Qualla: Booker T. Washington Community Center

Booker T. Washington Community Center: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ned Hartley, CC BY-SA 4.0. For thirty years, this was the only high school an African American student in Staunton was allowed to attend. The building at 1114 West Johnson Street opened in 1936, a two-story Art Deco brick structure designed by Raymond V. Long, and it carried a heavy name: the Booker T. Washington High School for Coloreds. The wording on official documents fixes the era exactly. Virginia public schools would remain segregated by law until well into the 1960s. For the families who sent their children here, the building was both a hard reality and a hard-won achievement - a real high school, with real teachers and a real auditorium, in a state that had spent decades insisting Black education barely needed funding at all.

Image: Ned Hartley | CC BY-SA 4.0

Booker T. Washington Community Center: An Art Deco School in Jim Crow Virginia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC0. Raymond V. Long designed the school in a restrained Art Deco style - clean brick lines, stepped massing, a modest geometric ornament that announced this was a public building meant to last. In a school system that systematically underfunded Black education, the fact of a proper, ...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC0

Booker T. Washington Community Center: More Than a School

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC0. In a segregated city, a Black high school was often the only public building Black residents could fully use. Booker T. Washington High doubled as the meeting place for civic organizations, mutual aid societies, churches without buildings of their own, and political groups. Gradu...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC0

Booker T. Washington Community Center: Closure and a Different Use

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC0. Staunton's public schools desegregated in the 1960s under federal pressure. As Black students were admitted to formerly white high schools, the Booker T. Washington school's role narrowed. It closed as a high school in 1966. Then came an awkward chapter: from 1967 to 1986, the bu...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC0

Booker T. Washington Community Center: Coming Back

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC0. After the police department left in 1986, the building was reclaimed by the community that had built it. It became the Booker T. Washington Community Center, a meeting place for the neighborhood and a vessel for memory. Alumni groups and local historians worked to document the sc...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC0