In early 2024, the Commonwealth of Virginia was awarded $75,000 in grant funds through the National Park Service's (NPS) Underrepresented Communities Grant Program to support the development of a statewide historic context report for African American schools. The project will result in a Multiple Property Document (MPD), a NPS form used for documenting topically related historic properties. The information in MPDs is primarily intended to streamline the nomination of related individual sites or historic districts to the National Register of Historic Places, however, the historic context and architectural analysis included in the MPD also can support the development of interpretive materials, historical highway markers, and other preservation initiatives.

This project is not DHR’s first effort to increase the number of African American schools on the National Register of Historic Places. The Julius Rosenwald Fund is well-known as an important program that helped construct schools and provide supplies for African American children in the South between 1917 and 1937. In 2004, DHR developed a MPD for Rosenwald Schools, which to date has resulted in the listing of 26 Virginia Rosenwald Schools in the National Register of Historic Places. The historic context and architectural analysis within the MPD also served as a publicly available research document and provided the basis for a statewide survey of extant Rosenwald Schools completed by Preservation Virginia in 2018. The current effort will look beyond the Rosenwald Fund era by addressing African American schools built from approximately 1870 until 1965 that used a variety of funding sources. It is anticipated that the resulting MPD will help broaden understanding of African American education in Virginia from the end of the Civil War through the mid-1960s.

To illustrate how the MPD can simplify the nomination of African American schools, this project will also result in a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Cuckoo School in Louisa County (pictured in this article). The two-room Cuckoo School was constructed ca. 1925 as a public school for African American children and is representative of many similar schools in operation before African American school consolidation efforts began in some parts of Virginia during the 1930s.

DHR hired cultural resource management firm Commonwealth Preservation Group to complete the MPD and National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Cuckoo School with an anticipated project completion date of June 2025. If you would like to share information about a historic African American school in Virginia or the history of segregated education in the Commonwealth, please feel free to reach out to Commonwealth Preservation Group's Preservation Project Manager Lena McDonald at lena@commonwealthpreservationgroup.com.

DHR and CPG conducted a virtual public information session about this project on Thursday, October 10th. A recording of the information session can be found here.