Like an apparition from another time, the fragile, wooden 119-year-old Ellicott City Colored School hides in plain sight.
A symbol of Jim Crow days in rural Howard County, the unpainted building blends into a steep hillside behind a slender screen of trees above Main Street, ignored by hundreds of motorists who pass it daily.
The two-room schoolhouse, closed since 1953 and propped up with steel beams, will be preserved as a museum to that era, when small, isolated black communities throughout the county sent their children to similar buildings from Elkridge to Highland to Cooksville.
After years of delays, advocates and county officials are working to get the project under way this year. Stabilization of stream banks below the precariously balanced building is scheduled for June, and work is under way to finalize restoration plans for the building.
"We see it as a research center -- a way to help people become involved in research about the African-American community in Howard County," said Sylvia Cooke Martin, who with Beulah Buckner heads the African-American Genealogical Society's effort to restore the building, aided by $412,000 in public money and the county's expertise.
But the project is more than that, others say.
"It's to celebrate our progress and remind us of our past, so we don't repeat it -- to keep before us the fact that we have got to work collectively, Euro- and African-Americans, to overcome racism in America," said the Rev. Robert A. Turner, president of the African-American Coalition of Howard County.
Those years of separation live in the memories of those who worked and attended school in these buildings, like the youths who grew up in Ellicott City's tiny black enclave on Fels Lane, off Main Street. While their parents cleaned and cooked for white families and businesses nearby, they learned to read and write under the watchful eyes of teachers who commuted from Baltimore or Catonsville, where they could find housing.
At the start of each day, the oldest boys among the 35 to 40 students fired up the pot-bellied stoves that warmed the building, and pumped water from the outdoor well for the day.
"There weren't any white kids on Fels Lane. We didn't mix. We just went in and did what we had to do," said Earline Brown Houston, 70, who attended Ellicott City's school for blacks in the 1930s, as did her husband, James, 72.
The Houstons of Westview, like other black students and teachers from that era, recall owning next to nothing, but having strong support and a warm feeling of caring from a tightly woven community that included family, church and teachers.
"For the most part, we were happy children. We didn't know how underprivileged we were," said Dorothy L. Moore, executive director of Howard County's Community Action Council, about her early years in Highland's isolated, insular, tiny black community.
"We used to get those old books from white schools -- they were tattered," Moore recalled. "A white man would bring those books in boxes. He was so happy -- like, 'Here, I brought you something,' " she scoffed.
'Palace in storybooks'
At age 10, Moore sometimes helped her grandfather, a janitor, clean the brick school for whites on Route 108 in nearby Clarksville, now the county's Gateway school.
"It almost looked like a palace in storybooks -- what we'd read about," she said, compared with her school, which was a duplicate of the one in Ellicott City.
The only time she saw white children, she said, was when their school bus passed by the blacks walking to class, and a rider occasionally shouted an insult or spit from the window, she said.
The county population was small. By 1950, it was 23,119 -- one-tenth of today's -- and blacks were 17 percent of the total, compared with 11.8 percent today.
Howard County had no high school for blacks until several upper grades were added to Cooksville Elementary School in Glenelg in the late 1930s. Blacks from Elkridge were bused past three white high schools to get to the Glenelg location, where the first two students graduated in 1939.
Standing up for rights
Not everyone took second-class status for blacks without a fight. The late Silas E. Craft Sr., principal of Cooksville High School in 1944 and later Harriet Tubman High School, fought the system relentlessly, former students, teachers and his widow, Dorothye, said.
" 'Don't bring one box of those books into this school,' " she said her husband told a shocked white deliveryman about the used texts he brought. The persistent defiance and quiet, unrelenting advocacy worked. "He got new books," she said, and added more academic classes to Cooksville High's vocational and agricultural courses.
Before Craft arrived, "The feeling was, you accept what you got," his widow said, because white officials believed blacks were going nowhere in life and didn't need the same materials. Craft helped organize the scattered black communities to jointly press the school board for a new high school, to improve conditions and organize black teachers.
He began infusing black students and teachers with an attitude of self-worth that broadened many children's horizons. He and other black teachers were taskmasters, pushing their young charges and helping them get college scholarships. Some personal advocacy and individual attention were lost after integration, some believe.
'Genuine warmth'
"What I remember most about those schools was that they were places of genuine warmth and caring -- they tried to motivate you," said Roger D. Estep, who grew up in Highland with his wife, Romaine. He went to college and learned veterinary science, while she became a nurse. They graduated from Cooksville High in the late 1940s without having eaten at a restaurant in their home county.
Teachers, like Mildred A. Williams, Wayman Scott Jr. and Cornelius Freeman, commuted or boarded with local black families. Howard County offered few places to live for black teachers, who worked with parents to sell home-cooked meals, stage contests and raise money for school activities.
Williams, 93, caught the No. 9 streetcar in the 1920s and '30s at Saratoga and Eutaw streets in Baltimore each day for the ride to Ellicott City. Scott, who taught at Harriet Tubman High during the 1950s, roomed across the street, then moved to Catonsville. Freeman began teaching in Howard in 1961, four years before segregation ended in county schools.
Teachers often came to Sunday dinner at pupils' homes, and they knew every child's family -- which made for better discipline. "The teacher and the preacher were the most respected two individuals in the community," Moore said.
Whites, who often helped black families with used clothing, food and credit, weren't overtly hostile. But Freeman, now an assistant principal at Oakland Mills High in Columbia, remembers one Sunday evening when he and several students were delivering meals in Glenelg in the early 1960s, and their car got a flat tire.
A white service station owner refused to let them use the phone to call for help. "It was rather shocking," Freeman said, but it re- inforced what Howard's blacks had known. "We were basically one big family. It was a necessity," he recalled.
Museum planning
Now, planning for the small museum that would preserve a bit of those times is close to fruition.
In June, Howard County intends to further stabilize the small school site by checking erosion along the steep banks of the Tiber River, which runs below the building. County Recreation and Parks officials Clara Gouin and Ken Alban Jr. are working on plans to strengthen the old building's walls, replace the roof and renovate the interior. A separate building to serve administrative and meeting room needs has been postponed because of a lack of money.
The cooperative planning for the museum reflects a changed world since Silas Craft fought for respect, new books and a building to replace ramshackle Cooksville High -- the first high school for blacks in Howard County. That change is underscored by the comment in 1949 from a Howard County commissioner at the school's dedication, recorded in a 1986 history of Howard's black community.
"You got this building, now don't ask for nothing else," Commissioner Frank Curtis is reported to have said at the school, named at the black community's insistence for Harriet Tubman, the 19th-century black abolitionist.
Pub Date: 4/11/99