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Mississippi » Delta Region » Issaquena County » Mayersville Vicinity » RIPLEY-BLACKWELL HEAD START CENTER (ISSAQUENA COUNTY TRAINING SCHOOL)

RIPLEY-BLACKWELL HEAD START CENTER (ISSAQUENA COUNTY TRAINING SCHOOL)

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1954, I. G. Alexander; 1960 addition, Harold Kaplan. 25982 MS 14 at Gibson Lake Rd.

As part of Mississippi’s 1950s school Equalization program, all eight of Issaquena County’s one- and two-room schools for African Americans consolidated to this low-slung modernist building, then known as Issaquena County Training School. Until the early 1960s, a 1920s ten-classroom Rosenwald building and teacher’s house completed the campus, housing twelve grades and 537 students in 1955. The manager for the Virden Lumber Company in nearby Rolling Fork, I. G. Alexander, designed the nine-classroom, steel-windowed building, which included a multipurpose cafeteria space and indoor toilets, new luxuries for most of the students. Kaplan added two classrooms to the east end in 1960. Now a Head Start facility, its name honors Unita Blackwell, a program director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Blackwell sued to desegregate this school in 1965, and in 1976 she became Mississippi’s first African American female mayor when she was elected mayor of Mayersville.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Jennifer V.O. Baughn and Michael W. Fazio with Mary Warren Miller
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Data

What's Nearby

SHARKEY COUNTY COURTHOUSE
MONT HELENA
LINDEN

Citation

Jennifer V.O. Baughn and Michael W. Fazio with Mary Warren Miller, "RIPLEY-BLACKWELL HEAD START CENTER (ISSAQUENA COUNTY TRAINING SCHOOL)", [Mayersville, Mississippi], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MS-02-DR1.

Print Source

Buildings of Mississippi, Jennifer V. O. Baughn and Michael W. Fazio. With Mary Warren Miller. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021, 99-99.

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