“A Full Share of the Public Money”: Black Education in Bridgeport

Part Four of “Across the River: A Centennial Reflection on Belmont County”

Among the most important passages in Belmont County’s centennial history is a short account of public education for Black children in Bridgeport.

Its significance can be heard in one remarkable phrase.

The Bridgeport School Board, the book reports, ensured that the Black school received its “full share of the public money.”

That statement deserves attention.

During the nineteenth century, Black families throughout the United States fought not only for the ability to create schools, but also for recognition that their children were entitled to the public resources collected through taxation. A school might exist and still be denied adequate funding, qualified teachers, suitable buildings, books, or a school term equal to that offered to white children.

The Bridgeport account describes an early attempt—within a segregated system—to establish a different standard.

A Public Responsibility

According to the 1903 history, when Bridgeport opened a new school building, the former schoolhouse was designated for the education of Black children.

The arrangement remained segregated, and a separate building cannot be mistaken for equality. Yet the book records that the School Board appropriated sufficient money to keep the Black school open for the same length of time as the white school and employed what the author called “good teachers.”

This was not merely private charity or occasional instruction supported by sympathetic individuals. The account describes the education of Black children as a responsibility of the public school system.

That distinction connects Bridgeport’s history directly to Wheeling’s.

In the fall of 1866, the Wheeling Board of Education established its tax-supported Colored School. John W. West became its first teacher and submitted reports through the Freedmen’s Bureau’s national educational system. By 1867, John was advocating for his brother Robert, who was later employed alongside him.

On both sides of the Ohio River, Black education became part of a developing public-school structure. That did not erase segregation or racial inequality, but it placed the education of Black children within the obligations of local government.

From Separate Schooling to Admission

The Belmont County history records that after Ohio law opened public schools to Black children, W. W. Holloway introduced a Bridgeport resolution granting them equal rights in the community’s public schools.

The resolution was adopted.

McKelvey’s book then makes two striking claims: that Bridgeport was the first place in Belmont County to provide a school for Black children and the first in the county to admit them to its public schools after the change in state law.

Those claims are important, but they come from a retrospective account published in 1903. Until confirmed through Board of Education minutes, newspapers, state reports, or other contemporary documents, they should be presented as the author’s claims rather than settled fact.

The book adds that many Black children later graduated “with credit to themselves.”

Even that complimentary language reveals the unequal expectations of its time. Black students were frequently expected to prove their worthiness within institutions that had first excluded them. Their success was treated as evidence in an argument over whether they belonged.

They had always belonged.

The Meaning of Public Education

The Bridgeport story complicates any simple account of progress.

A separate school could provide genuine educational opportunity while still embodying racial separation. Integration could open previously barred doors while also threatening the positions of Black educators and the community institutions Black families had built. Equal admission did not automatically create equal treatment.

Those tensions would remain visible throughout the next century.

Nevertheless, the phrase “full share of the public money” captures a principle that remains powerful: Black children were not asking for a favor. Their families lived in the community, worked in the region, and contributed to its life. Their education was a public obligation.

Across the river in Wheeling, the Colored School begun in 1866 grew into the institution later known as Lincoln School. In Bridgeport, Black children moved from a designated schoolhouse into the broader public system.

The paths were not identical, but the underlying demand was the same: education supported by public resources, taught by capable instructors, and recognized as a right.

-T

Research note: The Bridgeport account appears on p. 215 of McKelvey’s Centennial History of Belmont County.