From Forbidden Learning to “First-Class” Schools: Black Education in West Virginia, 1865–1922
Updated: 17 hours ago
In 1922, the West Virginia Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics devoted an extended section of its first annual report to the history and condition of African American education.
Beginning under the historical heading “Education of the Negro,” the section traces a remarkable journey: from a time when teaching an enslaved person could be unlawful or socially condemned, through the first improvised schools of emancipation, to a statewide network of Black elementary schools, high schools, teacher-training programs, colleges, and night schools.
The language of the report belongs to the Jim Crow era and must be read critically. Its opening narrative sometimes places white benevolence at the center and uses paternalistic descriptions of Black people. That framing can obscure the determination of African Americans themselves—enslaved people who sought literacy, freedpeople who contributed money and labor to build schools, parents who demanded public education, teachers who traveled into underserved communities, and students who pursued learning despite formidable barriers.
When those voices are placed back at the center, the report becomes more than an administrative record. It becomes evidence of one of the great educational achievements in West Virginia history.
Education once denied
The report’s “Pioneer Period” narrative—expressly credited to the West Virginia Collegiate Institute Bulletin—begins before emancipation, when opportunities for Black education were severely restricted.
It acknowledges that instructing Black people was unlawful in some places and deeply unpopular in others. Any educational opportunity available to an enslaved person depended upon uncertain private circumstances rather than a recognized public right.
Emancipation changed the legal status of thousands of people, but freedom did not immediately create a functioning school system. Union soldiers, missionary teachers, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Northern relief organizations became involved in early educational efforts. Buildings were rented or constructed, sometimes under extremely primitive conditions.
The report itself notes that funds came not only from outside organizations but also from freedpeople—families with little money who nevertheless contributed to the creation of schools.
That detail is essential. Black West Virginians were not passive recipients of education. They were petitioners, fundraisers, builders, parents, students, teachers, ministers, and organizers. They recognized literacy as one of the most powerful instruments through which freedom could become meaningful.
A delayed public responsibility
West Virginia entered the Union in 1863 with a constitutional commitment to free public schools, but the original system did not extend equal educational provision to Black children.
In his 1864 report, the state superintendent lamented that no schools existed for this portion of West Virginia’s population and appealed to the Legislature for action.
In 1866, the Legislature finally enacted a law establishing public schools for Black children between the ages of six and twenty-one. That important step contained a severe limitation: a school had to maintain an average attendance of at least sixteen pupils or face closure.
For small and scattered Black communities, sixteen children could be an impossible threshold. A community might desperately want a school and still lack enough pupils living within practical traveling distance to keep one open.
The requirement was modified in 1867, allowing local school boards to establish a school when more than fifteen Black children lived in a district. In 1899, the threshold was reduced to ten pupils, with provisions permitting schools for smaller numbers when possible.
These changes expanded access, but they did so within a system committed to racial separation. West Virginia’s revised Constitution of 1872 explicitly prohibited white and Black children from being taught in the same school.
In some communities, the two groups reportedly used the same buildings at different times. White students might attend from September through December, followed by Black students after the building had been vacated. With school terms sometimes lasting only four months, this arrangement vividly demonstrated that sharing a structure did not mean receiving an equal education.
Teachers crossed borders to answer the need
As West Virginia’s coal and railroad industries expanded, thousands of African Americans migrated into the state. The growing population created an urgent demand for teachers.
The report explains that West Virginia initially could not prepare enough Black educators to staff its expanding schools. Teachers consequently arrived from Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio.
Many served simultaneously as teachers and ministers. During the week, they instructed children. On Sundays, they preached, organized congregations, and helped establish Methodist and Baptist churches.
This combination of school and church leadership was not accidental. In many Black communities, education, faith, mutual aid, and community organization were closely connected. The schoolteacher and minister were often helping to build the same community from different directions.
The report notes that some teachers came from Ohio because racial prejudice prevented qualified Black educators from teaching white pupils there. West Virginia’s segregated schools offered them professional opportunities that remained closed across the river.
This history presents one of segregation’s many contradictions: Black teachers were recruited because of their education and ability while racial discrimination continued to restrict where—and whom—they were permitted to teach.
Progress written into the numbers
The report reproduced school-attendance figures from the 1910 and 1920 United States censuses. Those figures show meaningful progress, particularly among children of compulsory-school age.
Age group | Attending school in 1910 | Attending school in 1920 | 1920 attendance rate |
Ages 5–20 | 9,966 | 15,133 | 57.4% |
Ages 5–6 | 797 | 1,211 | 33.0% |
Ages 7–13 | 6,456 | 10,103 | 88.6% |
Ages 14–15 | 1,460 | 2,119 | 80.4% |
Ages 16–17 | 803 | 1,169 | 38.3% |
Ages 18–20 | 450 | 531 | 9.5% |
By 1920, nearly nine out of every ten Black children between seven and thirteen were recorded as attending school. Among children ages fourteen and fifteen, the rate was approximately 80 percent.
But the numbers fell sharply after age fifteen.
Only about 38 percent of Black youth ages sixteen and seventeen were attending school.
Among those ages eighteen through twenty, fewer than one in ten remained enrolled.
The report does not identify every reason for this decline. Economic necessity almost certainly mattered. Teenagers might have been required to enter mines, factories, rail yards, farms, private homes, or other workplaces to help support their families. Secondary schools were also fewer in number and often farther from the communities they served.
These figures should not be read as a failure of ambition. They reveal how difficult it could be for a Black student to remain in school long enough to graduate.
Literacy rises across a generation
The report also documented a considerable decline in the percentage of Black West Virginians classified by the census as illiterate.
In 1910, 20.3 percent of the state’s Black population age ten and older was recorded in that category. By 1920, the rate had fallen to 15.3 percent.
The improvement among younger people was even more pronounced:
Among Black children ages ten through fifteen, the rate declined from approximately 6.7 percent to 2.3 percent.
Among those ages sixteen through twenty, it fell from approximately 12.3 percent to 7.5 percent.
Among adults age twenty-one and older, it declined from approximately 24.2 percent to 18.9 percent.
The number of people classified as illiterate remained substantial, particularly among adults who had been born during slavery or raised where schools were scarce. Yet the generational movement is unmistakable.
Children were gaining access to opportunities their parents and grandparents had been denied. Each percentage point represented people learning to read a newspaper, write a letter, understand a contract, study the Bible, pursue professional training, or participate more fully in civic life.
A statewide school system takes shape
For the 1921–1922 school year, State Supervisor W. W. Sanders reported an extensive network of segregated Black schools:
298 one-room schools
132 schools containing two or more rooms
23 junior high schools
6 first-class high schools
7 second-class high schools
6 high schools classified below second class
641 elementary teachers
84 high-school teachers and principals
53 teachers and presidents in the state’s normal schools
Approximately 35 night schools
The prevalence of 298 one-room schools shows both reach and inequality. Education had extended into many communities, but much of it still took place in small buildings where one teacher might instruct children of several ages and grade levels simultaneously.
Teacher certification figures also reveal a developing profession. The report listed 200 Black teachers holding first-grade certificates, 50 holding second-grade certificates, four holding third-grade certificates, and 471 holding other forms of certification.
Education was no longer sustained only by scattered volunteers. By 1922, West Virginia had hundreds of Black professional educators, school administrators, college faculty members, and teacher-training students.
Lincoln High School among the state’s six leading Black schools
For Wheeling, one entry carries enormous significance.
Lincoln High School was named as one of only six Black high schools in West Virginia classified as “first-class.” The others were Garnett in Charleston, Kelly Miller in Clarksburg, Douglass in Huntington, Brown’s Creek District High School in Kimball, and Sumner in Parkersburg.
This placed Lincoln within the highest tier of secondary education then available to Black students in the state.
The designation becomes even more impressive when considered against the statewide numbers. West Virginia had hundreds of Black elementary schools but only nineteen classified Black high schools of any level. Only six held first-class standing.
Lincoln therefore represented something larger than a neighborhood school. It was one of a small number of institutions through which Black students could complete an advanced secondary curriculum and prepare for college, teacher training, business, or professional life.
Ohio County’s literacy figures provide additional context. The report counted 96 Black residents age ten and older as illiterate, producing a county rate of 6.6 percent—less than half the statewide Black rate of 15.3 percent.
The report does not establish why Ohio County’s rate was lower, and no single institution should receive all the credit. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s first-class status and the county’s comparatively low rate together suggest the strength of Wheeling’s Black educational culture.
Generations of parents, teachers, ministers, students, and community supporters had made education a priority.
Building a Black educational pipeline
The report recognized that elementary and high schools could not succeed without institutions capable of preparing teachers and providing advanced study.
Three major schools received extended attention: the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, Bluefield Colored Institute, and Storer College. It also described the West Virginia Seminary and College, an institution supported by the state’s Black Baptist community.
West Virginia Collegiate Institute
Established by the Legislature in 1891 following the Second Morrill Act of 1890, the West Virginia Collegiate Institute was elevated to college rank in 1915.
By 1922, its 83-acre campus contained six large brick buildings and two frame buildings, including classrooms, laboratories, dormitories, administrative space, and a dining hall. A new women’s dormitory, Dawson Hall, had been completed during the 1921–1922 school year.
Its curriculum combined academic and vocational study. Students could pursue arts, sciences, agriculture, home economics, industrial education, and business administration. The institution also prepared graduates to teach in West Virginia’s elementary and high schools.
The report counted 327 students during the regular term and stated that approximately 400 teachers attended its 1922 summer school.
That summer enrollment demonstrates the institution’s reach. Its influence traveled back into communities across West Virginia through teachers who returned to their classrooms with additional training.
Bluefield Colored Institute
Bluefield Colored Institute was established through legislation introduced in 1895. The founding act provided $8,000 for land and construction.
The institution enrolled 288 students during the 1921–1922 academic year. Over its first twenty-five years, it reported more than 375 graduates—an average of approximately fifteen per year. According to the school’s account, 90 percent of its graduates were teaching, practicing medicine, dentistry, or pharmacy, or continuing their education at colleges and universities.
Its success produced a new challenge: overcrowding. For five years, the report stated, Bluefield had operated at or beyond a level considered healthy or sustainable. Demand for education had exceeded the physical capacity available to provide it.
Storer College
Storer College began at Harpers Ferry on October 2, 1867, with two teachers and nineteen pupils.
For twenty-five years, according to the report, it was West Virginia’s only institution offering Black students instruction above the eighth grade. Approximately 3,000 students had attended by 1922, and about one in five had earned a diploma.
Its enrollment stood at approximately 180 students, but it too had reached capacity and was turning applicants away for lack of room.
Storer’s campus also preserved the John Brown Fort, connecting the education of newly freed people and their descendants to one of the nation’s most recognizable landmarks in the struggle against slavery.
West Virginia Seminary and College
The West Virginia Seminary and College at Hill Top offered another model of educational institution-building.
Founded by the Reverend R. J. Perkins in 1901, the school was maintained entirely by West Virginia’s Black Baptist community. The report described it as the state’s only private educational institution operated and supported by African Americans.
Its enrollment reached 70 students during the 1921–1922 term—the largest in its history. The school offered elementary and high-school instruction and intended to expand into college and theological programs.
For the year ending August 23, 1921, its supporters raised $6,755.60 and spent $6,344.33 on teachers, other staff, maintenance, and student support.
Those dollars represented collective determination. Black families and congregations were financing an institution intended to educate future teachers, ministers, and community leaders.
Black voices in educational governance
The development of schools also created demands for Black participation in the decisions affecting them.
West Virginia created the position of State Supervisor of Colored Schools in 1914. Professor W. W. Sanders served in that role, except during the years 1917 through 1919, when the Legislature failed to fund the position.
In 1919, the state established an advisory council to assist the State Board of Education with policies concerning Black schools. The council included the state supervisor and two Black citizens appointed by the governor with the consent of the Senate.
The report named Frank H. Jackson of Fairmont, the Reverend J. W. Robinson of Northfork, and Robinson’s successor, E. L. Morton of Beckley, as council members.
The council did not possess complete independence; its work remained subject to approval by the State Board of Education. Even so, its creation reflected statewide pressure from African Americans seeking a greater voice in the direction of the institutions their children attended and their taxes supported.
What these findings ask us to remember
The report’s educational section contains undeniable contradictions.
It describes expanding enrollment alongside sharp declines in attendance after age fifteen.
It celebrates hundreds of schools while revealing that most were small and many were isolated. It records growing professionalization among Black teachers while documenting a school system that remained segregated by law. It praises colleges whose classrooms and dormitories were so overcrowded that qualified students sometimes had to be turned away.
Yet the larger trajectory remains extraordinary.
Within little more than half a century of emancipation, Black West Virginians had helped build hundreds of schools, develop a professional teaching corps, establish colleges, organize night schools, create teacher-training programs, secure a measure of representation in state educational governance, and send thousands of children into classrooms.
In Wheeling, Lincoln High School stood among the six most highly classified Black secondary schools in West Virginia.
That accomplishment belonged to more than a building or a school board. It belonged to teachers who prepared lessons in one-room schools, parents who protected time for their children to study, ministers who promoted education from their pulpits, students who balanced school with work, and community members who refused to accept that segregation should determine the limits of a child’s mind.
Their struggle reminds us that educational progress is never only a story of laws, appropriations, or institutions. It is the story of people who decide that the next generation must be given more than the last.
Lincoln’s students inherited that determination. They carried it into their classrooms, their graduations, their professions, their families, and the larger life of Wheeling.
Today, we inherit it from them.
Our responsibility is to preserve their names, recover their stories, and make certain that the education they fought to obtain becomes part of the education we pass forward.
-T
Historical Terminology Note
This article includes historical terms such as “colored” and “Negro” when quoting original sources or identifying organizations as they were known at the time. These terms reflect the language and racial conditions of their era; their inclusion is not an endorsement of their use today.
In our own narrative, we use Black and African American, as appropriate. We preserve historical wording to document the past faithfully while honoring the dignity, humanity, and experiences of the people whose stories we share.
Source and research notes
T. Edward Hill, The Negro in West Virginia: Report of T. Edward Hill, Director, Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia, to Governor Ephraim F. Morgan, 1921–1922 (Charleston, WV: Tribune Printing Company, 1922), pp. 22–34, HathiTrust Digital Library.
The “Pioneer Period” narrative beginning on page 22 is expressly attributed in the report to the West Virginia Collegiate Institute Bulletin. On page 24, the Bureau explains that the institutional histories that follow include material prepared by the institutions’ presidents for the West Virginia Legislative Hand Book & Manual and Official Register, 1922. Statistics on attendance and literacy were reproduced from the 1910 and 1920 United States censuses. The 1921–1922 school inventory was reported by Professor W. W. Sanders, State Supervisor of Negro Schools.
Specific sections consulted:
“Pioneer Period” and early Black education, pp. 22–23.
State superintendent’s 1864 comments, p. 23.
Public-school legislation of 1866, 1867, and 1899, pp. 23–24.
Constitutional segregation and alternating use of school buildings, p. 24.
School-attendance table, p. 25.
Statewide and county literacy tables, p. 26.
Black schools, teachers, certification, and night schools, p. 27.
Classification of Lincoln High School and other Black high schools, p. 27.
Ohio County literacy, p. 26.
West Virginia Collegiate Institute, pp. 28–29.
Bluefield Colored Institute, pp. 29–30.
Storer College, pp. 31–32.
West Virginia Seminary and College, p. 33.
State supervisor and Advisory Council, pp. 33–34.
Attendance and literacy percentages calculated for this article were derived from the report’s published totals and rounded to the nearest tenth.
The historical word “Negro” is retained only when reproducing the report’s title, section headings, or formal names of period institutions. Elsewhere, this article uses Black or African American.
