Owen Lourie Research Journal
2/11/2006
The BC Archives does not have a great deal of information from the School Board, and much of what they have is not particularly revelatory about the Division Street School.
They have a full run of Public School Directories from 1877 to 1967, which were somewhat useful. I still have not determined how the BC schools were organized in terms of how it was decided what school someone would attend. In the first few years after 1910, there are references to districts, and the Division St. school is in District 1, but it's not clear what function the districts served. There is not even a list of what schools are in the district, but I have managed to determine from references in the reports 7 of the more than 30 schools in Dist. 1. Additionally, BC schools were broken into groups of 3-6 schools; School 103 was in Group Y with three other schools. I belive that the other schools were located close to 103, but I need to confirm that with a map of BC. Again, it is not entirely clear what role these groups served.
I borrowed a reel of microfilm (RG.31, S.5D, M 1356: Plats and Drawings Schools)which contains plans, drawings, etc of the school. I've taken only a cursory look, but it seems very detailed.
The school at Division st. was named for Henry Highland Garnet in 1920 (according to the Coleman Directories), an African American abolitionist: http://www.africawithin.com/bios/henry_garnet.htm. The school was still open in 1967, the last year the BC Archives has Directories from; I need to find out when it closed.
The Minutes of the School Board were not particularly helpful, unfortunately. They don't contain any discussion, just the decisions they made, and we already knew what they decided. A typical entry from 1908 reads "The Board ordered that School No. 46 [the Division St. School] be officially recognized as the Annex to the Polytechnic Institute," with no record of debate or the reason for the decision.
1/26/2006
From Roderick N. Ryon, "Old West Baltimore," Maryland Historical Magazine 77, no. 1 (Spring 1982), 57:
"Everyone in the community [West Baltimore] relied on public neighborhood schools, but parents were especially proud of School 103, on Division Street, a model elementary school which drew students from East and South Baltimore."
Of course, the schools were segragated, which Ryon doesn't mention. He also doesn't have any sources in his article, so it's not clear how he found this out.
1/25/2006
After examining school board reports from the first years of the 20th century, it is appernt that the Division Street school was not a colored school until sometime betwen 1906-1910 (still awaiting annual reports from that time period).
In 1900-1901, Baltimore reorganized its public school system, doing away with primary/grammer/high school model, and instituted the use of elementary schools (which I suspect ran K-8; certainly by 1923 this was the case). The schools were renumbered as part of this, and what had been Male & Female Grammer School No. 6 became School 46. Between the time it became No. 46 and the last availible school report in 1905, the Division Street school was listed was being white.
The school on Division Street was School #46 until 1908-1909 school year, when it became an annex of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (p. 98, 157). It was an annex for Poly until 1910-1911, when it was reconverted into use as an elementary school and assigned # 103, possibly to be used as overflow for School #112 (p. 173). Instead, when the school began in the fall of 1911, it was colored school No. 103 (p. 36). The 1911 School Board report does not contain a list of colored schools, as the previous years had, but in the report of Distric I, it is noted that the colord schools 103 and 112 are overcrowded (p. 84).
According to Juan Williams' biography of Thurgood Marshall, Marshall began attending School No. 103 in 1914 (p. 28). Williams cites an article from MD Historical Magizine that say 103 was the best colored school in the city. I"m going to see If I can find this article.
1/20/2006
The School Board report from 1877 contains some discussion of the construction of the Division St. School, and contains a a floor plan of the building. It is apparent from the reported information that the school was a white school when built. The 1923 Directory of the Public Schools of Baltimore, MD, which is included in the Baltimore City Law Department papers in Young v. School Board (see ecpclio series 62-93) lists Henry Highland Garnet School, Colored Elementary School No. 103 at the Division Street location. The next step, I would think, is to determine when the school became a colored school.
1/18/2006
According to the BC Board of School Commissioners Report for the year ending 1878, the school building on Division Street was Grammar School No. 6. It is located at "N.E. side Division, near Lanvale," (p. xxxv) which is consistent with 1313 Division (or 1315-27 as MHT says. Did the buildings in Baltimore get renumbered at some point? After the fire?)
It is not therefore, the school whose organization was pushed by the Brotherhood for Liberty, the Colored High & Grammar School, which was located on Saratoga St., near Charles, according to the School Board Report from 1888 (p. 18).
The 1878 report has some information about School No. 6, regarding building size, year built, etc. However, the report from the year it was built 1877, which may contain more information, is currently missing. It was pulled in 1998 so that the report from the Board of Health (contained in the same volume) could be scanned for the tobacco litigation, and was not returned to its original location. Christine will try and track it down. I checked the CD of what was scanned, but not surprisingly it was just the Board of Health report.
1/17/2006
Emily,
I've been hunting through what we have on education, unfortunately most of what was written about schools at the time ignored colored schools. I did find a dissertation which has some useful information, and a good discussion of the origins of the school, formally known as the Colored High and Grammar School, and the United Brotherhood of Liberty, which pushed for the creation of the school. The dissertation cites the Baltimore City School Board Annual Reports, and I'm trying to find out where these are, if they still exist. (the dissertation is from the 1970s, so I assume they do). It's hard to know if the school made it into the newspaper; there are no extant black newspapers from the era (although the Brotherhood did publish a paper, the True Communicator).
