This historic SC school once united a community. Now, they plan to bring it back to life

Growing up, Edith Williams-Oldham never realized the historical impact of her small school that sat just a “stone’s throw away” from her home.

She knew that she learned to play basketball on the St. George Rosenwald School’s dirt court and that the school was where her favorite literature teacher inspired her to be a writer and poet herself.

But it wasn’t until she started researching for her book, “What Grandma Forgot to Tell You,” that she realized that her years at St. George Rosenwald School in the late 1940s and early ‘50s were an important part of history in St. George, S.C., and across the country.

By 2014, when the school property was given to the town of St. George, the walls were decaying and the basketball court was full of shrubs. But now, after an extensive restoration effort lead by alumni and community members, the school is on track to reopen to the public this fall.

From a place that afforded precious opportunity to generations of Black children to a place that fostered community and progress in the Civil Rights era, the newly restored St. George Rosenwald School is a place community members now hope will inform and inspire the next generation.

The process

The St. George Rosenwald School is one of many schools built throughout the South by Julius Rosenwald, a philanthropist and president of Sears and Roebuck, and with the help of educator Booker T. Washington.

The historic South Carolina property was built in 1925 during a time when segregation and Jim Crow laws made it harder for Black students to receive a quality education. The building served as a school and gathering place for Black students until 1954 and after was a meeting space and community center for the surrounding area.

“If you saw the pictures before they cleaned it off, we even wondered if it could be salvaged,” Oldham said.

The school was one of only two Rosenwald Schools in Dorchester County and is the only one still standing, according to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

Ralph James, the chairman of the St. George School Board and one of the last students to attend the school before it closed, said the school was partially preserved by the neglect.

“It really was neglected to allow these trees to grow up around it, and then there were a lot of cement blocks and cement pieces stored around 6, 7, 8 feet high all around it,” James said. “So when the storm wind blew, that buffered the school from a lot.”

Since 2014, the board, made up of alumni and local legislators, has worked on restoring the building. They have added a kitchen, bathrooms and a board room. They also plan to recreate the old principal’s office and fill the small library with a mix of modern books and ones that James and his classmates would have read.

The school’s updated auditorium will include updated stage lighting, a projector and multicolor walls, which James said tell a story.

When the school hosted an early childhood education program, different walls were painted different colors for different age groups, James said. When the wooden boards from those walls were cleaned and reinstalled, all the colors were mixed up.

“So this was the pattern that was placed up there with intent to paint, and a few persons came in said not to paint,” James said. “It’s original, and it tells a story.”

However, one part of the south wing of the St. George Rosenwald School will feature two rooms most similar to what the building would have looked like while it was open. The board plans to host classes for visiting children in two classrooms fitted with original floors, a blackboard and a stove that would have been used to heat the classroom in the winter.

With the help of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, old desks were located from across the county and restored so that visiting students can sit it them while learning about the history of the school.

Doug Reeves, the vice president of the St. George Rosenwald School board, said the desks were just part of the board’s effort to preserve the memory of the school.

“We’ve got some alum that’s graduated from that school, and they keep coming back saying, ‘OK, well, this is where it was, you know, when I was here. …Yeah, you ought to do this, or do that.’ And that’s what we kind of kept in mind the whole time,” Reeves said. “We wanted to save as much of that as we possibly could.”

The project has become a community effort, according to Oldham, who said the alumni group even sponsored the restoration of a nearby restaurant themselves.

In the 1920s, the Black community held fish fries and fundraisers to be able to build the Rosenwald school, and Oldham said for the restoration project, the alumni did the same.

“Well, what we did was we just emulated what our parents, foreparents had done,” Oldham said. “We raised money.”

Oldham said she hopes the continued effort to rebuild the school and surrounding buildings will help to uplift the community that the school sits in the center of.

The community

For Oldham and James, the Rosenwald school represents a time of unity and support throughout the Black community in St. George.

James described the school as “the jewel, the pride of the community.” The Black community flourished around it, with restaurants, shops and movie theaters creating a vibrant uptown St. George that was nicknamed “Little Harlem.”

“As I walked the streets as a child, everyone knew of me, and you could just, from house to house, you can depend on a little helping hand along the way,” James said. “You were never a stranger. So that feeling is something that can’t be duplicated in a way, but it does tremendous to build citizenship and to strengthen humankind.”

Oldham said that the St. George Rosenwald School itself was so popular that it was overfilled and had to hold classes in the nearby church or in auxiliary buildings.

For many students, Oldham said the school was a life-changing opportunity that many Black children didn’t have. One of the school’s oldest alumni even begged her mother to ride their family’s bull to school during a particularly bad storm so she could maintain her perfect attendance.

“This school was a prayer, an answered prayer,” Oldham said. “To be in a room where there was no leaking room, there were heaters with wood, coal burning to keep them warm, there was toilet paper, even though it was an outdoor toilet, it was flushable.”

Even after the school closed, it acted as an organizing place in the Civil Rights movement, according to the National Park Service, which recognized the school as a part of the African American Civil Rights Network in 2021. The building was used to prepare community members to vote and hosted “Project Deep” which helped prepare Black students to enter integrated schools in Dorchester County.

“That school has been a venue for progress since the day it was built,” Oldham said. “We want to make it even more so now.”

James said the additions to the St. George Rosenwald School were made to help make the building a community space again. He hopes to see the school host everything from history lessons to Rotary Club meetings to birthday parties.

“Hopefully, we will be able to demonstrate not only here what can happen, but to other communities just what would happen if you would, again, begin to find something that would bring you together, bring the area together and give you a common cause,” James said. “Give us hope, again, create love for one another and more than that ... an education and to stimulate our minds and to do good things.”

The future

In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces, the updated St. George Rosenwald School will partner with the Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry to include informational exhibits for younger visitors on the south side of the building, James said.

“I think one of the slogans, ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste,’” James said. “So here we are not wasting minds, but we are rejuvenating them, we are strengthening them.”

To Oldham, involving and engaging the youth, which she considers anyone from children to 40-year-olds, will lead to the success of the project.

“This is the greatest gift that your foreparents could have given you. The opportunity to learn about where you came from, who they were, why you’re here and how you got here and what this school has contributed to the community in St. George and surrounding areas,” Oldham said. “We would hope that you would take interest and learn and keep supporting it to build a better community.”

According to James, the St. George Rosenwald School is on track to host a grand opening in September.