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FREDONIA — On Saturday afternoon, February 22nd, the New Hope Foundation hosted a program on Black History at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Guest speaker Felecia T. Moore spoke on the connection of Rosenwald schools to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBUs). Following the program, the guests in attendance were treated to a tour of the nearby New Hope Rosenwald School to see continuing progress on the restoration of a school building that served the northeast Chambers County African-American community from 1919 to 1958. The New Hope Foundation is heading up the restoration and has made some impressive progress over the past decade.

Moore is a native of Talbot County, Georgia and today lives in LaGrange. Her professional career has included work in human resources, information technology, middle school teaching, archives and consulting. As an artist, oral historian and author, she has written family history books and is currently illustrating and documenting the local history of various African-American schools and neighborhoods in Talbot and Troup counties.

In the days before the 1964 Civil Rights Act and school integration, Jim Crow racial segregation was widespread in the U.S., especially in the South. White schools struggled for public funding, and it was much worse for the black community.

Moore cited three important factors in the education of Black children: the church, Rosenwald schools and the HCBUs.

“They were all involved in educating them,” Moore said. “They encouraged children to look to a better, brighter future and not to be looking back.”

She praised the New Hope Foundation for its continuing work to promote the legacy of Rosenwald schools and for its renovation of the New Hope school.

The Rosenwald School program built schools for Black children living in rural areas of the Deep South. These schools were built as a result of a partnership between Julius Rosenwald, a philanthropist and businessmen, and Booker T. Washington, an educator and activist. Between 1913 and 1932, more than 5,000 schools, shops and teacher homes were built in 15 states. These schools were often the first schools in Black communities.

Nearly 400 Rosenwald Schools were built in Alabama. Some twenty of these were in Chambers County. The New Hope School is the only one still standing in Chambers County and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Most people in Troup County identify the name Ethel Kight with a LaGrange area school. Moore said that she was very deserving to have a school named for her.

“She wrote the first history of Black schools in Troup County,” she said. “At one time, the education of Black children in Troup County had been taking place in churches and lodge halls.”

While the vast majority of HCBUs are in the South, the first one was in Pennsylvania. What’s now known as Cheyney University began in 1837. Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta) was the first one in the South. Alabama’s HCBUs include Alabama A&M, Alabama State, Miles College, Oakwood University, Stillman College and Talladega College.

It was especially difficult for Black citizens to get a good education in Alabama. “As late as 1933,” Moore said, “there were no state-supported high school for Blacks in the state.”

Moore said she was especially proud of the fact that the first African-American federal judge from Georgia was from LaGrange. Thomas T. Ward was appointed by Jimmy Carter when he was president. 

“He had wanted to go to the University of Georgia, but they would not accept him,” she said. “He went to Northwestern for his law school education.”

“The HCBUs were important then and they are important now,” Moore said. “Enrollment is surging at some of them right now, and that’s good. There are 107 of them in the U.S.”

Moore was introduced by Alfreda Fannings, wife of Fredonia Mayor George Fannings. She made some history in the 1960s. She was the first African-American student to graduate from LaGrange College. She had wanted to go to school there because of its proximity to where she lived, but the school had been segregated since its founding in 1831. After learning that what had always been all-white colleges had been told they would lost federal funding if they did not admit Black students, most Southern colleges relented and started admitting Black students who qualified. Alfreda wrote a letter to the president of LaGrange College to ask if they would admit her. She was overjoyed when he wrote her back that they would.

Alfreda’s son Nathaniel talked about his college experience. After graduating from LaFayette High, he attended Auburn for a time but felt overwhelmed being at such a big school given what he’d been accustomed to in Chambers County.

“I still love Auburn – War Eagle!” he said, “but I transferred to Morehouse College in Atlanta, and I’m glad I did. As soon as I arrived on campus I knew it was home. Morehouse turned me from a boy to a man. It will always be near and dear to my heart.”

Foundation Board President George Barrow talked the the gathering about the ongoing renovation of the New Hope School building. It has been extensively reworked in recent years to look as much like a 1919-era Rosenwald School as possible. It still has the original blackboard and teacher’s desk. There are some newly-made student desk that were carefully put together to look like those of the period. There’s a potbellied stove that looks like the ones did in 1919, and there’s some wavy glass in the windows that look like those from the post-World War I era. In the middle of the large classroom area, there’s a folding partition that can be pulled across the room to separate the small children from the older ones.

Barrow said the room has been painted to have the 1919 look.

“We tried to match it as closely as we could to what it looked like back then,” he said.

Rosenwald schools are famous for their tall windows that let in ample sunlight. Most of them stood on brick pillars that let air circulate in and out of the building.

Barrow said the building was built from a floor plan designed by Robert Taylor, the first licensed African-Americn architect in the United States. In the late 1800s, he was the first Black student to attend MIT. Booker T. Washington persuaded him to come South to design buildings for the Tuskegee campus and for the Rosenwald program.

To have a Rosenwald school built in your area, the local community had to first come up with $300. That was a lot of money back then and it took lots of fundraisers and nickel and dime donations to come up with it. If a local community would do that, Mr. Rosenwald would put up $300 and the state would match that.

From 1913 to 1932, a total of 4,977 schools, 217 teacher homes and 163 shops  were built in 15 Southern states.

“We’ve put in a lot of hard work in restoring this school building,” said Board Member Thermond Billingslea. “We still have some more to do before it’s complete, but I am glad we are where we’re at right now.”

Kathy Grady talked about the history of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which dates to 1874. W.L. Boyd was its first pastor.

“God spoke to him and brought a vision to life,” she said. “Here he built a foundation based on a new hope, something that gave the church its name. People came from miles around to support him. Families have come together over the years to support the continuing mission of the church. It will be 153 years old this September.”