The “Mother School” for African Americans in Jackson, this two-story brick building erected by contractor C. H. Carroll was Jackson’s only black public school until the 1920s. It replaced the 1894 school destroyed by fire in 1909. The school was named for former slave Smith Robertson, who owned a prominent barbershop opposite the Old Capitol (JM12), and was Jackson’s first African American alderman. Perpetually overcrowded, the school was expanded and renovated in 1929 with a new Art Deco front and a large wing to the rear, erasing most of the 1912 exterior. The school’s symmetrical stuccoed facade, with a central pilastered frontispiece and stylized decoration, compares aesthetically with such contemporary white schools as George Elementary (1020 Hunter Street), but the twelve-classroom facility remained woefully crowded. Eight more classrooms (1935) and a cafeteria (1940, N. W. Overstreet) enlarged the U-shaped building to the rear, but the school still lacked an auditorium, in an era when white schools as small as four classrooms routinely boasted dedicated assembly space. Like many black schools, Smith Robertson closed in 1971 during public school integration. In the late 1970s, community support rallied in one of the first instances in Mississippi of a successful preservation battle by and for African Americans, and the building reopened as a museum in 1984.