What’s in a Legacy? old walker grant school By jon gerlach
Tucked away on a terrace above Walker Grant School at Hazel Run, the Old-W 200 Gunnery Lane proudly rises out of the 100-year floodplain as an enduring monument of public education in Fredericksburg. The history of AfricanAmerican education in our City is rich and complex, involving visions and struggles
for equal rights and the ultimate power of a community that works together. Freedom did not come to slaves until the Civil War; equal education and voting rights did not happen until much, much later. After the war, private schools for black children began to appear in Virginia. Shiloh Baptist Church was instrumental in establishing one of the
first such schools in the area. Later, in 1883, City Council established the first elementary school for African-American students at the northeast corner of Princess Anne and Wolfe Streets, the Fredericksburg Colored School, but as-yet there was no public high school for blacks. The "separate but equal doctrine" voiced by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 was devastating to public education. Churches continued to provide high school education for AfricanAmericans, and in 1905, Fredericksburg Normal and Industrial Institute, the first high school for blacks in Fredericksburg, was opened in Shiloh Baptist Church by visionaries including two prominent men: Joseph Walker and Jason Grant. Walker was been born into slavery in Spotsylvania County. Self-taught, he worked in various jobs but had a passion for learning. Grant, the son of a slave who fled to Canada, later moved to New York and eventually settled in Fredericksburg, where he became a teacher for 42 years. The school moved to Moorefield (today's Mayfield) and in 1925 occupied a new building called Mayfield High School, but despite aid from church groups it struggled financially, especially during the Great Depression. In 1935 the Colored School (elementary) was moved to the building we know today as Old Walker-Grant School. It was not until 1937, near the end of the Great Depression, when the City School Board took over Mayfield High School, with a goal of combining the Colored School (elementary) with the Institute (high school), and assumed the cost of operating it. This merger created the first public school for African Americans in Fredericksburg: WalkerGrant School, which opened in 1938 in the newly-expanded building along Gunnery Lane.
For 30 years, this was the public school for African-American students. After desegregation reached Fredericksburg, in 1968 and for the next 20 years, the building was the middle school for all Fredericksburg children, black and white. In 1988 construction of a new middle school was completed, bearing the Walker-Grant name, and the Old Walker-Grant School in its 50th year ceased being a middle school. Today, the building is under-utilized, but the City is looking for ways to creatively re-use the space. So ‌ what's in a legacy? Here, important stories of the many struggles for racial equality and public education in Fredericksburg.
An attorney and retired archaeologist, Jon Gerlach chairs the Architectural Review Board in Fredericksburg. Photo by Jon Gerlach
front porch fredericksburg
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