded Phillips’ and whether he had been completely honest in answering questions 

about himself and his connections. Reporting on the sale of the birthplace, the Journal 

and Guide identified Phillips as a “Soft Drink Co. Agent” since he paid for the birthplace 

with a check from Nehi. This affiliation was further confused by the fact that Phillips 

had called himself a, “newspaper man from Baltimore,” just days before the sale. While 

Phillips had published two different periodicals while in Alabama, these contradictory 

claims from a stranger seemed very suspicious to the black community.37

Confusion over his relationship with Tuskegee, however, was particularly damaging to 

his credibility. When he first arrived in Virginia, Phillips had listed the Tuskegee 

Institute post office as his Alabama mailing address. Even though the school no longer 

employed him, he did not immediately dissuade those who assumed an affiliation that he 

no longer enjoyed. In fact, before leaving Alabama, Phillips had drawn the resentment of 

 

36 In August 1954, the Gloucester County School Board replaced the County Training School, a 

small wooden schoolhouse that served all of the county’s black students, with a new brick 

building. The school board changed the name of the school to the Thomas Calhoun Walker 

School to honor, in the words of the school’s own history, “a local black American who held the 

dream that all people should have access to educational opportunities.” (“T. C. Walker 

Elementary School History,” http://walker.gc.k12.va.us/history.htm, 14 April 2004.) Three years 

later, in December 1957, the Franklin County Training School for blacks was renamed for Lee M. 

Waid, described as “a prominent businessman and a strong supporter of education.” Though 

Waid initially served as a trustee for the memorial, he later disassociated himself from it. (“History 

of Lee M. Waid Elementary,” in Lee M. Waid Elementary School: A Proud Past . . . A Promising 

Future, 2002-2003, Franklin County School Board, Rocky Mount, VA, 7-8.) 37 S. J. Johnson, Jr., “Soft Drink Co. Agent is Buyer,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 13 October 1945, 

1. 
28 

Tuskegee’s president, Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson. The frosty relationship 

between the two men stemmed from a newsletter published by the organization Phillips 

established as part of his work for Nehi, the Booker T. Washington Sales Agency. The 

newsletter, The Negro Worker, provided advice and aid to rural black farmers in the 

Washingtonian spirit and essentially competed with Tuskegee’s own publication, 

Service.

38 In Patterson’s view, Phillips’ use of Tuskegee’s mailing address upon his arrival 

in Virginia was merely the latest example of his tendency to use the Institute and 

Washington for his own advancement. In replying to inquiries regarding Phillips’ actual 

association with the Institute, Patterson claimed that Phillips had fully intended to 

“develop and perpetuate confusion in the minds of well wishers of the Institute” in order 

to “fool them into supporting” the memorial. Phillips dismissed these accusations as 

jealousy on the part of Patterson. Patterson’s animosity, Phillips argued, was merely the 

president’s frustration at the fact that The Negro Worker “had been more favorably 

accepted” by readers than Service.

39

After losing out to Phillips’ in their bid for the birthplace, Walker and Waid expressed 

the concern these allegations had fostered within the black community. The two NOS 

members told the Norfolk Journal and Guide that they doubted whether “the idea of an 

ideal memorial, as they envisioned it, will be realized now,” and stated that they would 

“play hands off” until they knew more about the man from Alabama.40 The white 

Richmond Times-Dispatch noted a week before the auction that Phillips faced 

“opposition from rival Negro organizations, all of them intent on creating a memorial for 

the Negro who became a leader of his race and an educator.”41 Phillips’ own plans for 

the birthplace, however, did not seem to differ that much from the NOS’s own vision of 

what the “ideal memorial” would look like. According to the Journal and Guide, the 

NOS had hoped to erect a memorial to Washington, as well as obtain a state 

appropriation to build a trade and agricultural school at the site, both of which were 

central planks of Phillips’ oft-stated designs. For his part, Phillips tried to assuage these 

concerns by telling the Journal and Guide that he wanted to restore Washington’s “birth 

cabin” and create a “living-breathing” memorial on the site. He also reiterated his desire 

to work closely with local groups and promised that the memorial would “be developed 

by Negroes for Negroes.”42

 

38 “The Message of Booker T. Washington for Today,” BOWA Park records, 1950. 

39 “Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial,” Tuck Papers (RG3), Executive Correspondence, 

Box 2, Library of Virginia, 30 April 1946. 

40 S. R. Johnson, Jr., “Booker T. Washington’s Birthplace Sold for $7,610,” Norfolk Journal and 

Guide, 13 October 1945, 2. 

41 “Tuskegee Institute Purchases Booker Washington Birthplace,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 

October 1945, 6-B. 

42 Johnson, Jr., “Booker T. Washington’s Birthplace Sold,” 2. 
29 

While Virginia’s black community remained suspicious of Phillips, the state’s white 

leaders were, at least initially, more confident of his bona fides. In fact, Phillips had 

brought with him letters from white leaders in Tuskegee that he passed on to Governor 

Tuck. Judge William Varner, for example, noted Phillips’ “law-abiding character,” while 

Harry D. Raymond, attorney-at-law, attested that he knew Phillips to be “in every way 

honorable and trustworthy.”43 

After Phillips officially established the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial with 

himself as president in January 1946, he moved quickly to secure state funding for the 

memorial. After an initial request of $25,000, the General Assembly approved a $15,000 

appropriation for the memorial in March 1946. On 5 April, the groundbreaking 

ceremonies were held with a number of white leaders in attendance including Franklin 

County Superintendent of schools, Harold W. Ramsey and representatives of Governor 

Tuck. When Phillips began to approach a number of local white leaders to serve on the 

memorial’s board of trustees, however, this campaign was momentarily stalled. Many of 

these men, however, wrote the newly elected governor, Bill Tuck, to inquire about the 

legitimacy and nature of the memorial and its president. They sought clarification of 

Phillips’ political motives, and whether he could be trusted with such a large amount of 

state funding. Indeed, the $15,000 the birthplace memorial received was the most ever 

appropriated by Virginia for a memorial to one of its “famous sons” at that time after 

Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.44

A.H. Hopkins, circuit court judge of Franklin County, for example, wrote to Tuck with 

concerns for the “safe-guarding” and “proper accounting” of these funds. His brother, 

Walter L. Hopkins, had attended the groundbreaking and agreed to serve on the 

memorial’s board of trustees. Writing for his brother, Judge Hopkins wanted to make 

sure that the memorial would be “properly” run. Specifically, the judge wrote that he 

hoped the memorial would be a non-profit organization, and that it would “not be used 

in any way to advocate social equality but must carry out the philosophy of Washington 

as expressed in [his] Atlanta speech.” In short, Judge Hopkins wanted assurance from 

Tuck that Phillips would not use the memorial for his own financial gain and that the 

memorial would endorse segregation as Washington had famously done in his 1895 

 

43 “Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial,” Tuck Papers (RG3), Executive Correspondence, 

Box 2, Library of Virginia, 30 April 1946. 

44 “A Washington Memorial,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, (Norfolk Journal and Guide editorial 

reprinted) 26 August 1946: 2D. 
30 

Atlanta Compromise speech: “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the 

fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual [economic] progress.” 45

In response to these concerns, Tuck formed an executive committee to investigate 

Phillips. The committee was comprised of three white and three black leaders from 

across the state. The white representatives were Virginius Dabney, editor of the 

Richmond Times-Dispatch; Lewis E. Lichford, mayor of Lynchburg; and Jesse W. Dillon, 

Secretary of the Commonwealth. The black members were Dr. Gordon B. Hancock, a 

sociology professor from Virginia Union University; William M. Cooper, a 

representative of Hampton Institute; and Dr. Luther H. Foster, president of Virginia 

State College.46 This committee was largely a formality, however, as Tuck himself had 

already been convinced of Phillips’ willingness to defer to the state’s white elite. Just two 

weeks earlier he had given Phillips his public endorsement at the memorial’s 

groundbreaking in a written address. In May 1946, Tuck wrote a letter to committee 

member Virginius Dabney, vouching for Phillips as someone who “is not only willing, 

but desires to have some responsible and well known white people in whom the public 

has confidence to serve on this Board [of Trustees] with him and with the colored 

people.” Though Tuck felt that the memorial’s board “had enough colored people on 

[it] already,” he was confident that “the importance of this proposed memorial is such 

that some of our best white citizens would be willing to make the necessary sacrifice to 

serve.”47 This final remark is especially telling, in that it reveals yet another reason why 

Phillips’ message and mission were so well received, not only by Virginia’s white elite, 

but nationally as well. Phillips imbued all of his literature, speeches, and testimonies with 

a patriotic fervor absent of any criticism of American society and culture. With the 

defeat of Hitler and the onset of the Cold War, America’s own racist institutions and 

practices were becoming an increasing liability internationally. The commemoration of 

an African American like Washington, therefore, seemed a particularly effective and 

benign way for southern whites to counter such critiques.48 By early June, the committee 

members, satisfied with Phillips’ credentials, gave him their “unanimous endorsement.” 

The appropriation by the General Assembly was an early and reliable indicator of the 

type of support Phillips’ message would garner among the country’s white politicians. 

 

45 “Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial,” Tuck Papers (RG3), Executive Correspondence, 

Box 2, Library of Virginia, 19 April 1946. 

46 “A Resolution of the Executive Committee of the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial,” 

Tuck Papers (RG3), Executive Correspondence, Box 2, Library of Virginia, 6 June 1946. 47 “Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial,” Tuck Papers (RG3), Executive Correspondence, 

Box 2, Library of Virginia, 1 May 1946. 

48 For these same reasons, and by similar methods, Phillips would be successful in helping to 

establish the George Washington Carver National Monument in 1943. As a student at Tuskegee, 

Phillips had studied under Carver. 
31 

An editorial in the Franklin County weekly paper, the Franklin News-Post, also illustrates 

the general attitude of local whites toward the memorial. The paper described 

Washington as “one of the outstanding Negro citizens of all time,” and a man that had 

“probably contributed more to the betterment of the colored race than any other 

person.” A not so subtle critique, perhaps, at the more radical W. E. B. Du Bois and his 

organization, the NAACP, which was currently waging legal battles to dismantle Jim 

Crow segregation. The editorial concluded: 

The school children of Franklin county probably understand more than any 

other group the things that Booker T. Washington did for his people, and so it is 

only natural that they should give their heartfelt support and endorsement of this 

project to honor the name of one of Franklin county’s beloved citizens – Booker 

T. Washington.49

During Phillips’s time in Virginia, he won similar endorsement from southern whites by 

supporting and promoting the belief that white benevolent paternalism and the gradual 

evolution of segregation was the best route to black political, economic, and social 

progress. As a devout admirer of Washington and the “Wizard of Tuskegee’s” 

educational vision and political philosophy, Phillips’ values and goals blended almost 

seamlessly with those of Virginia’s white elites. 

Eager to build on the momentum created by the General Assembly’s appropriation for 

the birthplace, Phillips turned his attention to Congress. While Phillips certainly was 

grateful for Virginia’s support, his ambitious plan to erect an industrial and vocational 

training school at the birthplace required a more substantial supply of capital. In June 

and July 1946, just months after the memorial’s groundbreaking ceremonies, Phillips 

testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in support of a bill introduced by 

Virginia congressman, Thomas G. Burch, a member of the Byrd Organization, which 

proposed the minting of five million Booker T. Washington commemorative halfdollars. Sold for a dollar each, the memorial could potentially net up to $2.5 million from 

the coins.50 In his testimony, Phillips detailed the broader vision that the profits from the 

coins would fund: 

We plan to have an industrial training school there to train Negro youth below 

the high school and college level, and especially World War II veterans; in 

addition to the training school at the birthplace site, we hope to conduct similar 

 

49 “The Booker T. Washington Memorial Fund,” Franklin News-Post, 5 April 1946, 3. 50 Congress, House, Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Commemorative Coins: 

Hearings before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures on H. R. 6528, 79th Cong., 2nd

sess., 28 June 1946, 5. 
32 

work in institutions throughout the country, to develop and establish schools in 

as many cities as possible where large groups of Negroes live.51

As a center dedicated to the development of industrial training schools across the 

country, he argued that the memorial would fulfill Washington’s goal, in Phillips’ words, 

of establishing “schools in every city and town in which workers could go to get aid that 

would help them to become more proficient on the jobs they were filling.”52

Importantly, because these schools would be based on the industrial and vocational 

training model, their focus would be on improving worker efficiency in jobs they already 

held, rather than equipping them to raise their economic or social status. Phillips argued 

that the “thousands of Negro veterans of World War II cannot take advantage of the GI 

training program because they do not have sufficient educational qualifications to meet 

the requirements of existing high schools and colleges.”53 In this way, Phillips’ vision 

assured white political and economic elites that his schools would not foster competition 

between blacks and whites for postwar educational and economic resources, and 

perhaps also played on their racial stereotypes about black ability and ambition. 

Politicians no doubt also saw the coins as a fairly painless way to address the country’s 

poor national and international standing on matters of race. Honoring Washington 

would be a public relations boon, while his legacy of accommodation would make him 

palatable to whites. The bill passed both houses easily and President Truman signed the 

bill into law in the fall of 1946. In doing so, Washington became the first African 

American to be featured on American currency; a significant accomplishment for Phillips 

personally and African Americans in general. 

While some prominent black Virginians had supported the idea of establishing an 

industrial school at the memorial in late 1945, by the time Truman signed the 

commemorative coin bill into law, this sentiment had markedly changed. On the day of 

the birthplace’s auction in October 1945, the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported that 

“interested readers throughout the country” had voiced “considerable support” for the 

paper’s own proposal “that the birthplace of Booker T. Washington at Rocky Mount, 

Va., be purchased and then offered to the state of Virginia as the site of a first class trade, 

agricultural, and technical school.”54 Less than a year later, however, the paper and 

others within the black community had begun to question whether the profits from the 

 

51 Congress, Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Booker T. Washington Commemorative 

Coin: Hearing before the Committee on Banking and Currency on H. R. 6528, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., 

23 July 1946, 2. 

52 Booker T. Washington Commemorative Coin, (23 July 1946), 6. 53 Booker T. Washington Commemorative Coin, (23 July 1946), 7. 54 “Public Likes BTW School Memorial,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 6 October 1945, 2. 
33 

coins might be put to a better use. In an editorial in late August 1946, the Journal and 

Guide criticized Phillips’ plan to build a school at the birthplace on practical terms, 

arguing “it might be that a real service can be rendered more adequately by a different 

memorial project than the attempt to found and operate a school of any merit.” The 

paper offered the following suggestion: 

One such alternate, might well be the creation of a scholarship fund to help 

deserving students to attend Hampton, where Dr. Washington was educated, or 

Tuskegee, which he founded and developed – or any college for that matter. . . A 

plan doubtless could be worked out whereby a scholarship endowment fund 

could be created, which in time would bring enough income to provide perpetual 

scholarships.55

The editorial added that, “Dr. Washington’s prime interest was in the education of our 

youth, not merely in the means of their education.”56 Not only would the money be 

better utilized by funding education at already existing institutions, the paper argued, but 

it also implied that it should not be limited to education in industrial and vocational 

training. This editorial began a public debate over how to use the profits from the coin 

sales that lasted for more than two months. The debate pitted Phillips’ belief in 

industrial and vocational training as the best means of racial uplift against the desires of 

most black Virginians to move away from this older philosophy of educational and social 

advancement. In this way, this debate also captured the tension between Phillips and 

Virginia’s black community over the exact relationship of Washington’s message and 

legacy to their efforts to improve black education in the postwar period. 

As the debate unfolded, the white Richmond Times-Dispatch also weighed in on the issue, 

siding with the Journal and Guide. The article recognized that “Great credit is due S. J. 

Phillips . . . for the manner in which he and his associates have publicized the need for 

memorializing Washington,” and praised Phillips and the memorial for their success in 

securing both state and federal funding. But, the Times-Dispatch found the arguments 

for the scholarship plan to be “highly persuasive”, and pronounced their support for it as 

more “practical and beneficial, in the long run, to the Negro race.” The editorial also 

offered the opinion of Jackson Davis, who, as vice president and director of the General 

Education Board, as well as a native white Virginian, was deemed to be “a specialist in 

such matters.” While he was generally supportive of Phillips’ aims and ideas, Davis was 

skeptical of their practicality. He believed “it would not be wise to seek to found and 

operate an institution of the kind [Phillips] proposed.” Though Davis did support the 

scholarship plan, calling it an “excellent suggestion,” he did have one suggested 

 

55 “Scholarships to Honor Booker T. Washington,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, (31 August 1946: 

8), emphasis added. 

56 “Scholarships to Honor Booker T. Washington,” 8 (emphasis added.) 
34 

amendment. “While [the Journal and Guide] do[es] not propose to limit the 

scholarships,” he told the Times-Dispatch, “it would certainly be appropriate to have 

them apply chiefly to Tuskegee and Hampton.”57 Davis’ suggestion that the scholarships 

be limited to these all-black, industrial and vocational training schools exemplified the 

sentiments of those white elite in Virginia who were supportive of black educational 

advancement, but advancement of a certain kind. 

Ten days after the Times-Dispatch editorial, the Journal and Guide more forcefully stated 

its opinion of Phillips’ plan for an industrial school: 

With a perpetual memorial to the great educator we have no objection 

whatsoever. But we do have serious doubts that an attempt to establish a school 

of any consequence on the near Rocky Mount farm where Dr. Washington was 

born is feasible or practical, and we are strongly of the opinion that a memorial 

scholarship fund . . . will more constructively honor the memory of the great 

educator.58

In this article, the paper also quoted the opinions of Tuskegee’s president, Dr. Patterson, 

and the president of Virginia State College, Dr. Luther H. Foster. Not surprisingly, 

Patterson found the scholarship plan to be “a far wiser approach than the one which is 

being outlined [by Phillips], though I have my doubts as to whether it represents the 

thing which those sponsoring the project are willing to promote.” Patterson recognized 

that state and federal political support for the commemorative coins had been based on 

Phillips’ plan for establishing an industrial and vocational training school and that white 

leaders, such as Davis, would be less willing to endorse a scholarship plan that did not 

limit students to this educational model. Patterson’s statement might also have been 

referencing the possibility of the scholarships funding education at Howard Law School, 

the institution that under Charles Hamilton Houston’s guidance produced the army of 

NAACP lawyers fighting segregation. Foster, who had served on Tuck’s investigative 

committee the year before and later succeeded Patterson as president of Tuskegee in 

1953, also endorsed the scholarship plan. “So far,” the Journal and Guide noted, as of 

late September 1946, “no one has taken pen in hand to urge retention of the plan to build 

a memorial school or to say that the scholarship proposal is not preferable.” Because 

Phillips and the memorial would need the financial support of the black community for 

the success of either plan, the paper “respectfully suggest[ed] that they [Phillips, et al] 

now give some consideration to our substantially endorsed counter proposal and 

provide the prospective contributing public with the benefit of their views.”59

 

57 “How Best Memorialize Booker Washington?” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 

18 September 1946, 8. 

58 “How Best to Memorialize Booker T. Washington – II,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 

28 September 1946, 8. 

59 “How Best to Memorialize,” Norfolk Journal and Guide. 
35 

In making its case for a scholarship fund, the Journal and Guide proffered its own 

interpretation of Washington’s philosophy, emphasizing those elements that better 

squared with the views of most African Americans following WWII. While the paper 

recognized the “obvious appropriateness” of Davis’ suggestion that the scholarships be 

limited to the two institutions most tied to Washington’s legacy, Tuskegee and Hampton, 

it wanted to expand the focus of black education beyond the industrial and vocational 

training model. The Journal and Guide argued that Washington’s “services knew no 

limitations. . . His educational ideas aroused interest throughout the world . . . [and] 

Institutions for students of all races and nationalities show the influence of his ideas.” 

The paper acknowledged that even though Hampton and Tuskegee were widely 

respected, “Fuller support of the scholarship project will be insured, . . . if alumni and 

friends of other colleges feel that some of the deserving students to be helped might, if 

they choose, attend these other colleges. As long as the college is recognized for 

soundness of its training, is fully accredited, it should not be excluded.”60 At the end of 

the editorial, the Journal and Guide emphasized the fact that Washington himself held 

desegregation as his ultimate goal. The paper suggested – no doubt with the hopes of 

garnering white support for the plan – that a scholarship available to both black and 

white students would best memorialize the Great Educator: 

No one realized more clearly than Dr. Washington that the races in this melting 

pot had to cooperate in all essential matters if each region (and the nation as a 

whole) was not to deny itself the fullest development. So we offer still another 

idea: that the proposed scholarships go to an equal number of white and Negro 

students. . . [The scholarships] would be an annual reminder of the genius and 

greatness of [Washington], of his idea that we must not be narrow and 

prejudiced, blindly holding ourselves back in seeking to hold back others. This 

lesson . . . will be needed for a long time . . . [and] will not be wasted with 

representatives of these oncoming generations of both races themselves being the 

recipients of generosity inspired by the memory of a great American who 

happened to be black.61

In this debate, the Journal and Guide echoed a growing sentiment among Virginia’s 

African American community that black education needed to move beyond the 

industrial and vocational training model. In fact, the Christiansburg Industrial Institute 

(CII) in nearby Christiansburg, Virginia, had already begun its conversion to a public 

elementary and high school by the time this debate took place. Established in 1866 by 

the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern-based aid societies as the Christiansburg Institute, 

the school was located in Montgomery County just 50 miles west of Booker T. 

Washington’s birthplace. In fact, Washington himself took over supervision of the 

school in 1895 and instituted his own industrial training curriculum, adding “Industrial” 

 

60 “How Best to Memorialize,” Norfolk Journal and Guide. 61 Ibid. 
36 

to the school’s name. As early as 1934, however, CII supervisors had begun transitioning 

the school’s curriculum to universal public education. That year they donated part of 

the school’s campus to the Montgomery County school board to establish a public 

elementary school. In 1947, CII donated the remainder of the property to establish a 

regional high school for black students in Montgomery and Pulaski counties. To signify 

its change in focus, the school also dropped “Industrial” from its name.62 While CII 

never drew mention in the 1946 debate over how the profits from the coins would be 

best spent, it is clear that Phillips’ educational philosophy was becoming more and more 

out of step with the rest of the black community. 

In early October 1946, Phillips himself publicly entered this debate in a letter to the 

Richmond Times-Dispatch. He did not, however, submit a response to the Journal and 

Guide. Phillips defended his plan by noting that the memorial had “sought the help of 

the country’s ablest people, white and Negro, in the fields of business, education and 

industry.” Repeating the argument he had made before Congress three months earlier, 

Phillips wrote that his organization had found “a serious and pressing need for greater 

industrial training opportunities for Negroes below high school and college level.” For 

this reason, the memorial had begun “plans for the establishment of a national training 

school based on Booker T. Washington’s philosophy.” Phillips argued that “44 

governors, . . . practically every Southern superintendent of education, . . . great Negro 

organizations like the 4,000,000 members of the National Baptist Convention, the 

500,000 Elks and social, civic, and fraternal organizations, white and colored, throughout 

America and . . . outstanding white and Negro leaders in every walk of life” had already 

voiced their support for this idea.63 He ended with a call for cooperation: 

Our answer, then, to the question, “How Best to Memorialize Booker T. 

Washington?” is – join hands with the Booker T. Washington Birthplace 

Memorial to establish at his birthplace a national industrial training school with 

extension facilities, which shall carry out his ideals of rendering service to the 

nation, though a program of help for the man farthest down.64

Despite the months of debate, as president and owner of the birthplace, the decision was 

Phillips’ alone to make, and he was determined to establish a school at the memorial. In 

January 1950, Phillips announced that the first classes in vocational training were 

beginning. In an effort to perhaps accommodate his detractors, he also announced that a 

“limited number of ‘Opportunity Scholarships’ were [to be] made available for worthy 

 

62 “The Key to Power: Introduction to the History of the Christiansburg Institute,” 

http://www.christiansburginstitute.org/keypower.html, (accessed 19 April 2004). 63 Sidney J. Phillips, “The Washington Memorial,” letter to Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 October 

1946, 3. 

64 Phillips, “The Washington Memorial,” 3. 
37 

Negroes who are not able to pay for their education and who have not had an 

opportunity to learn a trade.” Similar to Washington’s own experience at Hampton, a 

scholarship recipient would be required to “help pay his way through the training school 

by productive labor at the birthplace.” The only requirements for the scholarship were 

that “the students must be over 17 years of age, in good health and must have completed 

high school.” Phillips promised that the scholarships would be “divided equally between 

veterans of World War II and non-veterans.”65

Through all of this, the core of Phillips’ message always remained the acceptance and 

even, at times, the endorsement of segregation. In his 1949 testimony before the House 

proposing the creation of an African American Veterans’ Hospital at the birthplace, this 

position was most forcefully expressed. In response to the NAACP’s opposition to the 

hospital for its endorsement of segregation, Phillips defended his position: 

I really believe, Mr. Chairman, if today all barriers of segregation were removed 

in all phases and all types of our Government and industry and everything, and if 

you gave all the work out on the basis of merit and may the best man win, then I 

actually believe that the white people on that basis, the basis of what they could 

do, would put all or approximately all of our people out of business because there 

are so few, such a very small number of us that have come up to where they could 

measure up with the white people and they would get everything, on merit, and 

so we would not have anything for ourselves. And so, on this basis of segregation, 

I think we will be given an opportunity, a practical opportunity, to demonstrate 

what we can do, and put it into practice.66

While the veterans’ hospital never materialized, Phillips experienced more successes 

than failures in his efforts to develop the memorial during the late 1940s. In February 

1948, Phillips lobbied successfully for the establishment of a post office that essentially 

served only the memorial. The first slave cabin replica was completed in late May 1949 

and served as the centerpiece of the memorial. Attended by Governor Tuck, State 

Treasurer Jesse Dillon, and Franklin County school superintendent Harold Ramsey, the 

slave cabin dedication ceremony was certainly a proud day for Phillips. In less than four 

years since purchasing the birthplace, he had secured state and federal funding and 

endorsement for the memorial. Though the sale of the coins was progressing slowly, 

Phillips’ outlook was optimistic; the realization of his vision for the memorial perhaps 

seemed only a matter of time. 

 

65 “Classes to Begin Soon at B. T. Washington Birthplace,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 14 January 

1950, 4. 

66 Congress, House, Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Increasing Pay for Veterans’ Administration 

Medical Service and Authorizing Construction of a Hospital for Negro Veterans: Hearing before the 

Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on H.R. 3296 and H.R. 6034, 81st Cong., 1st sess., 10 August 1949, 

1117-1138. 
38 

Unfortunately for Phillips, the slave dedication ceremony in many ways marked the apex 

of his political prestige and financial success in promoting the memorial. Throughout 

the 1950s, Phillips found less and less support for his vision among the black community 

as African Americans increasingly demanded the complete dismantlement of Jim Crow 

segregation. 

Equalization and the Booker T. Washington Elementary School, 1945-54 

From the moment of his arrival in Virginia, Phillips had voiced the goal of building a 

consolidated elementary school in Franklin County on or near the birthplace. In his 

congressional testimony regarding the commemorative coins in July 1946, Phillips stated 

that he had already been in contact with Harold Ramsey, superintendent of Franklin 

County’s schools, about such a project. The superintendent, Phillips testified, had 

“manifested interest in this project to the extent of expressing his willingness to have his 

board consider the erection of a consolidated elementary school for Negro children built 

in connection with the memorial project.” Phillips stated that he and the “trustees of the 

memorial [would] be pleased to work with the superintendent to accomplish this end.”67 

Yet more than five years would pass before Phillips, working in tandem with members of 

the local African American community, fulfilled his promise of establishing a 

consolidated school closely connected to the birthplace memorial. The escalating battle 

between civil rights lawyers and white segregationists over unequal school facilities 

helped to create conditions that favored the construction of a new, consolidated 

elementary school for blacks in Franklin County after years of bureaucratic 

footdragging. 

During the second half of the 1940s, blacks in Virginia continued to attack segregated 

education in their own communities through efforts aimed at equalization. With support 

from NAACP lawyers, they pressed city and county school boards to provide the same 

quality of facilities, curriculum, and transportation for their children that they did for 

white students. In July 1947, black parents in Surry County, located in the Southern 

Tidewater region and neighboring Prince Edward County, sued the county school board 

for what they termed, general “discrimination in the conduct of the schools.” Their 

central grievance was the lack of an accredited high school for blacks in the county. 

Almost a year later in March 1948, the federal district court ruled that the county school 

board had to establish a high school for its black students or allow them to attend the 

 

67 Congress, House, Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Commemorative Coins: 

Hearings before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures on H. R. 6528, 79th Cong., 2nd

sess., 28 June 1946, 13. 
39 

county’s existing white high school. Unlike Surry County, King George County had a 

black high school, but its curriculum was far from equal to the county’s white high 

school. The county school board, perhaps in response to the Surry County decision, 

stopped offering chemistry, physics, biology, and geometry at its white high school 

rather than offer the same courses at its black high school as well. This incredibly 

stubborn and drastic move illustrates the lengths to which Virginia’s whites were willing 

to go to preserve Jim Crow segregation, foreshadowing the state of Virginia’s decision 

almost a decade later to close its public schools rather than desegregate them. In 

December 1948, the court found the school board in contempt and fined the district. 

Throughout the state similar suits were brought by black parents in Gloucester, 

Arlington, Essex, King and Queen, Dinwiddie, Halifax, Pulaski, and Prince George 

counties between 1947 and 1949.68

While all southern states were vulnerable to such efforts at equalizing segregated 

education, Virginia was particularly susceptible. By the end of WWII, Virginia’s system 

of public education faced nothing short of a crisis, especially in its construction needs. A 

1944 study by the publicly funded Virginia Education Commission found that Virginia 

ranked 41st in average per pupil expenditures, 43rd in the percentage of its population 

25 years old and over that had completed elementary school, and 36th in the percentage 

of its population of that age that had completed high school.69 At the end of WWII, 

historian William Crawley, notes, Virginia “lagged behind much of the nation in 

expenditures for almost every public service – schools, health, welfare – and the situation 

was worsening as a result of the state’s war-induced population growth.”70 Indeed, 

between 1910 and 1940, Virginia’s population increased by a little more than 600,000, 

growing from roughly 2.06 million to almost 2.7 million. In the decade after 1940, 

however, the state’s population grew by more than 640,000, surpassing more than 3.3 

million by 1950.71

By 1948, state education officials at the highest levels had earmarked the building of new 

elementary school facilities as a high priority. In his annual report for the 1948-49 school 

year, Superintendent of Public Instruction G. Tyler Miller identified “the need for 

additional school buildings and equipment” as one of “the most acute and serious 

 

68 Wilkerson, “The Negro School Movement in Virginia,” 20-24. 69 The study also found, however, that Virginia compared much more favorably to the rest of the 

nation in terms of higher education as it ranked twenty-seventh in the percentage of its 

population 25 and over that had completed four years of college. See William B. Crawley, Bill 

Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd’s Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978): 

180. 

70 Crawley, Bill Tuck, 180. 

71 See Table I: “Population of Virginia and Franklin County, 1870-1960,” Appendix. 
40 

educational problems” facing the Commonwealth of Virginia. He attributed these 

deficiencies, well documented in recent surveys of cities and counties, to “the lag in 

schoolhouse construction during the war years, and the heavy increase in current 

enrollments due to the high birth rate of those years.” The problem, Miller noted, was 

particularly acute at the elementary level, the point of entry for a growing school-age 

population. 

The need for replacement of outmoded buildings is evidenced by the fact that 

elementary school children are attending 1,706 schools which are twenty years 

old or over, and 513 that are over forty years old. Over one third of the 

elementary enrollment is housed in one-, two-, and three-room buildings with 

relatively few modern conveniences. 

The superintendent described the negative impact of these outmoded, overcrowded 

schools on students and teachers alike. 

Because of overcrowded classrooms, coupled with excessively heavy pupil loads 

for teachers, many divisions are resorting to double shifts in the elementary 

grades with a resulting danger to the learning situation for many boys and girls 

during the critical foundation years of school life, and a corresponding 

discouragement to those who are prospective candidates for elementary 

teaching. 

 

Miller did not differentiate in his report between the educational needs of Negro 

communities and those of White communities, leaving the impression that both suffered 

equally as a result of forces beyond state control. Still, in a section outlining “major 

problems in the education of Negroes faced by state supervisors,” he did acknowledge 

new legal pressures being brought to bear on school officials as a result of equalization 

suits filed in six Virginia localities (Arlington, Chesterfield, Gloucester, King George, 

Pulaski, and Surry Counties). “What is our responsibility,” he asked, “in the court cases 

brought by Negro citizens against local school officials for equal educational 

opportunities?”72

In the spring of 1948, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, ever conscious of the mounting 

NAACP attacks on the constitutionality of “separate but equal,” warned of the possible 

consequences that could arise should the state of Virginia continue to neglect the 

educational needs of its black residents. The paper acknowledged that though “We 

[Virginians] have seen to it that there was separateness, . . . we have not seen to it that 

there is equality.” Aware of the danger this posed to segregated education, the editorial 

ended with the following warning: 

 

72 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 

School Year 1948-49 (Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia Division of Purchase and Printing, 

1949): 24, 46. 
41 

It has been evident for some time that unless facilities are provided, the Federal 

courts may refuse to permit continuance of the dual system of schools. Either 

schools for the two races will be made substantially equal, or the State may be 

ordered by the Federal courts to operate a single system, and to admit all 

children, irrespective of race. The handwriting on the wall seems plain, in the 

light of Judge Hutcheson’s decision. We must act accordingly.73

By the late 1940s, the legal scaffolding that undergirded the segregation and 

disfranchisement of African Americans in the Jim Crow South had begun to buckle. In 

1946, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Virginia law that required all passenger 

motor vehicle carriers to separate their white and colored passengers. Two years later, 

the Court declared racially restrictive housing covenants unconstitutional. Victories in 

two major court cases challenging segregation in professional and graduate schools -- 

Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents (1950) -- persuaded 

Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that the time had 

come to challenge Plessy v. Ferguson and its “separate but equal” doctrine head-on. 

Under intense pressure to equalize or desegregate, the Commonwealth of Virginia 

embarked on a statewide, tax-funded school building program. In his January 1950 

inaugural address, newly elected Gov. John S. Battle proposed to set aside $45 million 

over the next two years for school construction across the state. The “Battle Fund,” as it 

became known, did not require local districts to match any of the state funds they 

received. That a Democrat and Byrd Organization stalwart would propose such a 

significant departure from the state’s traditionally conservative fiscal policy 

demonstrates just how large a problem the state faced in regards to public education. 

In May 1950, with the promise of Battle Funds in mind, the Franklin County school 

board announced a four-year building program that called for the consolidation and 

construction of new buildings, as well as, the improvement of existing structures. Black 

parents and community leaders in Franklin County began discussions to make sure that 

a new elementary school for their children was part of this program. According to James 

Jordan, alumnus of BTWE, this group initially considered purchasing land directly 

across from the memorial on the west side of Route 122, the Booker T. Washington 

Highway. While having the memorial and the school mirror one another in this fashion 

was symbolically pleasing, this site was not chosen due to concerns that its proximity to 

the road posed a danger to the students that would be attending the school.74 In late 

 

73 “The Court Calls for Better Negro Schools,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 April 1948; quoted 

from article reprinted in Virginia Journal of Education, 41:8 (April 1948), 328. 74 James Jordan, “The Building of Booker T. Washington Elementary School,” unpublished 

manuscript. 
42 

1951, the group began to work more closely with Phillips to discuss the possibility of 

providing some of the memorial’s land to be used as a site for the school. These efforts 

proved successful in May 1952, when Phillips followed through on his long-stated 

promise by formally donating about six acres from the memorial to the Franklin County 

school board.75

With an initial allocation of $60,000 from the Battle Fund, after additional costs, the 

county completed construction on Halesford Negro Elementary School – as it was 

initially named – in the summer of 1954 at a final cost of about $80,000. Opened on 

September 7, the school was officially renamed for the famous black educator a month 

later on October 17, exactly five months to the day after the Supreme Court issued the 

Brown decision. Nearly 1,500 people attended this dedication ceremony that included 

speeches by Sidney Phillips and Minnie H. Moorman, Jeanes Supervisor, and a song by 

the County Training School’s glee club. Superintendent Ramsey and Portia Washington 

Pittman, Booker T. Washington’s daughter, were also in attendance.76

Black parents and community members remained intimately involved in expediting the 

project, even helping to clear the land in preparation for the actual construction to take 

place. This group included Bob Clayborne, his son, Monroe Clayborne, Albert Starkey 

Sr., Buford Ferguson, Henry Bonds, Jack Swain, Sam Terry, Fitchew Chewning, Emmett 

Dudley, James Holland, Sr., Rufus Holland, Sylvester Holland, John L. Jordan, and Willie 

Taylor.77 Booker T. Washington Elementary’s Parent Teacher Association was very 

active, sponsoring dinners to raise money for various sorts of school equipment, as well 

as, educational field trips to Washington, D.C., historic Williamsburg, and the regional 

airport. In addition to clearing land for the initial school construction, parents also 

cleared land for a baseball diamond and dirt basketball court.78

Former students and faculty members of the school note that Booker T. Washington 

Elementary was a vast improvement over the various one- and two-room schools it 

replaced. Before these schools were consolidated, black elementary students had to 

walk to school, often at distances of two to three miles. One former student 

remembered the daily injustice of being passed on the road by a busload of white 

students as he made the long walk to school. In fact, bus service was not provided for 

him and his classmates until Booker T. Washington Elementary opened in 1954, nearly 

 

75 School Board Meeting Minutes, 12 May 1952. 

76 [Untitled folder], BOWA Park Records. 

77 Jordan, “The Building of Booker T. Washington Elementary School.” 

78 [Untitled folder], BOWA Park records. 
43 

thirty years after the county purchased its first school bus in 1926.79 The previous 

elementary schools were usually one-room structures with one teacher overseeing the 

education of students in grades one through seven. In contrast, Booker T. Washington 

Elementary had three classrooms, a kitchen, and four indoor restrooms. While the three 

teachers still taught two grades at once, the conditions were a far cry from those 

experienced by one former student who remembered having to walk to a spring to get a 

bucket of water at his previous school. Indeed, after the school was closed for 

desegregation, some of the former students noted that, at least initially, Booker T. 

Washington Elementary was nicer than some of the former all-white elementary schools 

to which they were reassigned.80

By the end of Battle’s term, the State Board of Education had approved school 

construction plans across the state for a total cost of nearly $132 million. In all, these 

funds aided more than 430 schools housing more than 130,000 children.81 The program 

resulted in tangible improvements for Virginia’s black students. The Richmond AfroAmerican reported in August 1953 that a new high school was “nearing completion in 

Bedford County, Va., to bring the county’s high school facilities up to par with those for 

the whites.” The article also noted that Richmond would soon have “a new colored 

elementary school,” and that it “recently opened the new Armstrong High School for 

colored pupils at a cost of $1,000,000.”82 Later that month, the paper reported the gains 

that African Americans in Norfolk had made. “For the first time in the history of the 

public schools of Norfolk,” the paper reported, “the school board paid just about an 

equal amount for the education of a colored child to that [of] a white last year.”83 

Tellingly, however, the Afro-American credited the gains to the NAACP’s efforts locally 

and nationally rather than to the goodwill of the state’s white politicians in Richmond.84

Franklin County’s public schools, white and black, evidenced similar results as part of 

the state’s larger efforts to consolidate and improve its schools. In the fall of 1951, 

 

79 Ramsey, “Franklin County Public Schools,” 19. 

80 Former Faculty and Alumni of Booker T. Washington Elementary School, interview by author, 

Booker T. Washington National Monument, Hardy, Va., 28 June 2003. 

81 Henriques, “John S. Battle and Virginia Politics,” 130. In 1950, the same year Battle’s bill was 

passed, even more money was made available for school construction when $11 million from the 

state’s retirement fund was transferred to the Literary Fund, the state’s educational fund. 

(Thomas, Jr., “The Role of the Literary Fund of Virginia,” 232-233.) 

82 “Fearing School Suits, Dixie rushes ‘equalization’ steps,” Richmond Afro-American, 15 August 

1953, 18. 

83 “Norfolk Equalizes School Pupil Cost,” Richmond Afro-American, 29 August 1953, 2. For the 

1952-1953 school year, the Norfolk school board spent $217.55 for each black student and 

$217.28 for each white one. 

84 “Norfolk Equalizes School Pupil Cost,” Richmond Afro-American, 29 August 1953, 2. 
44 

Franklin County had 32 white schools serving more than 4500 students with a total 

property value of $1.247 million. The county had 18 black schools for more than 800 

students with a total value of $178,000. Ninety percent of these students were in 

elementary school as sixteen of the eighteen schools were one-room schoolhouses 

serving anywhere from 10 to 49 students. By the 1959-1960 term, eight years later, there 

were half as many white schools serving more than 4000 students with a value of about 

$2.7 million. There were only 12 black schools, but they now served more than 1600 

students and had a value of almost $645,000. The value of white schools had more than 

doubled during this time and the property values of black schools had increased by more 

than three and a half times their 1951 values. There was also a significant increase in 

black high school students, with nearly as many attending high school as the total 

number of students just eight years earlier.85 In short, Franklin County’s schools – white 

and black – were newer and able to serve a far larger student population than they had 

ten years before. The building program so transformed the state of Franklin County 

schools that by 1965 all but three of the county’s white schools were less than ten years 

old, and its black schools were less than fifteen years old. All of the county’s one room 

schools, white or black, had been consolidated marking the significant shift that had 

taken place over the past two decades since the end of WWII.86 

Brown v. Board of Education and the Demise of Phillips’ Memorial 

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in the case 

of Brown v. Board of Education: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the 

doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are 

inherently unequal.” The Court did not say how it intended to enforce the ruling; 

instead, it invited all of the parties involved, as well as the U.S. attorney general, to submit 

briefs on how the ruling might be implemented. The ruling met with stiff resistance, 

bordering on open defiance, from white Southern officials. Georgia Gov. Herman 

Talmadge proclaimed that enforcement of the court ruling would “create chaos not seen 

since Reconstruction days.” U.S. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia warned that the 

decision would “bring implications and dangers of the greatest consequence.” Racebaiting politicians drowned out the voices of white Southern moderates and liberals who 

urged compliance.

The Brown ruling put Phillips between a rock and a hard place. While he had long 

supported the concept of “separate but equal” schooling, he saw “massive resistance” as 

 

85 “School Superintendent Reports, Franklin Co., 1951-1960,” Department of Education, RG27, 

Library of Virginia. 

86 Ramsey, “Franklin County Public Schools,” 20-23. 
45 

a threat to the Washingtonian spirit of interracial cooperation so essential to his public 

mission. He urged his white patrons to respect the authority of the Supreme Court and 

adopt a course of “gradualism” in responding to the court decree. At the same time, he 

told blacks that the constitutional right to an equal education did not require them to 

breach the social boundaries between the races or turn their backs on their schools and 

other community institutions. “It is my honest opinion,” he told the 74th Annual Session 

of the National Baptist Convention, “that if all restrictions were removed, Negroes 

would be content to fraternize with their own group just as other racial entities do. It’s 

just the idea of being legislated against that makes many Negroes militant. . . In the case 

of education, many Negroes are no more interested in attending white schools than 

whites are in attending Negro schools.”87

Phillips found himself increasingly out of step with the local African American 

community. Indeed, the lack of financial support by the black community, especially its 

cool reception to the commemorative coins, ultimately forced the memorial to file for 

bankruptcy in January 1955. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that “over half of 

the $140,000 owed by the corporation is claimed by promoters engaged to push the sale 

of the commemorative half dollars honoring the famed Negro educator.” In addition, 

the memorial owed $10,000 to the Federal government for “withholding taxes, penalty 

and interest.”88 Phillips defended the memorial, maintaining that he had done 

everything in his power to ensure its success. “We [Phillips and his wife] don’t feel bad,” 

he told the paper, “We put everything we had in the memorial.” Indeed, they had 

reportedly invested more than $30,000 of their own assets in the memorial. Phillips 

noted that he had “never drawn a penny in salary from the Booker Washington 

Memorial,” emphasizing that Nehi had paid his salary for the past decade.89

In defending his failed venture, Phillips placed the blame squarely on his “fellow” 

African Americans: “We didn’t find enough Negroes in the area to make it profitable.” 

As part of Phillips’ vision for an extension service, he had succeeded in opening a smaller 

version of the trade school he had hoped to build at the birthplace in Roanoke during 

the early 1950s. This school, Phillips argued, had done “a lot for [Roanoke] . . . ‘The 

school brought an estimated $3,000,000 into Roanoke. We brought more money into the 

city than all the other Negro organizations put together.’” He also noted that when he 

surveyed banks from around the country to determine who had actually purchased the 

 

87 S.J. Phillips to Gov. Thomas B. Stanley, Sept. 22, 1954, with attached copy of “An Address 

Delivered by Sidney J. Phillips, President of Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial, to the 

74th Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., Friday, Sept. 10, 1954, Kel 

Auditorium, St. Louis, Membership, 4,000,000.” Thomas B. Stanley Papers, Library of Virginia. 88 “Promotional Bills Top Memorial Debts,” Roanoke World-News, 21 January 1955, 1. 89 “Memorial Promotion Debts Told,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 January 1955, 3. 
46 

relatively few commemorative coins that had been sold, “in nearly every instance,” he 

complained, “the answer was whites.”90 Frontiers of America, a group of black leaders 

based in Roanoke, disputed these claims, arguing that that the failure was instead due to 

“sheer lack of ability” on Phillips’ part. Phillips dismissed the group as merely “sideline 

players” and argued that it was easy for blacks to critique his failed efforts when they 

“never tried to do anything themselves.” He added that it was “ always news” whenever 

blacks “met their responsibilities,” noting that, “in Roanoke, Negroes seldom meet their 

quota in . . . Red Cross and other community fund campaigns.”91 The group responded 

thusly: 

Mr. Phillips should have known before launching the project that members of his 

race did not control the affairs of the state or federal governments and would not 

be able to assist in that manner nor in any other manner that would compete with 

these sources. Depending so largely upon members of his own race as it now 

appears he did, he should have started on a more simple and practical level and 

been willing gradually to climb to the top instead of commencing at the top and 

being forced to come down. As much as we are in sympathy with him, we refuse 

to accept the responsibility for his failure.92

In an article eulogizing the memorial, the Roanoke World-News made a similar critique, 

reporting that while the memorial was initially successful, “perhaps Phillips’ ideas were 

too grandiose. . . It was a fine effort, noble in purpose. We are sorry it failed.” The 

World-News, however, also noted the divergent responses of blacks and whites to the 

memorial as a central factor as well: 

[The] collapse of the Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial after nine years 

of constant struggle is not surprising but is highly regrettable. Its founder and 

leader, Sidney J. Phillips, was always able to muster substantial white aid in both 

South and North but he never achieved the required backing of Negroes. 

This was most likely due, the paper concluded, to “a fundamental difference on 

segregation. We have gathered that Phillips favored continued segregation because it 

aided his cause, particularly in operating schools.”93

The bankruptcy of the birthplace memorial was a devastating blow to Phillips and 

marked the beginning of the end of his time in Virginia. Even so, the Byrd Organization 

remained powerful enough during the mid to late 1950s to help him secure his most 

lasting accomplishment. Two years before the memorial declared bankruptcy, in the 

 

90 “Memorial Promotion Debts Told,” 3. 

91 “Memorial’s Failure Blamed on Founder, S. J. Phillips,” Roanoke World-News, 

21 January 1955, 2. 

92 “Memorial’s Failure Blamed on Founder,” 2. 

93 “Noble Effort Fails,” Roanoke World-News, 24 January 1955, 6. 
47 

spring of 1953, Phillips requested the National Park Service (NPS) to conduct a historical 

and recreational study of the birthplace to determine whether it was worthy of federal 

recognition. No doubt the poor coin sales and already mounting financial problems 

made clear to him the difficulty in privately financing the memorial indefinitely. To his 

dismay, however, the study recommended that due to the relative absence of any 

surviving historical structures, the remote location of the site, and the region’s low 

tolerance for racial integration, the birthplace did not meet the requirements to become 

a national monument. Undeterred by the study’s finding, by 1954, Phillips’ used his 

Organization ties to introduce a bill to Congress to establish the Booker T. Washington 

National Monument at the birthplace. In response to this bill, the NPS Advisory Board 

again recommended against a national monument at the birthplace in early September 

1955.94

By the second NPS recommendation against the birthplace, Phillips had already declared 

for bankruptcy. The financial collapse of the memorial, however, only reinforced his 

determination to ensure the memorial’s permanence. Indeed, ever the optimist, Phillips 

remained hopeful that the state government would still “do something in time to keep 

[the] monument [open].”95 For his part, Phillips quickly founded a new organization, 

the Booker T. Washington Memorial Foundation in February 1955, just a month after 

the birthplace memorial had folded. For this new charter Phillips’ goals were much 

more limited. Phillips now focused primarily on securing federal approval to make the 

birthplace a national monument. His faith in the Byrd Organization paid off in January 

1956. Upon the formal request and lobbying of the local branch of the Bethune 

Women’s Club, the General Assembly agreed to purchase the birthplace for $17,000 (the 

total remaining debts accrued by the Birthplace Memorial/Monument Foundation) for 

the purpose of donating the land to the federal government to create a national 

monument. Despite NPS opposition, in April 1956, Congress voted to establish the 

Booker T. Washington National Monument at the birthplace. Finally, in June 1957, the 

NPS officially assumed control of the site. 

 

94 Minutes of the Secretary of the Interior’s Advisory Board on National Parks, 

Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments 33rd Meeting, September 7-9, 1955. National 

Historic Landmark Program Files, Washington, D.C. The full statement follows: “The 

Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments having 

carefully reconsidered its resolution of March 22-24, 1954, reaffirms its views that the 

achievements of Booker T. Washington are worthy of national recognition and should 

be appropriately memorialized. The place for such memorialization is at Tuskegee 

Institute, Alabama, where he made his greatest contributions to American life. None 

of the original buildings remain at the Birthplace and the Board believes that no 

expenditure of Federal funds is justified at that site.”

95 “Memorial Promotion Debts Told,” 3. 
48 

Phillips was not given much time to enjoy this achievement, however. In October, Dick 

Sutherland, a reporter for the Roanoke World-News, wrote a seven-part exposé on the 

Phillips and the recently disbanded Memorial Foundation. In this weeklong series of 

articles, Sutherland was highly critical of the amount of money spent by Phillips and the 

foundation and the manner in which it was spent. Frustrated by Phillips’ determination 

to remain involved with the monument that it had opposed from the beginning, the NPS 

played a quiet but crucial role in supplying Sutherland with information. In the articles, 

Sutherland detailed the foundation’s expenses from the past year. He was especially 

critical of Phillips and the “year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Booker T. 

Washington’s birth” that had “cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $225,000.” Echoing former 

Tuskegee president F. D. Patterson’s claims from ten years earlier, Sutherland accused 

Phillips of using the money simply for his own self-promotion. He was particularly 

skeptical of the fact that Phillips had primarily spent these funds on the somewhat 

ambiguous and intangible goal of building “interracial goodwill.” With reference to the 

Brown decision, the foundation’s nationwide ad campaign for the centennial celebration 

placed this goal at the heart of its efforts: 

The recent rulings of the Supreme court on segregation based on race has in 

some areas given rise to racial tensions of such serious impact that national unity 

is far from what it should be. Because of these tensions the Booker T. 

Washington Centennial Commission has dedicated its year long program . . . to a 

“Goodwill Building Crusade.”96

To be sure, since his arrival in Virginia, Phillips had placed improved race relations as a 

central goal for the memorial. By the late 1950s, however, people like Sutherland had 

become increasingly skeptical of Phillips’ claims that the purchase of a commemorative 

coin had anything to do with easing the growing “racial tensions.”97

Phillips defended the expenses, saying they were “well worth the results.” By helping to 

focus national attention on Washington, the program had “made the nation conscious” 

of his contributions, helped to promote “the spirit of interracial good will and revive[d] 

interest in the practical policies, program, principles and philosophies of Booker T. 

Washington.”98 In fact, Phillips believed the monument could serve the same purpose 

during the civil rights era that Washington himself had served during the turn of the 

century. “Following the Civil War,” he asserted, “the South [was] in complete chaos, . . . 

and Washington [was] the man whose ideas were to set the situation straight. . . [T]he 

 

96 Dick Sutherland, “Companion of Educator Lauds Phillips,” Roanoke World-News, 24 October 

1957, 1-2. 

97 Sutherland, “Companion of Educator Lauds Phillips,” 2. 

98 Dick Sutherland, “Booker T. Washington Centennial Costs Nearly $225,000,” Roanoke WorldNews, 21 October 1957, 1-2. 
49 

present struggle over integration has produced a situation comparable in many ways 

with that produced by the Civil War.”99 The establishment of the Booker T. Washington 

National Monument just months earlier was certainly strong evidence that his efforts 

had not been wasted. Indeed, the monument arguably remains the most lasting and wellknown testament to the time and energy Phillips spent in Virginia. It stands as a 

reminder of the politics of Jim Crow in Virginia as Phillips navigated them during the 

1940s and 1950s. 

Desegregation and Booker T. Washington Elementary 

The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling – issued five months before 

the opening of the segregated Booker T. Washington Elementary school -- met with stiff 

resistance, bordering on open defiance, from white Southern officials. Georgia Gov. 

Herman Talmadge proclaimed that enforcement of the court ruling would “create chaos 

not seen since Reconstruction days.” U.S. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia warned that 

the decision would “bring implications and dangers of the greatest consequence.” 

Hoping to avoid a violent showdown, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered local school 

boards to devise desegregation plans “with all deliberate speed.” The ruling granted 

federal district court judges -- most of them native white Southerners -- wide latitude in 

deciding whether local school districts were in compliance. Some districts adopted 

policies of token integration; others voted to close their public schools rather than 

desegregate.100

In Virginia, the Byrd Organization endorsed Massive Resistance by mandating as state 

law the closing of any public school forced to desegregate. In this way, Virginia’s white 

political leadership took the official position of Interposition, a policy that claimed to 

shield white Virginians from the “unjust” encroachments of the federal government. 

Newly-elected Governor Lindsay Almond ordered the closing of public schools in 

Prince Edward and three other Virginia school districts – the cities of Charlottesville and 

Norfolk, and Warren County – at the start of the 1958-59 school year in response to 

court orders to desegregate. In January 1959, however, both the Virginia Supreme Court 

and a U.S. district court ruled the school-closing laws unconstitutional. 

In response to these court rulings, Governor Almond called an emergency session of the 

General Assembly to repeal the legislation. In its place, the legislature enacted a 

 

99 Sutherland, “Booker T. Washington Centennial Costs,” 2. 

100 Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (New York: Viking 

Penguin, Inc, 1987). 
50 

“freedom of choice” desegregation policy. Though these plans “allowed” students to 

attend any school of their choosing within a district regardless of their race, the General 

Assembly knew that few, if any, white students would willingly attend a formerly allblack school. In this way, the burden of desegregation was placed on black students. 

While some desegregation occurred under these plans, most African Americans, not 

surprisingly, were hesitant to enter the lonely and antagonistic environment of a 

previously all-white school. 101

The year 1964 marked the tenth anniversary of the Booker T. Washington Elementary 

School’s opening and the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision declaring separate 

schools for blacks and whites inherently unequal. Yet, ten years after Brown, no 

significant efforts had been made by local officials to desegregate Booker T. Washington 

Elementary or any other public school in Franklin County. Indeed, for all the sound and 

fury associated with federal court-ordered desegregation, only 2.3 percent of all black 

students attended public schools with white students in the South that year. Absent any 

firm federal commitment to desegregation, the burden of enforcing Brown fell primarily 

on NAACP lawyers, who concentrated their efforts on large urban school districts. 

Rural districts like Franklin County had little, if anything, to lose by maintaining the 

status quo. “School boards cooled their heels and awaited litigation,” writes historian J. 

Harvie Wilkinson, III, “and litigation, if ever completed, often meant little in the way of 

integration anyway.”102

Undaunted, civil rights leaders continued to press for the passage of federal legislation 

that would throw the full weight of the executive and legislative branches behind 

desegregation. Spurred by the 1963 March on Washington and the escalation of 

violence against civil rights protesters in the South, Congress finally acted. The Civil 

Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, outlawed 

discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations 

engaged in interstate commerce; banned discrimination by businesses that employed 

more than twenty-five people; and authorized the U.S. Department of Justice to bring 

suit “for the orderly achievement of desegregation in public education.” No longer were 

 

101 Lassiter and Lewis, “Massive Resistance Revisited,” 7-8. While the 1959 rulings resulted in the 

reopening of the other three districts’ schools, Prince Edward County’s remained closed. The 

school board argued that the courts only said that the state could not close schools, and had not 

addressed whether the authority of local districts was similarly restricted. In fact, Prince Edward 

County’s schools remained closed for another five years until the legal efforts by the black 

community finally reversed the situation in 1964. (Amy E. Murrell, “The ‘Impossible’ Prince 

Edward Case: The Endurance of Resistance in a Southside County, 1959-64,” in The Moderates’ 

Dilemma, 134-135.) 

102 J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, “The Supreme Court and Southern School Desegregation, 1955-

1970s: A History and Analysis,” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 64 (May, 1978): 531. 
51 

Franklin County and other rural school districts safe from legal action; the Justice 

Department now had the resources to pursue any district that failed to desegregate in a 

timely fashion.103

Under the terms of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress authorized the U.S. Department 

of Health, Education, and Welfare to draw up guidelines for desegregation, thus 

establishing standards of compliance that would serve as the basis for any legal action. 

School districts that failed to comply with HEW guidelines risked the loss of federal 

funding for their elementary and secondary school education programs – a loss that 

many cash-strapped school districts could ill afford to bear. When HEW issued its first 

desegregation guidelines in April 1965, Franklin County and other school districts – 

enticed by the “carrot” of federal funding and threatened with the “stick” of legal action 

– moved swiftly to comply. 

In agreeing to submit a desegregation plan to HEW, Franklin County school officials 

made clear that they did so under duress to avoid losing federal funding. A resolution 

passed unanimously by the County School Board on May 10, 1965, read as follows: 

WHEREAS, the Board has applications approved for federal funds from 

N.D.E.A. and from the Vocational Act of 1963 for school equipment; and 

WHEREAS, this equipment has been purchased and these accounts are now 

payable; 

BE IT RESOLVED by the County School Board of Franklin County, in session 

this the 10th day of May, 1965, that the Board hereby agree that a plan of 

desegregation acceptable to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 

be submitted prior to June 15th. 

According to the minutes of the meeting, the school board “discussed at length the 

proceedings of the civil rights act as applying to public schools and heard a report from 

the Superintendent on the proposal and the requirements of the H.E.W.” Board 

members voted to proceed with desegregation at the slowest pace (“a minimum of four 

grade levels”) mandated by H.E.W. guidelines. An official statement from the board, 

published in the two Franklin County newspapers, summarized the county’s 

desegregation plan as follows: 

The Franklin County School Board has chosen to desegregate in September 1965 

grades 1, 8, 10, and 12 on the freedom of choice basis. This plan provides that all 

Franklin County pupils enrolling in these grades may choose to attend the 

formerly white or formerly negro [SIC] school nearest to their home. For pupils 

enrolling in the first grade, second choice is to be made in case it is impossible, 

 

103 Wilkinson, “The Supreme Court and Southern School Desegregation, 1955-1970s,” 532. 
52 

because of overcrowded conditions, for them to enroll in the schools of their first 

choice. In cases of overcrowding the applications of pupils who live nearest the 

school they select will be given first consideration. Although registration has 

already taken place at most of the County schools, pupils who are enrolling in the 

specified grades may still have the choice of school. 

The board pledged to include “four additional grades” in the Freedom of Choice plan 

for the 1966-67 year, with “all grade levels” to be opened by the Fall of 1967 – the 

deadline specified by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.104

Coincidentally, the announcement of Franklin County’s desegregation plan appeared 

alongside a front-page story announcing plans for a new, $106,300 visitor center at the 

Booker T. Washington National Monument. The article featured an artists’ rendering of 

the planned facility, scheduled to open in 1966 as “part of the Mission 66 program of 

modernizing National Park Service facilities to provide better service to the public.” It 

also highlighted plans for expanded interpretation within the new building, including a 

“small theater” with an “audio-visual program emphasizing Washington’s struggles to 

rise from his lowly beginnings, and his eventual renown as an educator and statesman,” 

and “exhibits” in the lobby that would “highlight Washington’s early life and his final 

accomplishments.”105

As Franklin County School Board announced plans for the desegregation of its schools, 

School Superintendent Harold W. Ramsey pronounced the county’s $6.1 million school 

building program – begun in 1949 as part of a statewide initiative to improve public 

schools and avert equalization lawsuits – nearly complete. “I don’t believe many places 

have done much better in the construction of schools than we have,” Ramsey told the 

Franklin County Board of Supervisors. Ramsey provided the board with a list of county 

schools built or improved under the program, omitting any reference to their pre-1965 

status as “white” or “colored”: 

1950 – Henry School, $15,000 

1952, 1965 - Lee M. Waid, $850,000 

1952 – Franklin County High School, $1,100,000 

1953 – Dudley School, $25,000 

1953, 1962 – Burnt Chimney School, $375,000 

1954 – Booker T. Washington School, $80,000 

1959 – Glade Hill School, $350,000 

1961 – Truevine School, $250,000 

 

104 Minutes of Franklin County School Board Meeting, May 10, 1965; “Schools to Desegregate 

Four Grades for 1965-66,” The Franklin News-Post, May 13, 1965. 105 “106,300 Visitor Center Set for Booker T. Birthplace,” The Franklin News-Post, May 13, 1965. 
53 

1963 – Sontag School, $350,000 

1963 – Ferrum School, $360,000 

1963 – Calloway School, $230,000 

1964 – Franklin County Junior High School, $1,100,000 

1965 – Boones Mill School, $375,000 

1965 – Rocky Mount Elementary School, $525,000 

Ramsey advised the board “to study the trend and density of population” – numbers 

certain to fluctuate in response to patterns of desegregation – “before planning any 

further school buildings.”106

Apparently Franklin County’s plan to desegregate just four grade levels in the 1965-66 

school year – the minimum allowed under HEW guidelines – did not sit well with federal 

officials. In July 1965, Superintendent Ramsey informed the school board that while 

HEW had approved neighboring counties’ plans for desegregation at all grade levels, it 

had not yet approved Franklin County’s more limited plan. “I understand we might be 

invited to Washington for a conference on the plan,” Ramsey was quoted as telling the 

board. “If we are, I have been advised that we take a state appointed attorney with us. In 

several cases, I understand counties have been told to make certain arrangements which 

are not required by the Civil Rights Act bill.”107

By August 1965, Franklin County officials had received word that HEW would not 

approve their desegregation plan without substantial revisions. The school board 

announced the decision in a prepared statement: “The plan as originally submitted to 

HEW was declared by officials in Washington to be insufficient, and it has been 

necessary to prepare a revised plan incorporating the provisions required by them.” 

Under the revised plan approved by the board, all twelve grades were to be desegregated 

under the Freedom of Choice model, effective September 1965.108 HEW approved the 

revised plan, with the addition of a sentence guaranteeing nondiscrimination in teacher 

assignments: “The race, color or national origin of pupils will not be a factor in the initial 

assignment to a particular school or within a school of teachers.”109

The implementation of desegregation in Franklin County schools under the HEWapproved Freedom of Choice plan produced just one incident of racial hostility deemed 

worthy of note by school officials and the local press. On September 16, 1965, The 

Franklin News-Post reported that “a name-calling incident last Thursday on a school bus 

 

106 “$6.1 Million School Building Program Nears End,” The Franklin News-Post, May 20, 1965. 107 “School Board Deseg Plan Unapproved,” The Franklin News-Post, July 15, 1965. 108 “All Schools to Integrate in New School Board Plan,” The Franklin News-Post, Aug. 12, 1965. 109 “Integration Proposal Approved,” The Franklin News-Post, Sept. 2, 1965. 
54 

involving five white and two negro students” had prompted the school board to take 

“stern measures.” The board adopted a resolution stating that “students are under the 

control of the school board from the time they board a school bus until they step off the 

bus in the afternoon. When an infraction occurs, the principal is expected to take proper 

action, which could include suspension from school or denial of the privilege of riding a 

bus to and from school.” The board also authorized the school principal to “write the 

parents of the students involved in the Thursday incident asking their cooperation in 

maintaining discipline of their children on the school bus.” Superintendent Ramsey 

characterized the “name-calling incident” as an isolated occurrence in an otherwise 

smooth transition. “All in all,” he told the board, “things are going very well.”110

Franklin County’s nominal compliance with HEW desegregation guidelines ensured that 

the county would remain eligible for federal funding under the 1965 Elementary and 

Secondary Education Act. For the 1965-66 school year, the county school board applied 

for almost $300,000 in federal aid for “deprived” students under Title I of the 1965 

Elementary and Secondary School Act.111 The aid was to be dispersed to eight schools 

within the district, including the three black schools – Lee M. Waid, Truevine, and 

Booker T. Washington Elementary. The funding was to be used primarily for Head Start 

programs and remedial courses. In February 1966, the Franklin News-Post announced 

that the county’s application for federal aid had been approved. BTWE was scheduled to 

receive $12,000 to fund a Head Start program, as well as spring and summer remedial 

programs, with 63 students slated to participate.112

Federal officials continued to press Franklin County to speed up the process of 

desegregation. In April 1966, the News-Post reported that the county school board, 

“pushed by the federal government,” had “adopted a new desegregation plan and set a 

target date of September, 1968, for total desegregation within the county school system.” 

The government had identified Franklin County as “one of 20 Virginia counties whose 

plans for desegregation were not moving fast enough.”113

 

110 “School Board Warns Parents on Discipline,” The Franklin News-Post, Sept. 16, 1965. 111 “Deprived students” referred to those students whose family’s annual income was below the 

poverty line, which was $2,000 at that time. The county had 1369 such children in all, with 1056 

enrolled in the eight schools requesting aid. Out of Booker T. Washington Elementary’s 90 

students, 63 – 70% of the student body – qualified for the aid. Truevine had 170, and the largest 

of the three black schools receiving aid, Lee M. Waid, had 409. The three black schools, then, 

accounted for 642 of the targeted “deprived students”, or fully 60% of the total. (“8 School 

Projects Get Federal Okay,” Franklin News-Post, 24 March 1966, 1-2.) 

112 “Federal Aid Approved for 8 County Schools,” The Franklin News-Post, February 17, 1966. 113 “Board Adopts Desegregation Plan,” The Franklin-News Post, April 14, 1966. 
55 

The new plan called for the closing Booker T. Washington Elementary and the 

redistribution of its approximately 90 students to either Burnt Chimney Elementary or 

Dudley Elementary. In addition, the plan called for a gradual transition of county 

schools from “freedom of choice” to a “zoned” system in which students would be 

assigned to schools based on pre-established boundary lines. “Adoption of the plan will 

mean that approximately 400 Negroes will be attending previously all-white schools this 

fall,” the News-Post reported. 

Patrons of the Booker T. Washington Elementary School protested the school closing, 

but to no avail. The Franklin News-Post reported that the school board “heard from 

Fred Moss Jr., RFD 1, Hardy, who asked the board if there was anything the patrons of 

Booker T. Washington school could do to keep the federal government from closing 

their school.” 

A letter the patrons had written to HEW in Washington protesting the closing of 

Booker T. was read to the board. Moss suggested that maybe a delegation from 

the school could talk to officials in Washington to see if they could do anything. 

Dr. Harold W. Ramsey, Superintendent, said, “I don’t know, but it might help to 

communicate with them (HEW) and see.” 

He also told Moss, “It is not the desire of this board to close Booker T. HEW 

officials told us to close it and we will have to conform with what they say.”114

In announcing its desegregation plan, the board made clear that the federal government 

was responsible for any disruption caused by the closing of a local school (Booker T. 

Washington Elementary) and the reassignment of pupils under new zoning plans. 

The School Board takes this action advisedly after considering all of the possible 

alternatives available. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is now the law of the land and 

as public officials of the county, we must insist that the provisions be complied 

with. On the other hand, the board is unwilling to take any drastic steps that 

would produce chaos, or make it impossible to operate an efficient system, and 

for that reason, the board has requested a postponement of the target date for 

total desegregation until September, 1968, in order that suitable plans may be 

fully informed of the situation and the necessity for this action.115

James Holmes, the school’s one and only principal, said that though “it was sad when the 

school had to close down,” he knew at the time that it was inevitable. During the 1965-

66 school year, in fact, Holmes had stressed the theme, “Make a New Start,” to prepare 

his students and ensure that they would “be on equal footing with their [future] white 

 

114 “Desegregation Zone Plan Adopted by School Board,” Franklin News-Post, May 12, 1966. 115 School Board Meeting Minutes, 8 April 1966. 
56 

classmates.”116 Ironically, as Holmes noted, the school’s relatively small size, which was 

a big factor in generating the family atmosphere at the school, also made it a strong 

candidate for desegregation in the school board’s eyes. By merging an entire 

consolidated black elementary school into existing white schools, they could give the 

federal government the impression that a significant amount of desegregation had taken 

place while creating minimal “disruption” for most of the county’s white students. 

In The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2005), historian W. Fitzhugh 

Brundage argues that black parents and students who opposed the closing of black 

schools in the aftermath of desegregation did so not because they subscribed to the 

ideology of “separate-but-equal” but because of their communal attachment to the oncesegregated schools. Brundage writes: 

As repositories of community lore and pride, black schools were civic spaces 

whose importance far exceeded their function of teaching children. But with 

integration, the costly duplication of infrastructure necessitated by segregated 

school systems became untenable. Because whites were unwilling to integrate 

into majority black schools, black students typically were transferred to 

“unitary,” majority white schools. The surplus schools in black neighborhoods 

were closed or converted to administrative facilities. In either case, they no 

longer served black communities, and their traditions, lore, and spirit expired. 

In addition, when black students were integrated into previously white schools, 

they confronted unfamiliar schoolteachers and traditions. School names offered 

one measure of the distance that black students were asked to travel. They found 

themselves transferring from schools named after Booker T. Washington, 

Frederick Douglass, and other black heroes to buildings adorned with rebel 

mascots and named after such illustrious Confederates as Nathan Bedford 

Forrest, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee. A black student who entered a 

previously all-white high school in Americus, Georgia, in the early 1970s 

observed, “It wasn’t really our school. Like we had lost our own school, you 

know, and all we had was the whites’ school.”117

Former students and faculty of Booker T. Washington Elementary who were transferred 

into previously all-white schools in the fall of 1966 characterized the transition as 

relatively peaceful compared to other experiences in the state and across the South. One 

former student noted that it was definitely a “big turning point” in his life. As the only 

black student in many of his classes, it was a “rough transition” initially, as it was often 

difficult to “know what to say, or how to say it.” Still, though there were some students 

that were particularly antagonistic, most did not really give him any problems. A former 

teacher of the school who joined a previously all-white staff had a similar, though rare, 

 

116 Comments of James Holmes at Booker T. Washington School Reunion, Booker T. Washington 

National Monument, 12 July 2003. 

117 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: 

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005): 229, 278-279. 
57 

experience. She noted that her fellow teachers were “very professional,” and that 

parents and students were likewise generally welcoming and supportive. These former 

students and faculty attributed the relative lack of tensions or conflicts to the county’s 

rural nature. As opposed to more urban areas which were increasingly becoming 

residentially segregated by the mid to late 1960s, whites and blacks in Franklin County 

had “grown up alongside one another,” and despite segregation, “knew each other fairly 

well.”118 

It is worth noting that the county did witness some outspoken opposition from white 

supremacists to the integration of schools in the months surrounding the closing of 

Booker T. Washington Elementary in 1966. In June, for example, the Franklin News-Post

reported that a large crowd of about 500 to 1,000 people had “attended a United Klans of 

America rally” in a field within a mile of the Booker T. Washington National Monument 

and school. The rally lasted two and a half hours, concluding with a cross burning. 

“Before the meeting started,” the paper noted, “anti-Negro country music was played 

over the loud speaker,” and “KKK pennants, ‘Never’ lapel buttons and car bumper 

stickers” could all be purchased. Interestingly, the rally’s organizer claimed to have no 

knowledge of the fact that the either the national monument or the school was so 

nearby. “The site,” he claimed, “had nothing to do with the ceremony.”119 While it was a 

rally against desegregation, it did not seem to be specifically targeted at the events in 

Franklin County. 

The National Park Service also noted the existence of some hostility to desegregation, 

but overall provided a similar assessment of the area’s race relations. In a September 

1966 memo to the regional director of the southeast region, Park Superintendent Fred A. 

Wingeier noted that Franklin County “is a rural community offering no public 

transportation. The housing in the area is a mixture of Negroes and whites living as 

neighbors.” Though there had been problems “within the past three months [as] there 

have been several Ku-Klux-Klan rallies held within 1⁄2 mile of the Monument,” he and 

other park employees felt “that the general feeling of the community is not in agreement 

with the Klan since the store on whose property these rallies have been held is being 

boycotted by many of the white people.”120 Indeed, the Franklin News-Post’s headline 

reporting the June rally made no secret of its opinion of the KKK: “Kowardly Killers 

Konvene in Field Near Booker T.”121

 

118 Comments of James Holmes at Booker T. Washington School Reunion, Booker T. Washington 

National Monument, 12 July 2003. 

119 “Kowardly Killers Konvene in Field Near Booker T.,” Franklin News-Post, 23 June 1966, 1. 

120 [Untitled Folder], BOWA Park Records. 

121 “Kowardly Killers Konvene in Field Near Booker T,” Franklin News-Post, June 23, 1966.
58 

The slow demise of segregation of Franklin County Schools, culminating in the closing 

of Booker T. Washington Elementary School in 1966, stands in sharp contrast to the 

more widely celebrated conflicts between civil rights activists and proponents of massive 

resistance in Prince Edward County, Virginia, and other communities throughout the 

South. Indeed, the absence of open conflict in Franklin County may prove far more 

representative of desegregation in Virginia than the Civil Rights narrative currently 

acknowledges. 

Conclusion

The attempt of Negroes to obtain an education, since the time it became lawful to 

teach Negroes to read and write, has always been a struggle against odds. Even 

when facilities are meager, the schools serve as cultural outposts. In the students’ 

pageants and plays, declamation exercises, and singing fetes, parents see reflected 

their own ambitions. To countless youths, no other phase of life is quite so 

satisfying as this all too short interlude, this brief respite from the restricting and 

frustrating forces awaiting them. 

The Negro in Virginia, Compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of 

the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, 1940 

With this paragraph, the authors of The Negro in Virginia captured the bittersweet 

ironies of Jim Crow schooling at the dawn of the modern Civil Rights era. Then as now, 

black Virginians took pride in their segregated, community-based schools, even as they 

fought to dismantle the legal apparatus of racial apartheid that created and sustained 

them. Likewise, many embraced the moral philosophy of uplift, self-help, thrift, and 

industry, so eloquently espoused by Booker T. Washington, even as they rejected 

Washington’s accommodation with the reactionary forces of white supremacy. 

Significantly, as a site of memory and reunion for alumni since its closing in 1966, the 

former Booker T. Washington Elementary School is associated not with the stigma of 

Jim Crow but with the inspiring story of African Americans’ struggle for educational 

opportunity through the eras of segregation and civil rights. Even Sidney Phillips, whose 

public support for “separate but equal” schooling conflicted with the sentiments and 

attitudes of most black leaders following World War II, was motivated (at least in part) 

by a desire to expand educational opportunities for black residents of Franklin County 

and the surrounding region.

The interconnected histories of Phillips’s Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial 

and the Booker T. Washington Elementary School, built with Phillips’ support on 

Memorial-donated land, illuminate the shifting terrain of civil rights and black activism 
59 

in post-World War II Virginia. Phillips fashioned himself the Booker T. Washington of 

his generation and sought to create, at Washington’s Franklin County birthplace, a living 

memorial to the “Wizard of Tuskegee...” Like Washington, Phillips was willing to work 

with powerful white patrons to achieve his aims, and his successful lobbying of state and 

federal lawmakers derived from his accommodation with the reactionary forces of white 

supremacy and massive resistance in Virginia. Unlike Washington, however, Phillips’ 

message was not tailored to his time, and clashed with the sensibilities of the black 

community. 

The industrial school debates of the 1940s and the bankruptcy of the birthplace 

memorial in 1955 indicate that Washington, while still a potent symbol of race 

leadership, no longer spoke for the majority of African Americans on issues of civil 

rights. After World War II, African Americans in Virginia and across the South 

embraced Washington’s message of discipline, hard work, and self-improvement while 

distancing themselves from his public endorsement of “separate but equal.” Some even 

mobilized Washington’s memory in support of integration, dismissing his embrace of 

“separate but equal” as merely a tactic in the long struggle for freedom and equality. At 

the 2003 reunion picnic, for example, James Holmes, the school’s one and only principal, 

read the following quote by Washington: “More and more we must come to think not in 

terms of race or colour or of language or religion or of political boundaries, but in terms 

of humanity.”122 Holmes then placed these words within the integrationist tradition of 

another black leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., noting that Washington would have been 

“overjoyed” by desegregation and the gains of the civil rights movement. In this way, the 

alumni of Booker T. Washington Elementary School mark the evolution of Washington’s 

ideological and political legacy in relation to black education during the second half of 

the twentieth century. 

In sum, the historical significance of the Booker T. Washington Elementary School rests 

on its relationship to three important and interrelated themes: Virginia’s school 

equalization campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s; Booker T. Washington’s postWorld World II legacy, as mobilized by black and white Virginians; and the school’s 

enduring value to alumni and other residents of Franklin County as a site of memory and 

source of community pride.

 

122 Comments by James Holmes at Booker T. Washington School Reunion, Booker T. 

Washington National Monument, 12 July 2003. 

61 

III. Architectural Data Section 

Summary Evaluation 

During the period of educational equalization in Virginia there was an increase in the 

both the number and quality of schools constructed for use by the Commonwealth’s 

African American citizens. Throughout the South the design and construction of public 

buildings in the period reflected the concerns of white politicians, citizens, and 

bureaucrats about the fragility of the standard of “separate but equal” upon which the 

region’s essential racial divisions were maintained. 

The design and construction of schools for African Americans in Franklin County, 

including the Booker T. Washington Elementary School, reflected the concerns of the 

period. African American schools constructed or substantially rehabilitated during the 

period of equalization employed many of the “standards” of school construction – 

careful siting to maximize daylight in classrooms, the use of “modern” window units to 

provide ventilation, and the installation of exterior brick walls, interior concrete block 

walls, as well as interior washrooms and toilets. These so-called “equalized” schools 

represented an obvious improvement over their predecessors and, to the untrained eye, 

may have appeared indistinguishable from schools built for white students during the 

same period. Site visits to surviving schools from the period reveal, however, that 

schools built for Franklin County’s “colored” students during the era of equalization 

remained physically inferior to those built for “white” students only. This inferiority is 

evident in the African American schools’ smaller spaces, interior finishes and details, and 

lack of amenities, such as surfaced recreation areas.

The former Booker T. Washington Elementary School (1954-1966) derives significance 

as an example of a segregated consolidated elementary school built during the era of 

equalization. It retains integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, 

feeling and association from the school equalization in defense of segregation campaign.

Though no longer used as a public school, Booker T. Washington Elementary School 

maintains its presence as one of the significant educational facilities built with public 

funds during the period of educational “equalization.” The building remains in its 

original location and the conditions of the surrounding site are largely unchanged. The 

building is structurally sound as well and its current interior layout and organization and 

uses are generally sympathetic to its original function as a school building. The essential 

exterior materials, design, and architectural elements which defined its appearance when 

in use remain in place and unaltered. The footprint of the building has not been altered 

and there have been no significant enclosed additions to the building envelope. NPS 

staff currently uses two of the classrooms and the former principal’s office for office and 

administrative functions. The building’s interior and exterior material palette remain 

largely intact (with the exception of the addition of the dropped ceiling) as does the 

workmanship related to deployment of the exterior and interior details and materials. 
62 

The building has endured some changes since the school opened in 1954. The 

installation of replacement windows, the use of classrooms as offices, and the installation 

of a modern heating and cooling system have all had an impact on the building’s 

appearance. While these changes are notable, the size, scale and materiality of the 

building envelope remain intact as does its appearance and the assessment of its integrity 

based upon a review of the building’s design, material, workmanship and setting. 

The addition of the maintenance yard to the west of the building and changes to the west 

elevation to accommodate vehicles have affected the school’s setting and resulted in the 

loss of some historic material. The new facility uses a material palette, details and scale of 

construction different than and generally not sympathetic to the original building. The 

change in use and modification of the school’s kitchen and adjacent classroom to a 

maintenance workshop and operations facility has similarly diminished the feeling of the 

building as a school. These changes are described in detail in later sections of this report. 

The critical issue in assessing the impact of these changes upon the Booker T. 

Washington Elementary School’s historic integrity lies in determining whether the 

school’s overall appearance and hence its significance as an artifact of the period of 

equalization remains discernible. The findings of this report are that the school does 

retain its original massing, roof and wall materials and details and, therefore, it retains its 

historic integrity. 

The original windows have been replaced but, with the exception of the west elevation, 

the original window opening size and locations remain. As noted in the detailed 

summary of existing conditions much of the interior millwork remains in place, though 

often covered by new partitions. In most instances original classroom doors, closets, 

blackboards and tackboards, and baseboards are extant. They are generally in good 

condition or maybe easily repaired or restored. The school’s tile floors and mastic 

adhesive have been removed; both contained asbestos. Classrooms have retained their 

original configuration but wood frame and panel partitions have been added to create 

private offices within the classrooms. These partitions were carefully constructed so that 

when removed there will be little or no impact on the physical integrity of the building. 

In some instances original doors have been removed and replaced. Individually and 

collectively, through their materiality, scale, and detail, these elements convey a clear 

sense of the design, workmanship and feeling of the building, and are critical to 

maintaining the building’s historic integrity. 

Like other buildings constructed in the mid 1950s the school has had to accommodate 

the introduction of new/modern mechanical systems. The new HVAC system has had a 

significant impact on the appearance and “feeling” of school’s public corridor. The 

corridor finished with a high plaster ceiling was originally lit and ventilated by transom 

windows above the north and south entry doors. The ceiling height of the corridor has 

been reduced by the installation of HVAC ductwork concealed by a suspended ceiling 

system. The ductwork and dropped ceiling alters the scale and proportion of the public 

corridor, and conceals the original transom windows described above. The transom 

windows are still visible on the exterior above the north and south entry doors. The 

current ceiling material does alter the appearance of the school’s public hallway, but 

again the elements which remain— wall, doors, and display cases— are sufficient to 
63 

provide an understanding of the hallway’s original appearance. In total, the remaining 

elements reinforce the feeling, design, materiality and workmanship of the school and 

allow its historic integrity to remain intact. 

The maintenance yard and shed diminish the school’s integrity of setting. All aspects of 

this particular addition, including materials, construction methods and details, differ 

from the school’s original appearance. Moreover, the location of these additions 

partially obscures one of the building’s critical facades and has replaced one of the 

school’s exterior basketball courts. (See Fig. 5.24. Period Plan 1956, p. 57, Cultural 

Landscape Report, Nowak, et al.) Left in place, the maintenance yard and sheds do alter 

the relationship between the building and the site. However, many other important 

building elements remain as does the sense of material, design, detail, workmanship, 

feeling and relationship to setting which reinforce the significance of Booker T. 

Washington Elementary School and maintain its historic integrity. 

As noted in the following detailed assessment, the building has endured a number of 

additions, as well as the loss of original material since the elementary school closed in 

1966. Most of this work has no lasting impact on the building’s historic integrity because 

it does not permanently undermine the school’s design, evidence of workmanship, 

materials, feeling, association and its setting and location. Therefore, the Booker T. 

Washington Elementary School, significant for its association with the period of public 

school equalization and defense of segregation in the Commonwealth of Virginia, retains 

sufficient integrity to be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. 

General Physical Description 

In addition to the Booker T. Washington Elementary School, Franklin County contains a 

number of formerly segregated schools, including the Lee M. Waid School and the Burnt 

Chimney Elementary School. Both of these facilities have undergone extensive 

renovations and/or additions which have significantly altered their appearance. As a 

result of their physical changes the integrity of both buildings has been severely 

compromised. Unlike the Waid and Burnt Chimney schools however, the Booker T. 

Washington School remains in its original location and retains most of the critical design 

elements including mass, scale, proportion and major building components as well as its 

setting. 

The Booker T. Washington Elementary School is comprised of a modest one-story brick 

and concrete masonry bearing wall building containing approximately 5,500 square feet. 

The proportions of the building’s exterior envelope remain largely intact. The building 

has an L shaped footprint, and measures approximately 74’ on its northern facade, 92-8” 

on its western and eastern facades and 56’-2” on its southern façade. The school’s 

primary entrance is located on its northern façade which faces onto a vehicular turnaround encircling a small lawn where the flagpole stood. The flagpole has been 

removed. The school’s northern façade entry/egress is comprised of a pair of outswinging 9-light doors covered by a small flat roofed canopy supported on a pair of pipe 

columns. A similar entry/egress condition is found on the building’s southern façade. 
64 

The building’s exterior load-bearing brick walls are constructed using standard brick 

laid in running bond pattern with concrete masonry unit (CMU) back-up. The building’s 

interior plan is organized around a central double loaded corridor which provides access 

to all of the interior program spaces, e.g. classrooms, offices, rest rooms, and kitchen. 

Corridor partitions are constructed from painted “cinder block” CMU. Most of the 

original classroom doors remain in place as do many of the building’s original finishes 

including “black” and tack boards, coat closets and trophy cabinet. The western and 

eastern façades contain windows for the building’s major program spaces. The original 

single glazed windows have been removed and replaced with double-glazed insulated 

windows. The western façade has been altered with the addition of an over head garage 

door in the place of windows. The west elevation is obscured by the addition of a 

maintenance yard and a free standing vehicle shed. The building has a flat roof with 

aluminum coping. A summary of the exterior and interior building components follows 

this general description. 

The Booker T. Washington Elementary School closed in 1966 following the Franklin 

County School Board’s Freedom of Choice Initiative. The school was vacant for a 

number of years and remained the property of County School Board until 1973 when the 

building and approximately six acres of land were donated to the NPS. Between 1973 

and 1988 the building site was used for a number of different activities, including an 

Environmental Education and Cultural Center. However, in 1985 the park’s 

maintenance operations were relocated to the school. In 1986 a maintenance yard was 

created on the western side of the building. By 1994, the National Park Service had made 

alterations to the building to serve as both the park’s headquarters and as a maintenance 

facility. The maintenance yard has been supplemented by a 75’-0” timber-frame vehicle 

storage shed which has been constructed more than 30’-0” from the western face of the 

building. The paved vehicle court lies between the shed and the school. A chain link 

fence encloses the entire maintenance complex. The shed and fence are on the western 

side of the building, and are among the first things a visitor sees upon arriving at the 

school. The size, scale, material palette and workmanship of these additions are quite 

different from the building. Cumulatively, the added program spaces have a deleterious 

effect on the appearance and integrity of the building. Other areas of the site remain 

largely intact. 

As noted previously, the original steel hopper windows have been replaced with 

aluminum units. The replacements units are different in scale and overall appearance 

and have significant effect upon the appearance. They alter the “look” of the building. 

Additionally windows have been removed from what was at one time a classroom 

adjacent to the school’s kitchen and replaced by an overhead garage door. A HVAC 

system has been installed requiring the construction of a suspended ceiling in the public 

corridor to conceal ductwork and piping. In addition ductwork is visible in each of the 

program spaces. 
65 

Property Assessment 

A preliminary assessment of site and building features and an itemized description of 

each of the building’s program spaces and their constituent elements follow. The 

assessment identifies the significant features of the building and reviewing their 

condition and contribution(s) to the school’s appearance and integrity. The report has 

been prepared using material and information gathered during on-site inspection of the 

premises, oral on-site interviews with school alumni, and a review of design and 

construction drawings prepared by the architectural firm of J. Coates Carter from 

Martinsville, VA. Floor plans, Mechanical Plans, Finish, Fixture and Equipment 

Schedules as well as cabinet and millwork details provide valuable information about the 

original condition of the building. Digital images of architectural drawings are appended 

to this report (see Appendix). 

Site and Building Features 

I. Exterior 

A. Building Envelope 

--Exterior Walls. Original load bearing brick and concrete masonry walls remain 

in place and are in fair to good condition. Brick should be washed and repointed as required. One portion of the envelope has been renovated and an 

addition constructed to accommodate a workshop and maintenance facility. 

--Roof. Original built up roofing was last replaced in 1992. Insulation was added 

during the roof replacement. The roof replacement has a 20-year lifespan and is 

in good condition. Any repair or replacement of the existing roof must respect 

the building’s “flat” roof form indicative of a modern architectural vocabulary. 

--Windows. Original single glazed windows were steel hopper design with the 

lower sash opening inward and the upper, larger hopper opening outward. They 

have been replaced with units that are doubled glazed with “heavier’ sashes, 

frames, mullions and muntins and trim. 

 

--Doors. Original exterior doors are in place and operable, though the units were 

“re-worked” in 1988 and door glazing was replaced. Original entrance canopies 

at front, rear and kitchen remain in place and with exception of roof and coping 

original materials have been maintained. Roofs have been replaced in-kind. 

B. Site and Landscape 

--Site. A significant area of the site directly adjacent to the building has been 

altered to accommodate the storage of maintenance vehicles and supplies in a 

courtyard. Underground and above ground storage tanks, a flammable storage 
66 

building, and a storage shed next to the gas pump have been added since 1988. 

(See expanded and illustrated discussion of site in NPS, Cultural Landscape 

Report for Booker T. Washington National Monument. Nowak, Foulds & 

Troutman.)

II. Interior 

General Layout and Organization 

 

 --Classrooms and Corridors. As per its original design, the building has seven 

rooms organized around a central double loaded corridor providing circulation 

to classrooms, rest rooms, and offices. All of the classrooms have been altered to 

accommodate the building’s current use as the park’s headquarters and 

maintenance facility. One classroom has been converted into a workshop. 

Though the workshop remains within the footprint of one of the classrooms, 

floors and walls have been altered to provide safe working surfaces. 

--Structure. The corridor walls are load bearing and are constructed of concrete 

masonry units “cinder block” with a painted finish. The interior walls remain in 

their original location defining the major public circulation in the building. A 

reinforced concrete slab serves as the “foundation” or substrate floor throughout 

the building.

 --Walls. Interior partitions separating classrooms and other original program 

spaces remain largely intact. Some of the original millwork (tack boards and 

built-in cabinetry) remains. Most of the chalkboards are gone and NPS records 

indicated some of the individuals purchasing these items. 

 --Floors. Much of the building has been carpeted, replacing the original 

“asbestos tile” floors. In some areas the original concrete slab has been exposed 

and is used as the finish floor. Tiles and mastic were removed in 2001, before new 

carpeting was installed. The carpet has been installed (glued) on the concrete 

foundation. Mastic still remains in the uncarpeted “kitchen” area. 

--Ceilings. The ceilings of the building contain surface mounted fluorescent light 

fixtures which appear to have been retrofitted to the building. A suspended 

ceiling has been installed in the hallway to accommodate HVAC supply and 

return ductwork and piping. 

 --Rest Rooms. The building contains single sex restroom facilities with tile floors 

and wainscoting. New partitions in the restrooms, toilets, lavatories, and water 

storage tank have been added since 1988. The urinal in the Boy’s Rest Room was 

not replaced. 
67 

Program Spaces and Constituent Elements 

CLASSROOM #1 

General Description 

Classroom #1 located in the southeastern corner of the building contains approximately 

770 sq. ft. (approximately 35’-0” in length and 22’-0” wide). Classroom #2 is the adjacent 

room to the north, and the public corridor is adjacent to the west. The room is defined 

by the original load bearing concrete (cinder block) masonry walls and currently 

contains office space, a library, and a museum collection room. A wood frame partition 

room has been constructed in the southeastern end of the room and a wood frame 

partition wall running the width of the room has been constructed at the north end of 

the room. On the architect’s Floor Plan, the Finish Schedule calls for “sand-plaster” 

walls. It is not clear whether the plaster finish was ever installed. The CMU walls do not 

show evidence of the type of damage (nail holes) that would have occurred if plaster lath 

had been removed. It appears that the specified plaster finish was not installed in this or 

other rooms where this wall finish was specified. Doorframes and surface mounted 

millwork (chair rail, baseboards) appear to be in the proper position for existing CMU 

wall finish. The general condition of the room is fair to good. 

Eastern Wall (Left hand side of photo) 

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: The wall is load bearing cavity wall 

with painted concrete masonry units (8” x 16” typical 

throughout building and identified on the drawings as 

“cinder blocks”) on the interior and brick on the exterior. 

Both brick and CMU are set in a running bond pattern. 

The wall contains operable aluminum window units which 

replace the original steel sash units. CMU blocks, mortar 

joints and paint are all in fair to good conditions with no 

obvious signs of damage. Interior sills and lintels are in fair 

to good condition with some small damage (chips) evident 

on CMU sills. Venetian blinds have been installed on all 

windows. Cast-iron fin-tube baseboard radiators have 

been removed and replaced with a fan coil unit. 

Western Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single CMU wall set in running bond pattern. A 

painted wooden door with glazed transom is located in this wall and provides entry and 

egress to and from the adjacent public corridor. The door has nine fixed lights above 

two recessed panels and sits in a painted wooden frame and is identified on the Finish 
68 

Schedule as Door Type “B.” The transom has three glazed panels which have been 

painted to obscure a view of the plenum and hung ceiling in corridor. The door is 

original, but the doorknob and faceplate have been replaced. A portion of original 

painted wooden chair rail, a wood framed tack board and workbench counter mounted 

on cabinets are located on this wall. Counter/cabinet unit was specified to run for 

approximately 20’ beginning at the water closet wall. The architect’s drawings show a 

sink located in the workbench/counter. No evidence of the sink is currently present. 

Plumbing for this fixture is located in the cabinet and connected to waste and supply 

lines in the water closet. Painted wooden baseboard is intact. An HVAC return air grill 

is located to the right of the door. A number of surface mounted convenience electrical 

devices (switches and receptacles) are found on the wall. 

Southern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: A wood 

frame and paneled partition 

room obscuring more than half 

of the wall has been constructed 

in the south eastern corner of the 

room connecting to both the 

southern and eastern walls. In the original layout of this classroom the blackboard was 

installed on the southern wall. A small portion of the blackboard remains, but portions 

have been removed to allow for the installation of the wood partition walls. 

Northern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: A wood 

frame and paneled partition wall 

has been installed in front of the 

northern wall to create office 

space for maintenance staff 

employees. The northern wall 

divides Classroom #1 from 

Classroom #2. This wall is 

approximately 5’-0” deep with a load bearing CMU demising partition set in the middle 

of this dimension. Architect’s construction drawings indicate that this wall contains 

built-in closet(s) and a water closet with commode. The water closet door and 

commode have been removed. Operable two- panel wooden doors and frames are on 

the closets. Photographs of the interior taken during the school’s use show these doors 

in place even though there is no mention or specification of doors indicated on the 

architect’s drawing. The original exhaust vent grills in the water closet and closet(s) are 

covered with plywood. 
69 

Floor

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for asphalt tile to be laid directly on 

concrete floor. Tile has been removed and replaced with wall-to-wall carpet. No 

evidence of tile color or installation pattern. Steel boilerplate covers access to horizontal 

pipe chase. 

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact 

and shows no evidence of water damage. 2’ x 4’ 

surface mounted fluorescent light fixtures have 

been installed and replace the six pendant 

fixtures specified in architect’s drawings. 

HVAC ductwork is mounted on or from ceiling. 

Modern electrical devices and smoke/fire 

detectors are also mounted on the ceiling. 

.

CLASSROOM # 2 

General Description 

Classroom #2 located on the eastern side of the building is similar to Classroom #1, 

which is adjacent and lies to the south of this room. The Boiler Room lies directly 

adjacent to the north, and the public corridor lies to the west. The room, currently used 

for office space, contains approximately 770 sq. ft. and is approximately 35’-0” in length 

and 22’-0.” The room is defined by the original load bearing concrete (cinder block) 

masonry walls. A wood frame partition wall has been constructed in front of the 

southern end of the room to create an office for the park superintendent. As in 

Classroom #1, the architect’s drawings and finish schedules call for “sand-plaster” walls. 

However, it does not appear that the specified plaster finish was installed. The CMU 

walls do not show evidence of the type of damage (nail holes) that would have occurred 

if plaster lath had been removed. Doorframes and surface mounted millwork (chair rail, 

baseboards) appear to be in the proper position for existing painted CMU wall finish. 

The general condition of the room is fair to good. 
70 

Eastern Wall (Left hand side of photo) 

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: The wall is load bearing cavity wall 

with painted concrete masonry units (8” x 16” typical 

throughout building) on the interior and brick on the 

exterior. Both brick and CMU are set in a running bond 

pattern. The wall contains operable aluminum window 

units which replace the original steel sash units. CMU 

blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good 

conditions with no obvious signs of damage. Interior sills and lintels are in fair to good 

condition with some small damage (chips) evident on CMU sills. Venetian blinds have 

been installed on all windows. Cast-iron fin-tube baseboard radiators have been 

removed and replaced with a fan coil unit.

Western Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single CMU wall in running 

bond pattern. A painted wooden door with glazed transom is 

located in this wall and provides entry and egress to and from the 

adjacent public corridor. The door has nine fixed lights above two 

recessed panels and sits in a painted wooden frame. The transom 

has three glazed panels which have been painted to obscure a view 

of the plenum and hung ceiling in corridor. The door is original, 

but the doorknob and faceplate have been replaced. A portion of 

original painted wooden chair rail, a wood framed tack board and workbench counter 

mounted on cabinets are located on this wall. Counter/cabinet unit was specified to run 

for approximately 20’ beginning at the southern wall. The architect’s drawings show a 

sink located in the workbench/counter. No evidence of the sink is currently present. 

Plumbing for this fixture is located in the cabinet and connected to waste and supply 

lines in the water closet. Painted wooden baseboard is intact. An HVAC return air grill 

is located to the left of the door. A number of surface mounted convenience electrical 

devices (switches and receptacles) are found on the wall.
71 

Southern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: A wood frame and paneled partition wall has been installed in front 

of the southern wall to create office space for the park superintendent. The classroom’s 

southern wall separates this classroom from Classroom #1. This wall is approximately 

5’-0” deep with a load bearing CMU demising partition set in the middle of this 

dimension. Architect’s construction drawings indicate that this wall contains built-in 

closet(s) and a water closet with commode. The commode has been removed. Operable 

two-panel wooden doors and frames are on the closets. Photographs of the interior 

taken during the school’s use show these doors in place even though there is no mention 

or specification of doors indicated on the architect’s drawing. The original exhaust vent 

grills in the water closet and closet(s) are covered with plywood. 

Northern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: A wood frame and paneled partition 

room obscuring more than half of the wall has been 

constructed in the eastern corner of the room connecting 

to both the northern and eastern walls. In the original 

layout of this classroom the blackboard was installed on 

the northern wall. A small portion of the blackboard 

remains, but portions have been removed to allow for the 

installation of the wood partition walls. 

Floor

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for 

asphalt tile to be laid directly on the concrete floor. 

Tile has been removed and replaced with wall-to-wall 

carpet. No evidence of tile color or installation pattern. 
72 

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact and shows no evidence of water damage. 

2’ x 4’ surface mounted fluorescent light fixtures have been installed and replace pendant 

fixtures specified in architect’s drawings. HVAC ductwork is mounted on or from 

ceiling. Modern electrical devices including smoke/fire detectors are also mounted on 

the ceiling. 

CLASSROOM #3 

General Description 

Classroom #3 is located on the western side of the building and is similar to the other 

two classrooms. The Office lies directly adjacent to the north and the Kitchen is the 

adjacent room to the south. The public corridor lies to the east. The room contains 

approximately 748 sq. ft. and is approximately 34’-0” in length and 22’-0” wide. This 

room is currently used as a maintenance shop. The volume of the room is defined by the 

original load bearing concrete (cinder block) masonry walls. As in Classroom #1 

architect’s drawings/Finish Schedule calls for “sand-plaster” walls. However, it appears 

that the specified plaster finish was not installed. The CMU walls do not show evidence 

of the type of damage (nail holes) that would have occurred if plaster lath had been 

removed. Unlike Classroom #1 & #2, door frames and surface mounted millwork (chair 

rail, baseboards) have been removed. Originally windows in a similar configuration to 

Classrooms #1 & #2 were installed in this classroom. An overhead garage door has 

replaced center windows and aluminum windows have been installed in flanking 

apertures. 

Eastern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single constructed of 

concrete masonry units set in running bond pattern. 

CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good 

condition with no obvious signs of damage. Original 

painted wooden nine-light door with glazed transom has 

been replaced by hollow metal door, frame and opaque 

transom. The opaque transom obscures a view of the 

plenum and hung ceiling in the corridor. Architect’s drawings call for framed tack 

surface (similar to those found in Classrooms #1 & #2), chair rail/wainscot cap and a 

freestanding sink. The tack board is in place, but covered with pegboard. All millwork 

has been removed as has the sink. A number of surface mounted convenience electrical 

devices (switches and receptacles) are found on the wall. Wiring on this wall is run 

through aluminum conduit or wire-mold as is the case in the other two classrooms. An 

HVAC return air grill is located to the right of the door.
73 

Western Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: The wall is load bearing cavity 

wall with painted concrete masonry units (8” x 16” 

typical throughout building) on the interior and 

brick on the exterior. Both brick and CMU are set 

in a running bond pattern. The wall contains two 

operable aluminum window units which flank a 

rolling overhead garage door. This assembly 

replaces original steel windows and sills. CMU 

blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good 

conditions with no obvious signs of damage. Interior sills and lintels are in fair condition 

with some small damage (chips) evident on CMU sills. 

Southern Wall

Conditions: fair 

Description/Notes: The classroom’s southern wall 

separates this room from the Kitchen. CMU blocks, mortar 

joints and paint are all in fair to good conditions with no 

obvious signs of damage. Architect’s construction drawings 

indicate that this wall contains built-in book closet with a 

pair of ten light doors (which remains installed), and an 

adjacent closet comprised of three pairs of two-panel 

wooden doors which have been removed. 

Northern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: This 

wall separates Classroom 

#3 from the adjacent office. 

It is constructed of a single 

width of painted CMU 

blocks which are load 

bearing. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good conditions with no 

obvious signs of damage. In the original layout of this classroom the blackboard was 

installed on the northern wall. The blackboard has been removed. The nine light door 

and glazed operable transom connecting this room with the adjacent principal’s office 

has been replaced with a hollow metal door, frame and transom.
74 

Floor 

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for asphalt tile to be laid directly on 

concrete floor. Tile has been removed and existing concrete slab used as floor surface. 

No evidence of tile color or installation pattern.

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact in original position 

(approx. 108” above the finished floor) and shows no evidence of 

water damage. 2’ x 4’ surface mounted fluorescent light fixtures 

have been installed and replace pendant fixtures specified in 

architect’s drawings. HVAC ductwork is mounted on or from 

ceiling. Modern electrical devices including a heat detector and 

two exhaust fans are also mounted on the ceiling.

KITCHEN

General Description 

The “Kitchen” is located on the western side of the building. Classroom #3 lies to the 

north and the public corridor lies to the east. The room contains approximately 440 sq. 

ft. and is approximately 20’-0” in length and 22’-0” wide. This room is currently used as 

a maintenance shop. The volume of the room is defined by the original load bearing 

concrete (cinder block) masonry walls. Architect’s drawings/Finish Schedule calls for 

“sand-plaster” walls. However, it is not clear whether the plaster finish was ever 

installed. Three walls are covered with gypsum wallboard finish, likely concealing 

concrete masonry units. The visible CMU wall does not show evidence of the type of 

damage (nail holes) which would have occurred if plaster lath had been removed. 

Doorframes and surface mounted millwork (chair rail, baseboards) appear to be in the 

proper position for existing painted CMU wall finish. Wiring on the walls is run through 

aluminum conduit and wire-mold. A return air grill is located in between the two doors. 

The general condition of the room is fair to good. 

Eastern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single constructed of concrete masonry units set in 

running bond pattern. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good 

condition with no obvious signs of damage. The two original painted wooden nine light 

doors with glazed transoms are in place and are operable. Transoms have been painted 

to obscure views of ceiling plenum in the corridor. The doorknobs are original. 

Architect’s drawings call for a framed tack surface (similar to those found in Classrooms 
75 

#1 & #2) and chair rail/wainscot cap. Some millwork and the tack board have been 

removed. The “tack board” frame remains and may be original. Architect’s drawings 

indicate that a serving counter and steam table were located parallel to this wall so that 

students could enter through one door, pick up food, and exit through the other door. 

Neither is present. A number of surface mounted convenience electrical devices 

(switches and receptacles) are found on the wall. 

Western Wall 

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: The wall is load 

bearing cavity with gypsum wallboard 

finish likely concealing concrete 

masonry units. The wall contains a 

pair of operable aluminum window 

units which have replaced the original 

steel windows. Interior sills and lintels are in fair condition. Architect’s drawings 

indicate that a scullery sink was located beneath the windows. No sink is present. A door 

at the southwest corner provides exterior ingress/egress to the kitchen. The door 

opening is filled with a nine-light panel above two recessed panels and sits in a painted 

wooden frame. The faceplate has been replaced. 

Southern Wall (Right hand side of photo) 

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: The wall is load bearing cavity with 

gypsum wallboard finish likely concealing concrete 

masonry units. Some millwork is present. Architect’s 

drawings indicated that a range with exhaust hood was 

located on this wall. 

Northern Wall (Left hand side of photo) 

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: The wall separates the Kitchen from 

the adjacent Classroom #3. The wall is load bearing cavity 

with gypsum wallboard finish likely concealing concrete 

masonry units. A hollow metal door and frame replace a 

nine lights wooden door and frame. Architect’s drawings 

indicate that this wall held a refrigerator, “clean dish 

table”, “dishwashing sink”, and “soiled dish table”. (See 

Kitchen layout drawing.) None are present today. Some millwork is present. A return air 

grill is located in the center of the wall. 
76 

 Floor

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for “grease 

resistant” asphalt title to be laid directly on concrete floor. 

Tile has been removed and existing concrete slab used as 

floor surface. Evidence of tile pattern can be seen from 

presence of tile mastic. Boilerplate covers access to 

horizontal pipe chase. 

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact in original position (approx. 108” above 

the finished floor) and shows no evidence of water damage. 2’ x 4’ surface mounted 

fluorescent light fixtures have been installed and replace pendant fixtures specified in 

architect’s drawings. An original exhaust vent grill is covered with plywood. Modern 

electrical devices including a heat detector are also mounted on the ceiling.

PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE

General Description 

The Office is located on the western side of the building. The Girl’s Rest Room lies 

directly to the north, the public corridor to the east, and Classroom #3 to the south. The 

room contains approximately 240 sq. ft. and is approximately 12’-0” in length and 22’-0” 

wide. The room is currently used as an office for the park facility manager. The volume 

of the room is defined by the original load bearing concrete (cinder block) masonry 

walls. The architect’s drawings/Finish Schedule calls for “sand-plaster” walls. The 

CMU walls do not show evidence of the type of damage (nail holes) which would have 

occurred if plaster lath had been removed. It is likely that the specified plaster finish was 

never installed. Much of the original millwork remains including door(s), chair rail, and 

baseboards. The architect’s drawings do not show that a blackboard was specified for 

this room. No blackboard is present and walls show no sign one was ever installed. 
77 

Eastern Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single constructed of concrete masonry units set in 

running bond pattern. Original painted wooden nine light door with glazed transom is 

in place and operable. The opaque transom obscures a view of the plenum and hung 

ceiling in the corridor. The door is original, but the doorknob and faceplate have been 

replaced. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good conditions with no 

obvious signs of damage. Access doors for a corridor display cabinet are located on this 

wall. A framed tack surface similar to those found in Classrooms #1 & #2 covers these 

doors. An HVAC return air grill is located to the left of the door. A number of surface 

mounted convenience electrical devices (switches and receptacles) are found on the 

wall. Wiring on this wall is run through aluminum conduit and wire-mold as is the case 

in the other classrooms.

Western Wall (Right hand side of photo)

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: This is a load bearing cavity wall 

with painted concrete masonry units (8” x 16” typical 

throughout building) on the interior and brick on the 

exterior. Both brick and CMU are set in a running bond 

pattern. The well contains one operable aluminum 

window unit which replaces the original steel window 

and sill. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in 

fair to good conditions with no obvious signs of damage. Interior sills and lintels are in 

fair condition with some small damage (chips) evident on CMU sills. Cast-iron fin-tube 

baseboard radiator has been removed and replaced with a fan coil unit.

Southern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: The southern wall separates this 

room from Classroom #3. The wall is load bearing 

cavity with gypsum wallboard finish likely concealing 

concrete masonry units. Originally a nine light wooden 

door, frame and glazed transom connected this room 

to Classroom #3. The original door has been replaced 

by a hollow metal door, frame and transom. An HVAC 

return air grill is located on this wall. 
78 

Northern Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: The 

northern wall separates this 

room from the Girl’s Rest 

Room and has a water closet 

and commode similar to 

those once found in 

Classrooms #1 & #2. The 

wall is constructed of a single width of CMU. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are 

all in fair to good conditions with no obvious signs of damage. The original door and 

frame of the water closet are in tact and operable. An operable commode is also in place 

and appears to be the original fixture. Architect’s drawings indicate that a lavatory was 

installed on this wall adjacent to the water closet. An operable lavatory is in place and 

appears to be the original fixture. 

 

Floor

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for asphalt 

tile to be laid directly on concrete floor. Tile has been 

removed and wall-to-wall carpet has been installed (glued) 

onto the concrete slab. There is no evidence of tile color 

or installation pattern.

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact in original position (approx. 108” above 

the finished floor) and shows no evidence of water damage. 2’ x 4’ surface mounted 

fluorescent light fixtures have been installed and replace pendant fixtures specified in 

architect’s drawings. HVAC ductwork is mounted on or from ceiling. Modern electrical 

devices including a smoke/fire detector are also mounted on the ceiling. The original 

exhaust vent grill in the water closet is covered with plywood. 
79 

GIRL’S REST ROOM

General Description 

The Girl’s Rest Room, located on the western side of the building, is 12’-0” in length and 

22’-0” wide, and has floor area of approximately 247 sq. ft. and is adjacent to the Boy’s 

Rest Room to the north, the Office to the south and the public corridor to the east. Walls 

are constructed of a single width of 8” x 16” concrete masonry units (CMU). This room 

continues to be used as a women’s rest room. There is an original glazed tile wainscot 

extending approximately 5’-8” above the finish floor on all walls, except at the window 

aperture where the wainscot is 4’-6” above the finish floor. The floors are finished with 

glazed 8” x 8” ceramic tile. Like the wainscoting, the tile is original. The architect’s 

drawings called for three commodes with privacy partitions and three lavatories. Only 

two commodes with privacy partitions and two lavatories were installed. New privacy 

partitions have been installed. The original commodes have been replaced with newer 

ADA compliant units. The original lavatories have been replaced with newer ADA 

compliant units. The architect’s drawings do not identify the specific type of original 

plumbing fixture to be installed, and interviews with alumni were inconclusive on this 

issue. Aluminum windows have been installed replacing original steel windows. These 

window units contain textured privacy glass. There is no indication on the architect’s 

drawings about whether the glass in this or the Boy’s Rest Room was intended to be 

vision glass or privacy glass. 

The general condition of the room is fair to good. 

Eastern Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single constructed of 

concrete masonry units set in running bond pattern. 

Original painted wooden two-panel door is in place and 

operable but a painted metal ventilation grill has been 

installed. Architect’s drawings call for sand-finished 

plaster, but as is the case with all other rooms in the 

building it does not appear as if this finish was installed. 

CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good 

condition with no obvious signs of damage. The original 

glazed tile wainscoting is in good condition. 
80 

Western Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: This is a load bearing cavity wall with painted concrete masonry 

units (8” x 16” typical throughout building) on the interior and brick on exterior. Both 

brick and CMU are set in a running bond pattern. The wall contains one operable 

aluminum window unit which replaces the original steel window and sill. CMU blocks, 

mortar joints and paint are all in fair to good conditions with no obvious signs of damage. 

The original glazed tile wainscoting is in good condition. Cast-iron fin-tube baseboard 

radiators have been removed and replaced with a fan coil unit.

Southern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: The southern wall 

separates this room from the Office. The wall 

is constructed of a single width of CMU. The 

original glazed tile wainscoting is in good 

condition. CMU blocks, mortar joints and 

paint are all in fair to good condition with no 

obvious signs of damage. Two newer ADA 

compliant lavatories are installed. Rough 

plumbing for one additional lavatory is visible. New soap and towel dispensers have been 

installed. A mirror is on a side wall to the left of the lavatories and may be original. 

 

Northern Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: The northern wall separates 

this room from the Boy’s Rest Room. The wall is 

constructed of a single width of CMU. CMU 

blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to 

good conditions with no obvious signs of 

damage. The original glazed wainscot is in good 

condition. The original toilet partitions have 

been removed and reconfigured to create an 

ADA compliant toilet stall. Two newer ADA compliant commodes are installed. 
81 

Floor

Condition: good 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for glazed 

ceramic tile to be laid directly on concrete floor. Original tile 

is in place and is in good condition. The surface grill for the 

floor drain appears to be original. Some minor damage is 

visible where original toilet partitions were removed.

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact in original position (approx. 108” above 

the finished floor) and shows no evidence of water damage. 2’ x 4’ surface mounted 

fluorescent light fixtures have been installed and replace pendant fixtures specified in 

architect’s drawings. The original exhaust vent grill is present and operable. HVAC 

ductwork is mounted on or from ceiling. Modern electrical devices including a 

smoke/fire detector are also mounted on the ceiling. 

BOY’S REST ROOM

General Description 

The Boy’s Rest Room, located on the western side of the building, is 12’-0” in length and 

22’-0” wide, and has a floor area of approximately 247 sq. ft. The Girl’s Rest Room is 

directly adjacent to the south and the public corridor lies directly to the east. Southern 

and eastern walls are constructed of a single width of 8”x16” concrete (cinder) masonry 

units (CMU). Northern and western walls are load bearing cavity walls with painted 

concrete masonry units (8”x16” typical throughout building) on the interior and brick 

on the exterior. Both brick and CMU are set in a running bond pattern. This room 

continues to be used as a men’s rest room. There is an original glazed tile wainscot 

extending approximately 5’-8” above the finish floor on all walls, except at the window 

aperture where the wainscot is 4’-6” above the finish floor. The floors are finished with 

glazed 8”x 8” ceramic tile. Like the wainscoting, the tile is original. The architect’s 

drawings called for two commodes with privacy partitions, two urinals, and three 

lavatories. Only one urinal, two commodes with privacy partitions, and two lavatories 

were installed. New privacy partitions have been installed. One commode was removed 

in order to create an ADA compliant toilet stall. The other commode was replaced with 

one newer ADA compliant unit. All units are fitted with replacement “flush meters”. The 

urinal is the original fixture. The lavatories and fittings have been replaced with newer 

ADA compliant fixtures. The Architect’s drawings do not identify the specific type of 
82 

original plumbing fixture to be installed, and interviews with alumni were inconclusive 

on this issue. Aluminum windows have been installed replacing original steel windows. 

These window units contain textured privacy glass. There is no indication on the 

architect’s drawings about whether the glass was intended to be vision glass or privacy 

glass. The general condition of the room is fair to good. 

Eastern Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: A load bearing single constructed of concrete masonry units set in 

running bond pattern. Original painted wooden two-panel door is in place and operable 

but a painted metal ventilation grill has been installed. Architect’s drawings call for sandfinished plaster, but as is the case with all other rooms in the building, it does not appear 

as if this finished was installed. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to 

good conditions with no obvious signs of damage. The original glazed tile wainscoting is 

in good condition.

Western Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: This is a load bearing cavity wall with painted concrete masonry units 

(8”x16” typical throughout building) on the interior and brick on the exterior. Both brick and 

CMU are set in a running bond pattern. The wall contains one operable aluminum window unit 

which replaces the original steel windows and sills. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in 

fair to good conditions with no obvious signs of damage. The original glazed tile wainscoting is in 

good condition. Cast-iron fin-tube baseboard radiators have been removed and replaced with a 

fan coil unit.

Southern Wall

Condition: fair to good 

Description/Notes: The southern wall separates this room from Girl’s Rest Room. The 

wall is constructed of a single width of CMU. CMU blocks, mortar joints and paint are 
83 

all in fair to good conditions with no obvious signs of damage. The original glazed tile 

wainscot is in good condition. The original toilet partitions have been removed and 

reconfigured, and one commode has been removed, and not replaced, to create an ADA 

compliant toilet stall. One commode was replaced with a newer ADA compliant unit. 

The urinal is the original fixture. 

Northern Wall

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: This is a load bearing cavity 

wall with painted concrete masonry units 

(8”x16” typical throughout building) on the 

interior and brick on the exterior. The original 

tile wainscoting is in good condition. CMU 

blocks, mortar joints and paint are all in fair to 

good conditions with no obvious signs of 

damage. Two newer ADA compliant lavatories 

are installed. A mirror is to the right of the 

lavatories. A water heater has been installed as 

have a new soap and towel dispensers. 

Floor

Condition: good 

Description/Notes: Architect’s drawings call for glazed ceramic tile to be laid directly 

on concrete floor. Original tile is place and is in good condition. The surface grill for the 

floor drain appears to be original. Some minor damage is visible where original toilet 

partitions were removed. 

Ceiling

Condition: fair 

Description/Notes: Ceiling is generally intact (approx. 

108” above the finished floor) and shows no evidence of 

water damage. 2’ x 4’ surface mounted fluorescent light 

fixtures have been installed and replace pendant fixtures 

specified in architect’s drawings. The original exhaust 

vent grill is present and operable. HVAC ductwork is 

mounted on or from ceiling. Modern electrical devices 

including a smoke/fire detector are present. 
84 

PUBLIC CORRIDOR

Condition: Fair to good 

Walls

The public corridor runs the length of building for a distance of approximately 90’-0”. It 

is 8’-10” wide. Double doors (nine-light doors with solid recessed lower panels) are 

located on its northern and southern walls. The north door is considered the building’s 

front door. These doors provide the primary means of egress from the school. 

Northern and southern walls are load bearing and are constructed with an interior width 

of 8”x16” concrete masonry units (cinder block) and have an exterior width of brick. 

Eastern and western walls provide access to all of the building’s program spaces. These 

are load-bearing masonry walls constructed with a single width of concrete masonry unit 

finished with paint on both sides. As has been noted in other parts of this assessment the 

architect’s drawings call for “sand-finished” plaster as a finish material for these walls. It 

does not appear as if this finish was installed, but rather the walls were painted. The 

architect’s drawings call for four linear feet of “bulletin board” to be mounted on the 

eastern wall adjacent to the front doors. The tack board currently in place in this 

location is original. 

 
85 

Ceiling

The ceiling was specified to be finished with an “acoustical 

plaster” and the floors were finished with asphalt tile. The 

original ceiling height was approximately 9’-0” above the 

finished floor. A suspended acoustical tile ceiling has been 

installed lowering the ceiling height to approximately 8’-0”. The 

suspended ceiling conceals trunk duct and piping for an HVAC 

system serving all program spaces. Surface mounted fluorescent 

light fixtures have replaced pendant fixtures specified in 

architect’s drawings. 

Floor

The floor is concrete and was originally finished 

with asphalt tile. The tile has been removed and a 

wall-to-wall carpet has been installed. 

Millwork and Equipment

A “Display Case” is located on the western wall adjacent 

to the Office. The case has a simple wooden frame 

enclosing two panes of glass. This woodwork appears to 

be original. On the eastern wall a niche was built to 

house a water-fountain. Currently a water fountain is 

installed in this niche but it is not original. The painted 

wooden baseboards are original. A pair of nine light 

two-panel doors is installed at each end of the corridor 

providing entry and egress from the building. These 

doors match the classroom doors. The architect’s 

specifications call for wire glass in these doors. The 

doors are equipped with “panic-bar” egress hardware 

and hydraulic door closers. This equipment appears to 

be original. But illuminated Exit signs above egress doors 

are not. Fire alarm, security and HVAC control systems 

panels are mounted on the east wall by the front door 

and were not part of the original design. 
86 

BOILER ROOM/FUEL ROOM/PUMP AND TANK ROOM

General Description 

These three rooms are located on the north side of the building. The south wall of the 

Boiler Room separates it from Classroom #2. The Fuel Room is directly adjacent and to 

the east of the Boiler Room and the Pump and Tank Room is directly adjacent and to the 

east of the Fuel Room. 

The north wall is constructed of one width of brick and one width of concrete masonry 

unit. The CMU is unfinished and serves as the interior finish of all three rooms. The 

original coal fired boiler has been removed and replaced. The Boiler Room is entered 

from a single nine light two-panel wooden door on the north wall. This room is in good 

condition. 

The Fuel room was originally used to store coal for the boiler and is no longer used for 

this purpose. This room is in good condition. 

The Pump and Tank room were used to store the well pump and water storage tank. 

The original tank and pump have been replaced by modern equipment. The Pump and 

Tank room is entered through a door on the east wall. The wellhead sits in a masonry 

enclosure on the south wall. This room is in fair to good condition 

Images 

Ceiling Door Inside door Floor 

 

Walls and ceiling Wall ladder Ductwork Ladder 
87 

Exterior Building Envelope 

Walls

The building is approximately 92’-8” long and 56’-2” wide. The front or north face of 

the building contains the mechanical and equipment rooms and is 73’-10” wide. All 

exterior walls are load bearing and are constructed of a width of brick on the exterior 

and a width of “cinder block” concrete masonry unit on the interior. (The brick and 

concrete masonry units (CMU) are constructed together as a load bearing cavity wall.) 

These walls are nominally 1’-0” thick. The exterior brick is set in a 1/2 module running 

bond pattern. Eastern and western walls each have an overall length of 92’-8” and were 

designed to accommodate a 48” (approx) window module to provide all program spaces 

with natural illumination and ventilation. Window apertures have steel lintels and precast concrete sills. The sills are in fair condition. All sills evidence some chipping and/or 

minor spalling. 

Brick is in fair condition with some spalling and water damage visible at the corners. 

Bricks and mortar joints are clean, dry and tight. At the southern corner of the eastern 

wall there is some water and ice damage causing some bricks to have been “pushed” 

forward of the plane of the wall. The west wall of the building has undergone significant 

renovation and a 12’-0” section of wall and window was removed and replaced with a 

rolling overhead garage door. 

Park staff has erected a small lean-to cold frame to start garden plants on the south wall 

of the building. 

Front and rear doors lead directly into the building’s public corridor. Each door has a 

6’-0” x 10’-0” concrete deck and frame canopy set on steel pipe columns. The deck is set 

one set (approximately 6”) above the adjacent grade. The Kitchen has a similarly 

designed and detailed deck and canopy for the door providing access to the Kitchen 

through the western wall. The step up to the front door deck has been replaced with an 

ADA compliant concrete ramp. 

Roof

The building has a flat built up roof pitch to drain to scuppers and downspouts on the 

eastern and western walls. Original built up roofing and coping have been repaired and 

replaced. Aluminum coping has been attached to existing painted wooden trim. The 

roof is in fair condition. There is no evidence of water damage within the building. Any 

repair or replacement of the existing roof must respect the building’s “flat” roof form 

indicative of a modern architectural vocabulary. There are nine air exhaust vents on the 

roof. Eight are original; the other one is NPS installed. There are five plumbing vents on 

the roof; all appear to be original. A radio antenna for the park’s radio system has been 

attached to the chimney. 

 
88 

Windows

Aluminum frame and sash windows have been installed to replace original steel hopper 

windows. Original windows were single glazed, and replacement units will be doubled 

glazed with “heavier’ sashes, frames and trim. 

The building’s west elevation has undergone significant alterations and is currently being 

used as a storage area for maintenance vehicles. An overhead rolling garage door was 

added to replace windows in Classroom #3. A new lintel was installed to accommodate 

the new door. 
89 

Images

 Sign Windows Front 

Chimney Field side Front door 

Windowsill Lintel Brick damage

Shop yard. Big field. Greenhouse 

Shop yard 

91 

Appendix: Design and Construction Drawings 

Floor Plan 
92 

Finish Schedule 
93 

Site Plan 
94 

Wall Section 
95 

East Elevation 
96 

West Elevation 
97 

North Elevation 
98 

South Elevation 
99 

Door Detail - Exterior 
100 

Door Detail - Interior 
101 

Equipment Plan - Overview 
102 

Equipment Plan - Detail 
103 

Window Detail 

105 

Bibliography 

Primary Sources Consulted 

Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library 

Charles Rogers Fenwick Papers, 1938-1973, accession no. 9857-d. Albert and Shirley 

Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 

Edward Lebbaius Breeden Papers, 1932-1972, accession no. 9825. Albert and Shirley 

Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 

Mosby G. Perrow Papers, 1940-1962, accession no. 11014. Albert and Shirley Small 

Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 

Papers on the Consultative Resource Center on School Desegregation, 1999-2000, 

accession no. RG-6/38/1.001. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections 

Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 

Alderman Library 

John Segar Gravatt Papers, 1940-1972, accession no. 11584. Special Collections 

Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA. 

Leon Sebring Dure Papers, 1957-1970, accession no. 9751. Special Collections 

Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA. 

Richmond Afro-American, 1945-1965. Periodicals Room, University of Virginia Library, 

Charlottesville, VA. 

Roanoke World News, 1945-1965. Periodicals Room, University of Virginia Library, 

Charlottesville, VA. 

Booker T. Washington National Monument 

“Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial – Correspondence of Est.,” Resource 

Management Records. Booker T. Washington National Monument (hereafter, 

BOWA), Hardy, VA. 

“Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial – Stanley Campaign, 1953,” Resource 

Management Records. BOWA, Hardy, VA. 

 “Booker T. Washington Birthplace Memorial – NPS Notes,” Resource Management 

Records. BOWA, Hardy, VA. 

 

 “Booker T. Washington Elementary School – Cultural History,” Resource Management 

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