WASHINGTON, N.C. (WITN) – Located on North Pierce Street in Washington is the P.S. Jones Museum of African-American Education.
It’s a site that stands on what used to be the P.S. Jones High School campus, which holds history and archives that highlight the path of education for Washington’s disenfranchised children before, during and after segregation.
“This museum represents a whole community,” James H. Smallwood, the museum’s historian, who also attended the school, said.
“lt demonstrates the tenacity of effort by individuals who taught here in spite of everything, they still persevered. I think about my grandparents and my fathers and all of those who persevered to endure whatever was happening in order to be here.”
In Beaufort County, options for public education for black children were a long-fought battle, resulting in children having to learn in wooden buildings or church basements in isolated communities.
Smallwood says that despite hardships, teachers and students bonded like a family.
“In the Black schools, the teachers were caring,” he said. “Because they were a part of them. Because the teachers could look at the students and see that they were a part of them and that they could be their children.”
In the fight for educational equality for children of color, the P.S. Jones High School, formerly titled the ‘Washington Colored High School,’ was established in 1924 with an elementary school downstairs and a high school upstairs.
It was a school that took in students from over 10 rural schools across Beaufort County, that gave them an opportunity to gain an education beyond elementary school.
“Professor” Peter Simon Jones is who the school was named after in 1949.
Jones came to Washington with the goal of helping students gain more skills beyond basic reading and vocational skills.
Smallwood says going to school and learning alongside other children with the same background created a sense of pride, and love for their community.
“We’ve always had the pride of who we are, and I think going to an all-Black school instilled in me that aspect of it,” he said.
Now, more than a century later, with schools desegregated, Smallwood says the journey lives on, for those living today and for future generations, to keep the history and fight for educational equality alive.
“This life is not a sprint, it is a marathon, and, in a marathon, we carry a torch and that torch that we carry is one that must be passed on,” he said.
Today, the P.S. Jones Alumni, Inc. Association has two chapters, one in the NC Piedmont Triad area that aims to advance learning with scholarships for students in underrepresented fields of study.
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