A Digital Strategy of Interpretation of
St. Johns Elementary School
Preserving the Community’s Engagement
Explore the website to learn and interact with the history of African American education and understand the impact of the Rosenwald Fund on the built landscape with a focus on St. Johns, a rural Albemarle County, Virginia school built in the 1920s.
African American education developed from a system, suppressed by the white population, but the African American population pushed their way through hardship as to educate themselves. Growing from the self-taught to the schoolhouse to top universities, African Americans pushed their way through hardship in order to educate themselves.
Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald came together to establish and launch the Rosenwald Fund aiding in the construction of rural African American schools from 1917 until 1932.
St. Johns, a two-teacher Rosenwald Schoolhouse constructed in 1922-23, served the Cobham African American community outside of Gordonsville, Virginia as an elementary school until 1954. Today, the schoolhouse is looking to build a new future.
Timeline of African American Education and St. Johns Elementary School
For full text and image citations reference the two linked PDFs in the website footer, at the bottom of the page.