McBride Colored School

In June 2019, residents attended the unveiling of a roadside historic marker honoring the location where African-American students attended school during segregation.

A local reporter covered the unveiling for an article published in The Daily Advance local newspaper in nearby Elizabeth City.

The McBride Colored School opened in 1926 at where today is N.C. Highway 343 and Bunker Hill Road in South Mills, Camden County, N.C. The Rosenwald Community Center now occupies the same property. Attending the unveiling ceremony, which was held inside the community center, was former McBride teacher Virginia Jones.

Jones taught at the small school in the 1950s and retired after teaching for more than 30 years.  

“I am blessed to be here,” Jones told guests, the newspaper reported.

Jones said McBride Colored School was only teaching grades first through the seventh when she taught there. She recalled other details, like how each morning class began with students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and by saying a prayer.

McBride Colored School was made possible by a project funded by Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck and Company (Hanchett). Rosenwald provided matching grants to rural communities seeking to build schools to educate Black children during segregation (Hanchett). More than 5,300 Rosenwald schools were built across 15 states in the South, with North Carolina having the highest concentration with more than 800 (Hanchett). The schools program was the original idea of Black educator Booker T. Washington and his colleagues at the Tuskegee Institute (Hanchett).

The matching grants allowed for construction of modern school houses, complete with textbooks, chairs, desks, Blackboards and even included funds for teacher salaries, according to researchers Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder.

Rosenwald's estimated overall investment in the Rosenwald schools program, adjusted for inflation, would amount to more than $750 million today, according to an essay from 1999 in The Journal for Blacks in Higher Education.

Hanchett, Thomas W. "The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in North Carolina." The North Carolina Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1988): 387-444. Accessed November 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23520778.

Aaronson, Daniel, and Bhashkar Mazumder. "The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement." Journal of Political Economy 119, no. 5 (2011): 821-88. Accessed November 23, 2020. doi:10.1086/662962.

"Julius Rosenwald: The Great American Philanthropist Who Decided What Blacks Should Teach." The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 24 (1999): 52-55. Accessed November 23, 2020. doi:10.2307/2999070.