Former Students, Advocates Hope To Preserve Havre De Grace Colored School

3 years ago 367

HAVRE DE GRACE, Md. (WJZ) — In the aboriginal 1900s, determination were less than 20 schools successful Harford County that would amended Black children. A radical of erstwhile students of the Havre de Grace Colored School is raising wealth to sphere the gathering truthful the past of the schoolhouse tin basal the trial of time.

Some singular names of the civilian rights epoch walked these floors, similar writer and activistic Langston Hughes, who utilized to predominant this schoolhouse successful Havre de Grace to talk to parents of the children who attended this schoolhouse and work his poesy aloud.

Up until 1965, Black children successful Harford County could not be schoolhouse with achromatic children. This gathering astatine 555 Alliance St. is wherever a young Thurl Snell got her education.

Now, she and others are dedicated to restoring the abstraction truthful it tin thatch the leaders of time astir the fighters of yesterday.

“We fought, everything was a fight,” said Nathalie Mullen James. “We didn’t cognize it past that we would go history.”

James was the younker section president for the NAACP successful 1962.

“I tin retrieve we marched. I tin retrieve being face-to-face with the Klan,” she said. “I tin retrieve we were trained to beryllium peaceful, to walk, not fto thing deter us.”

Her story, and dozens of others, adorn these walls.

“It brings a idiosyncratic constituent to their history, to their education, that is invaluable,” said prof James Karmel, manager of the Harford Civil Rights Project.

Karmel has partnered with the depository and taste center, helping to get these stories of existent radical into the hands of aboriginal leaders.

The Harford Civil Rights Project is an interactive app, you tin really perceive immoderate of these stories from erstwhile students who grew up knowing this schoolhouse arsenic 1 of the lone places they could get an acquisition and different civilian rights icons successful the country during that time.

But the surviving past present needs to beryllium restored, preserved and treasured for generations to come, which requires your help.

MORE NEWS: 5 Killed In Baltimore Over Halloween Weekend, Mayor Scott Says 'It Pisses Me Off'

The restoration of the Havre de Grace Colored School volition instrumentality millions of dollars and years to complete. More accusation astir donating is disposable here.