A Rich, Disappearing Legacy Remembering Black boarding schools: A tradition obscured by desegregation's impact.
By Ronald Roach

There's no doubt that the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board school desegregation case next year will generate much-needed discussion about the ongoing struggle over providing quality education for American children, especially for those in the Black, Latino and American Indian communities.
While a good deal of the celebration will applaud the historic efforts of courageous scholars and lawyers, such as Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Kenneth Clark, to desegregate the public schools, there likely won't be much, if any, attention paid to another distinct tradition that sought the best education possible for Black children during the segregation era. The tradition belongs to historically Black boarding schools, of which there were more than 100 in the United States prior to the 1970s.
Currently, only four such schools are in operation.
" It was an excellent educational option, and it is the kind of option I wish we had available today," says North Carolina Central University provost Dr. Lucy Reuben, who attended a Black boarding school known as the Mather School in Beaufort, S.C., during her high school years.
Alumni of these schools, which were primarily based in the South, decry the loss of these institutions, which came about in large part from enrollment declines and financial hardship after desegregation opened up all-White public schools to Black students. These independent boarding schools had made up a significant part of the educational infrastructure for Blacks between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. When southern states and localities failed to provide schools for Black children, local Blacks, religious organizations and philanthropists took it upon themselves to build independent elementary and secondary schools.
" The schools that became boarding schools were often the only places in a particular community where Blacks could be educated," says Dr. Charles Beady Jr., the president of the Piney Woods School in Mississippi.
Among the Black boarding schools, the Mather schools in Beaufort and Camden, S.C., Palmer Memorial Institute and Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, Snow Hill Institute in Alabama, Gilbert Academy in New Orleans, Piney Woods in Mississippi and Boggs Academy in Georgia are some of the better known institutions.
To those who attended the Black boarding schools, the tradition imbued them with a profound sense of community, religious devotion for those at the church-affiliated schools, and a commitment to academic excellence, qualities they believe are rarely replicated in the lives of contemporary Black students.
" I can say that Mather provided a truly rigorous and character-building experience," Reuben says.
Today, a number of the boarding school alumni groups have reunions on an annual basis and a few work on historic preservation projects relating to their alma maters. The four existing Black boarding schools have recently begun efforts to reach out to the alumni of the ones that have closed.