Education

On Tuesday evening, February 14, 2023 a ceremony was held at the Allegany County Board of Education noting the history of African American education within the county as well as commemorating the first African American students to graduate from an integrated Allegany County high school, this being Fort Hill in May 1956 with the students being Harold Hilton, William Peck and Judy Leath. This was following the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Howard High School, Piedmont, West Virginia

The first organized efforts to open a school (in Piedmont, West Virginia) which Negro children could attend was located below Hampshire Street, above the B&O Railroad track, often referred to as "Chicken Ladder." After three years of operation, the private school was incorporated into the charge of the Board of Education in 1880.

The Cumberland Street School was replaced as a high school in 1908 with the building of Allegany County High School which was located on the corner of Greene and Lee Streets, the current site of the Coca-Cola Plant and Greene Street Gas Station.

James William Goldsworthy was a 1931 graduate of Keyser High School and was the school's first graduate to become its principal. He began teaching at Piedmont in 1936 and went to Keyser Junior High from 1937 to 1940. He taught at the high school from 1941 to 1951 when he became assistant principal, then became the principal in 1959. He retired in 1971. James William Goldsworthy passed away in 2003 at the age of 89.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1950 -

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. was born in Keyser and raised in Piedmont, Mineral County, West Virginia. This is located just across the Potomac River from Westernport and Luke, Maryland in the southwestern portion of Allegany County. His father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., worked at the nearby paper-mill, the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company during the day, and as a night janitor at the local telephone company building. His mother, Pauline Coleman Gates, helped provide for the family by cleaning houses.

Gates writer-in-residence at Shepherd University
Piedmont native also receives Appalachian Heritage Writers Award

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., author, educator, scholar, editor, literary critic and intellectual, was on the Shepherd University campus recently as its Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence.

On Oct. 3, Gates spoke before a standing-room-only audience in the university's Frank Theater on "Speaking of Race and Appalachia" and was presented with the Appalachian Heritage Writers Award.

Frederick Street School debate team, 1926.

The year 1918 brought the opening of Cumberland High School, a black high school located on Frederick Street. In keeping with the Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, the new school for black students was, in theory, to be, "separate but equal." B.H. Smith was the principal and it was initially established as a two-year institution.

This photograph was taken in 1926 and along with the accompanying write-up appeared in the 1926 Frederick Street (later Carver) School Yearbook. These five girls were all competing in a popularity contest for the school's Valentine's Day Dance to be held on February 12, 1926.
Depicted here in the front row, left to right are Hazel (Stephens) Gates, Sadie D. Washington (the winner of the contest), and Kathleen (Francis) Washington. In the back row, left to right are Nellie (Franklin) Diggins and Gussie (Rawlings) Bradley.

Carver High School graduates for 1940 pose in front of the school for a class photograph. Geraldine Lovett (later Smith) is on the left in the front row, while Gladys Chamberlain (later Bartlett) is in the middle. In the third row, second from the left, is Anna Yates (later Washington), while Angela Parker is third from the left.

The PDF lists the graduating students from 1936 to 1955, provided by Herman Washington.

Ruth Franklin was in the first graduation class of the Frederick Street School, for blacks, in 1923. In 1927 she became the first local teacher hired at that school, which in 1941 became known as Carver High School.

Ruth Franklin was regarded by her supervisor at the Board of Education as one of the most outstanding teachers in Allegany County. Upon the complete integration of Allegany County public schools in 1959 Ruth Franklin relocated to Allegany High School until her retirement in 1966.

Her obituary from the Cumberland Times-News: