Alumni of Black school in Mississippi fight for its history
GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) — As with many Black schools in the Jim Crow South, references to Gulfport’s 33rd Avenue School in archives and books are scarce.
The school’s graduations and football games made the local newspaper, but almost never with photographs. Trophies, records and memorabilia were thrown out after the school closed with integration in 1969.
But the alumni remember.
They recall homecoming parades from the Quarters to downtown Gulfport, when the streets were lined with people — as many white as Black — eager to see the drum corps and the majorettes. They think about the band director, Willie Farmer, a strict disciplinarian whose rare smile was a source of joy. They remember the teachers they saw in church, who made home visits if they acted up, who shaped the school into a place of pride and rigor.
And now, they’re working to create a museum-style exhibit at the site of the school, which will become one of the few in Mississippi dedicated to the history of an African American school under Jim Crow. From the 1920s until 1969, the school educated thousands of Black children on the Coast, from as far away as Bay St. Louis and Wiggins.
The exhibit will be part of a $30 million Department of Labor-funded renovation of the building, which housed a Job Corps Training Center until Hurricane Katrina badly damaged it. Designed by a team of public historians from New Orleans, the exhibit will draw on oral histories with alumni and include images and memorabilia.
It will tell a story that many historians say has been neglected: How 33rd Avenue School, like Black schools across the South, provided a valuable education and a source of community pride in the face of racism and limited resources.
It’s different from the story of integration, and it deserves to be told on...