A small, single-story, building sits in a corner of a city park in Canton, Mo. It might not look like much, but for three-quarters of a century, this building served as Lincoln School.
However, the school was only for certain children — those who were blocked from attending other schools because of the color of their skin.
“This school was built in 1880, and it was the one-room school that was used for all African-Americans in this Lewis County area,” said Phyllis Dean, Project Director of Lincoln School, which is now a museum.
She said the first community’s first school for Black children was in the old post office in the middle of town. After a short time, it was moved to a house, then the AME Church.
But a flood damaged that building. Repairing it would have cost too much, so Lincoln School was built in a corner of Martin Park in a part of town where many of the town’s Black residents lived and went to church.
This was before the community along the Mississippi River built a levee, so it’s a part of town that flooded, swamping buildings, including the school.
“As you can see right now, it has a wooden floor in it,” Dean said “But when they first did it and they had the wooden floor, it flooded so many times that they put a cement floor down.”
Changes through the years
Dean, her husband, their sons, and other family members restored the building in 2019. When they started the project, the ceiling was gone, the walls had deteriorated, and the building was about ready for the wrecking ball. Now, as a museum, it reflects various eras in the school’s history.
For example, there are pillows on the floor because they did not have desks when the school opened. But there are also desks in the room to demonstrate a later period, and long benches reflect times when they did not have enough desks for all the children.
There are books in one section of the room, though Dean said the students did not have books for much of the school’s history, and the books they did sometimes have were worn and tattered.
The school is restored to a time when there was no electricity, heat, or indoor plumbing for the building.
Dean believes it’s important to preserve history, and she said this chapter of Canton’s past is not well-known.
“It’s kind of been pushed aside because it’s a painful subject for so many people. But when you don’t tell the truth and the history of something, it has a tendency to come back and repeat itself. So, I want people to know the truth,” she said.
Learning by lantern light
Dean said Lincoln School taught children through eighth grade. High school students were bused down to Hannibal, which is about 50 miles from Canton, to attend Douglass School, which was for Black students.
She said sometimes Black adults would seek an education at the school, even though they were not supposed to. Those ages 15 and older would come in at night and learn by lantern light from the school’s teacher.
“They weren’t paid any money for doing the teaching that they did. They would just volunteer to do that just to help,” Dean said.
She said sometimes they would share food, baking a potato using the small stove that heated the room.
Oppression ‘has never, ever stopped’
The Reverend Carolyn Blair grew up in New York City. She’s now pastor of Zion United Church of Christ in Burlington, Iowa. She has not visited Lincoln School, but she heard about such schoolhouses from her parents.
“That’s the kind of school they went to,” she said.
It was a challenging learning environment, according to her parents. But they recognized the value of an education. So when they raised a family, they pushed their nine children to get educated. Blair said all nine now of them have high school diplomas and college degrees, including master’s and doctoral degrees.
Blair said people continue to be blocked from being all they can be. She said they’re oppressed based on their skin color, where they’re from, their gender, or their sexual orientation.
“It never stopped happening. That blockage of preventing people from moving forward – even with Brown v. Board of Education – all the way through, it has never, ever stopped,” she said.
Brown v. Board of Education was the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to end segregation in schools. But some communities dragged their feet, and not just in the deep south.
For example, in Indianapolis, the schools remained segregated until 1971, when a federal court ordered them to integrate.
And in Rockford in far northern Illinois, a federal magistrate ordered the school district to desegregate in 1993, nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court ruling. The magistrate said the Rockford district had “raised discrimination to an art form.”
Recognition for Lincoln School
Lincoln School is open for visits by appointment. Phyllis Dean hopes visitors come away with an idea of what it was once like for Black children trying to get an education. She said it was especially challenging in rural areas, and she praised the resilience of the Black people of those times.
“It was the work that each generation did to get us to the places where we are, and it was because of people like them that I am able to come out here and do the things that I do and continue to share the information,” she said.
Lincoln School was named a Landmark School by the Country School Association of America.
In addition, a plaque on the front of the building says Lincoln Colored School was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
The marker says the school is a testament to rural education.
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