The white rectangle-shaped 3-room building cant be seen driving down LA-2 just west of Plain Dealing, Louisiana, but 77-year-old Eddie Mae Scott knows exactly which red dirt driveway to go down to find it.
The building, while not always at that location, has been a big part of Scott's life, as well as her mother, Margen Bradford, and thousands of other Black residents in Plain Dealing.
It is one of the approximately 388 Rosenwald School buildings constructed in Louisiana between 1912-32, thanks to the efforts of Booker T Washington.
Washington was born into slavery in 1856. At the age of nine, he gained freedom under the Emancipation Proclamation. His life was spent championing progress for Blacks through education. He became the first president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now called Tuskegee University.
The school was little more than an idea when he first arrived and the website describes the humble beginnings, "The school opened July 4, 1881, in a shanty loaned by a Black church...students built a kiln, made bricks for buildings and sold bricks to raise money. Within a few years, they built a classroom building, a dining hall, a girl’s dormitory and a chapel."
It would go on to become a leading institute for Black education and Washington became a national spokesman and advisor to many US presidents.
Why are they called Rosenwald Schools?
One of Washington's most far-reaching efforts came with the help of Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck. Thanks to partial grants funded by Rosenwald, which were matched by the community, they were able to create 5,000 schools that educated Black children.
What was the importance of the Rosenwald School?
By 1928 about one-third of the South’s rural Black school children and teachers were served by Rosenwald Schools according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“These schools meant opportunity...without these schools, they would not have been able to reach their full potential,” said Brian Davis, Executive Director of the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation. Davis has mapped 300 of the 388 Rosenwald Schools around the state and confirmed that of those, 18 original buildings are still standing. His goal, part of a national effort by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is to see what remains and to help save what is left. The national average of surviving Rosenwald Schools is 11%. Davis says in Louisiana it is about 5%.
One of the best-left examples is the building that Eddie Mae Scott knows so well. Her mother was a teacher there, she went to school there, and later she would teach her first class there.
Davis met Scott when he went to see the building. He looked and saw the long row of windows that let in the natural light, typical for Rosenwald Schools which often did not have electricity when they were first built.
Scott still remembers being a student in the building. She remembers the fans that were in the ceiling and the wood stove in the corner. She always loved the days when the wood floors were oiled down to prevent dust, which meant the kids got to play outside.
Davis knows these first-person accounts are important. "We are losing these kinds of personal connections, trying to capture those stories in important."
When Scott began teaching there was still no indoor plumbing. She had a big cooler with ice and cups on the side for her kids to drink. It was her second year there when indoor restrooms were added.
Scott says they did what they could with what they had. "The teachers did everything they could to make the kids happy and to learn. "The education that those Black children got in that building made them very successful in life".
Scott's whole life has been about education. She knows how her family sacrificed to get their education. Her mother literally walked miles each day to grade school, and even farther to go to high school. Her father was only able to receive a third-grade education but drove his wife and countless others to Grambling University so they could receive their teaching certificates.
She believes the remaining Rosenwald Schools should be saved. When people visit "they can see their history, they can see where their parents, their grandparents and great grandparents started in education."
For now, the school building sits vacant after serving as a community center. It is marked and photographed with the other surviving District 7 schools.
Henrietta Wildsmith is a photojournalist for the Shreveport Times, part of the USA Today Network. Reach her at [email protected], Facebook or Instagram at @hanketta.