In Atlanta, over a century ago, before the $billion Mercedes Benz Stadium was erected on MLK drive & Northside, educating Atlanta’s Black children was the heart of this Beloved Community; perhaps the first “School-2-College PipeLine” in America, if not the world.
In the 1880’s and early 1900’s, inside of Historic Fountain Hall, Whites like E.A. Ware & Blacks like Dr. W.E.B DuBois worked together to heal Black poverty and resolve White ignorance through Education after The Civil War during “Reconstruction.” This is the genesis of the “Atlanta Way.”
Atlanta University, founded in 1865 by the American Missionary Association (White Christians from Massachusetts) devoted to educate newly freed enslaved Africans in Atlanta after The Civil War, with later assistance from the Freedmen’s Bureau, was, before consolidation with Clark College, the nation’s oldest graduate institution serving African-Americans.
Morris Brown College was founded in 1881 by African American leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and named to honor the denomination’s second Bishop, Morris Brown who worked with Bishop Richard Allen in Philadelphia and Denmark Vessey in South Carolina as leader of Mother Emmanuel AME.
Morris Brown College was the 1st Educational Institution in Georgia to be owned and operated independently by African Americans.
For more than a century, the college enrolled many students as “A haven for hungry Souls”, large numbers of whom returned to their hometowns as teachers, as education was a mission of high priority; especially in Atlanta.
The Edmund Asa (“E. A.”) Ware School, named for Atlanta University’s first president, was built in 1922 as one of the first elementary schools for African American children in Atlanta.
E.A. Ware School is also especially important because it was built in response to the collective effort of the African-American community (led by A.D. Williams, Martin Luther King, Jr’s grandfather) using the power of the vote to demand that the Atlanta School Board invest in the black community in 1918.
Booker T. Washington High School, named for the famous educator (who cultivated an oasis of learning in the wilderness of Tuskegee, Alabama), opened in September 1924 under the auspices of the Atlanta Board of Education, with Charles Lincoln Harper (graduate of Morris Brown College) as principal. It was the first public high school for African-Americans in the state of Georgia.
Our history unites us toward our future,
~ Julian K. Smith, Jr.
Faithful Friend of Historic Fountain Hall