Posts Tagged ‘Black Schoolhouses’

JASPER – Fifty years ago, a teacher in a one-room Jasper County schoolhouse faced a class full of rural African-American children and issued a challenge.

“Everyone of you is going to college,” Viola Tukes told them.

Some of those students did go to college, while others, like Jesse Woods, took the first good-paying job they could find. But in the small school, situated in the Rock Hill community between Kirbyville and Jasper, students were given an education and opportunities that barely existed for previous generations.

“I’ve seen some good times in Rock Hill,” said Woods, 62, whose father never learned to read or drive a car. Woods attended the Rock Hill school in the 1950s.

The schoolhouse was built in the 1920-21 school year through the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which supplied funding and architectural planning for 5,300 African-American schools from 1912 to 1932.

Read the rest of this entry »