School For Blacks

Set in a neighborhood becoming dotted with new homes, the white building that houses the Freetown Improvement Association looks plain and unremarkable. The building, however, used to be a focal point of a small community of black farmers founded by ex-slaves in the mid-1800s. Freetown Elementary was a two-room schoolhouse when it opened in 1925, funded partly by a philanthropist who sought to provide schools to blacks when segregation and discrimination were standard practice. It had no indoor plumbing, so students had to use outhouses.

It has taken 142 years, but Baltimore's first school district leader will finally take his place in the superintendent's suite of city school headquarters. The Rev. John Nelson McJilton received a long-overdue recognition Friday, when city school officials paid homage to the first leader of the district, whose legacy has been ignored for more than a century after his decision to educate black children after the Civil War. Judge Thomas F. Upson, the great-great-grandson of the Rev. John McJilton — who served two years as superintendent beginning in 1866 — presented a commemorative photograph and history lesson on his ancestor Friday, ending a months-long attempt to have his ancestor's name and reputation restored.

African-American leaders in Howard County will soon begin raising funds in the hopes of developing a museum and community center in the former Harriet Tubman Junior-Senior High School. Coalition members incorporated as the nonprofit Harriet Tubman Foundation on Sept. 16. They announced the formation at the reunion of the high school's Class of 1951 last night at Martin's Champagne Room in Baltimore. The building, which was the first high school built for black students in Howard County, now houses the Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center and Head Start classes.

Set in a neighborhood becoming dotted with new homes, the white building that houses the Freetown Improvement Association looks plain and unremarkable. The building, however, used to be a focal point of a small community of black farmers founded by ex-slaves in the mid-1800s. Freetown Elementary was a two-room schoolhouse when it opened in 1925, funded partly by a philanthropist who sought to provide schools to blacks when segregation and discrimination were standard practice. It had no indoor plumbing, so students had to use outhouses.

In the late 1800s, school started at 9 a.m., when the teacher rang a brass handbell to summon the pupils. The children sat on backless benches and wrote their lessons on slates they held in their laps. In the 1940s, a teacher woke early to get to the school and fire up the potbelly stove so the building would be warm for the arrival of students, some of whom walked seven miles. In those days, all the students walked. Established in 1867 as Harford County's first public school for blacks, the Hosanna School in Darlington boasts a rich history.

EVERY YEAR brings news coverage hailing pledges by top officials to restore the abandoned Wiley H. Bates High School building in Annapolis -- and then nothing.As The Sun's Tom Pelton pointed out in an article last week, trees now grow out of the school's floor, the roof is collapsing and the walls are smeared with graffiti.The county plans to spend $6 million to repair the roof and remove asbestos beginning next month. But grander plans for a community center with 85 senior-citizen apartments there are still up in the air. The county's still searching for a developer to join the renovation, estimated at $16 million, so this story is far from settled.

An Annapolis planning board voted, 4-3, yesterday to oppose the higher-density housing a developer says is needed to build a community and senior center at the old Wiley H. Bates High School.The Planning and Zoning Commission will recommend against a change in zoning that would have allowed developer Victor Frenkil to build 86 town houseson a portion of the 16-acre site and to pay $1.2 million to remove asbestos from the once all-black school."It was not a decision about the merits of the project," said commission chairman Thomas Hennessy, who voted to recommend against the rezoning.

For a town that prides itself on oozing history from every cobblestone, Annapolis for years has inexplicably ignored its link to the slave Kunta Kinte, whose descendant, the late Alex Haley, immortalized him in his genealogical novel, "Roots."At last, the city has agreed to pay tribute to this emotional historic connection, donating $75,000 to a private foundation that is commissioning a $500,000 memorial to Mr. Haley. The statue will be placed at the City Dock where, in 1767, Kunta Kinte was led ashore in chains.

Few projects mean more to Annapolis' black community than the restoration of the Wiley H. Bates High School, the red-brick building that used to be Anne Arundel County's only public school for blacks. Unfortunately, the project doesn't seem to mean much at all to county and city officials, who have shunted it aside for more than a decade.They may talk about supporting black leaders' efforts to transform the school into a community and senior center, but what have they done? Ten years after neighborhood leaders started working for the school's re-use, there is no discernible plan to finance its preservation.

For a town that prides itself on oozing history from every cobblestone, Annapolis for years has inexplicably ignored its link to the slave Kunta Kinte, whose descendant, the late Alex Haley, immortalized him in his genealogical novel, "Roots."At last, the city has agreed to pay tribute to this emotional historic connection, donating $75,000 to a private foundation that is commissioning a $500,000 memorial to Mr. Haley. The statue will be placed at the City Dock where, in 1767, Kunta Kinte was led ashore in chains.

In the late 1800s, school started at 9 a.m., when the teacher rang a brass handbell to summon the pupils. The children sat on backless benches and wrote their lessons on slates they held in their laps. In the 1940s, a teacher woke early to get to the school and fire up the potbelly stove so the building would be warm for the arrival of students, some of whom walked seven miles. In those days, all the students walked. Established in 1867 as Harford County's first public school for blacks, the Hosanna School in Darlington boasts a rich history.

ISLE OF WIGHT, Va. - Celestine Savage ponders for a moment why some people want to forget their childhoods and some people want to remember them. Savage wants to remember her school days walking miles to her schoolhouse, a small wooden building with a musty smell, a pot-bellied stove and secondhand books. For people like Savage, who attended Isle of Wight's segregated, one- and two-room schoolhouses in the first half of the 20th century, memories came flooding back recently, when Smithfield officials said they wanted to make a museum out of the old Christian Home school building.

African-American leaders in Howard County will soon begin raising funds in the hopes of developing a museum and community center in the former Harriet Tubman Junior-Senior High School. Coalition members incorporated as the nonprofit Harriet Tubman Foundation on Sept. 16. They announced the formation at the reunion of the high school's Class of 1951 last night at Martin's Champagne Room in Baltimore. The building, which was the first high school built for black students in Howard County, now houses the Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center and Head Start classes.

THE OTHER day I spotted a young man in the blessed shade of a Calvert Street bus kiosk. He was reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself. Bingo! I thought. The book had been chosen by Mayor Martin O'Malley and Pratt Library Director Carla D. Hayden as "Baltimore's Book" in a two-month community "readathon." Through the end of next month, Baltimoreans are reading Douglass' marvelous 19th-century memoir, discussing it, featuring it at book clubs and perhaps visiting Fells Point, where as a boy Douglass learned the empowering nature of reading.

Like an apparition from another time, the fragile, wooden 119-year-old Ellicott City Colored School hides in plain sight.A symbol of Jim Crow days in rural Howard County, the unpainted building blends into a steep hillside behind a slender screen of trees above Main Street, ignored by hundreds of motorists who pass it daily.The two-room schoolhouse, closed since 1953 and propped up with steel beams, will be preserved as a museum to that era, when small, isolated black communities throughout the county sent their children to similar buildings from Elkridge to Highland to Cooksville.

EVERY YEAR brings news coverage hailing pledges by top officials to restore the abandoned Wiley H. Bates High School building in Annapolis -- and then nothing.As The Sun's Tom Pelton pointed out in an article last week, trees now grow out of the school's floor, the roof is collapsing and the walls are smeared with graffiti.The county plans to spend $6 million to repair the roof and remove asbestos beginning next month. But grander plans for a community center with 85 senior-citizen apartments there are still up in the air. The county's still searching for a developer to join the renovation, estimated at $16 million, so this story is far from settled.

Like an apparition from another time, the fragile, wooden 119-year-old Ellicott City Colored School hides in plain sight.A symbol of Jim Crow days in rural Howard County, the unpainted building blends into a steep hillside behind a slender screen of trees above Main Street, ignored by hundreds of motorists who pass it daily.The two-room schoolhouse, closed since 1953 and propped up with steel beams, will be preserved as a museum to that era, when small, isolated black communities throughout the county sent their children to similar buildings from Elkridge to Highland to Cooksville.

Intent on keeping their vow to save the old Wiley H. Bates High School, Annapolis leaders began a series of high-profile meetings Friday to find ways to pay for the renovations.Mayor Alfred A. Hopkins was scheduled to meet with Gov. William Donald Schaefer Friday afternoon to discuss converting the abandoned brick school into a senior center.City Council members, who rejected a plan Thursday to help pay for rehabbing the school by building town houses on the grounds, openeddiscussions with the developer and non-profit groups backing the town house proposal.

A tree sprouts from rotting carpet in the library. Rain drips from light fixtures dangling at drunken angles from the collapsing roof. Coils of graffiti surround a painting of a school principal wearing a bow tie.The ruins of Wiley H. Bates High School in Annapolis inspire conflicting emotions for alumni who graduated from Anne Arundel County's only high school for blacks during the decades of segregation that ended in 1966.For most graduates, the boarded-up buildings are a monument to the black teachers who inspired students to become judges, principals and business owners.

CHICAGO -- I'm putting my sanity on the line here, virtually rolling the dice with my peace of mind as the stakes.I'm in the Windy City for the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. I went to my first one last year in Nashville, when one Louis Farrakhan gave an opening-day address which is infamous now. He excoriated the assembled journalists, implying they were Uncle Toms afraid to stand up to their white bosses. When he was done, the crowd -- obviously afflicted with a deep streak of masochism -- gave the man a standing ovation.