EXHIBIT PANEL I - FOUNDERS OF BUCKINGHAM COUNTY'S FIRST HIGH SCHOOL FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS

Following World War I, Reverend Stephen J. Ellis led the effort to build a black high school in Buckingham County. He called together local ministers and community leaders concerned about the lack of secondary educational opportunities in the county.

George Cousins remembers Ellis preaching about the importance of black children receiving an education beyond elementary school.

Ellis “went from house to house telling people why their children should be educa[ted]… He went to Dillwyn and he would preach [about] it on Saturday…and he finally got them interested enough to go out to a meeting and they had several meetings and then they organized … the County-Wide League and then they started fighting for the school."

Stephen J. Ellis and representatives of the newly created County-Wide League for School Improvement met with the Buckingham County School Board to request that the county match funding received from the Julius Rosenwald Fund for the construction of a black high school. Although there were at least three white high schools in the county at the time of their appeal, the Board rejected the League’s proposal.

The Julius Rosenwald Fund, established in 1917, was a Chicago-based philanthropic foundation. Its rural school building program sought to improve the quality of southern African American education in the early twentieth-century. The Rosenwald Fund provided opportunities to African Americans to build schools through matching grants.

Denied by the School board, Buckingham’s black community was forced to raise the required matching funds without county support. By 1923, they had raised enough money to match the Rosenwald Fund. Matilda C. Allen’s principal discussed “how the school [Buckingham Training School] began and how they had to raise money to match a bond which was [called the] Rosenwald Fund….they had to raise the rest the best way we could.”