Qualla: Booker T. Washington High School

Booker T. Washington High School: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the brick was being laid in 1925, Black children in Kanawha County, West Virginia, had essentially two choices for high school: the school being built near London on the south bank of the Kanawha River, and Garnet High School in Charleston. The two schools - small for the population they served - were what the segregated system was prepared to offer. The new building near London, named for Booker T. Washington, who had been raised twelve miles upriver in Malden, was a two-story L-shaped wire-brick structure designed in a restrained Streamline Moderne style. It would serve as the Black high school for the eastern Kanawha Valley until 1956, when desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education ended its original purpose. The building outlived its function. It is still there, repurposed and standing, an artifact of a system that pretended to be separate but equal and was neither.

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Booker T. Washington High School: The School System That Required It

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. West Virginia's 1872 constitution and subsequent legislation mandated racially segregated schools - a system that lasted until 1956 in practice, two years after Brown v. Board ruled school segregation unconstitutional. By the 1920s, the Black population of Kanawha County had grow...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Booker T. Washington High School: Streamline Moderne in the Coalfields

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. The building's architectural style - Streamline Moderne, characterized by horizontal lines, rounded corners, and a stripped-down industrial aesthetic - was unusual for a rural Kanawha County school in 1925. Most schools of the era were Colonial Revival or Tudor in style; Streamli...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Booker T. Washington High School: The Years It Served Its Original Purpose

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 1925 to 1956, the school educated Black students from the small towns and mining camps of the eastern Kanawha Valley - London, Cabin Creek, Ward, Eskdale, Cedar Grove. Students came from miles away, some boarding with families closer to the school. The curriculum mirrored wh...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Booker T. Washington High School: After 1956

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Brown v. Board was decided in 1954. West Virginia integrated its schools in 1956, two years after the ruling. The Booker T. Washington High School building no longer served as a high school; the students were absorbed into previously white facilities. The building was renamed Gra...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Booker T. Washington High School: Flying Over the Valley

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the air, the Booker T. Washington school building sits on the south bank of the Kanawha River near the small community of London, between Charleston upstream and Cedar Grove downstream. The L-shaped plan distinguishes the building from the surrounding houses. The Kanawha Riv...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0