Ashburn Colored School A Jim Crow Era One Room School House for Blacks-Only

Several years ago while I was driving to Ball’s Bluff Battlefield in Northern Virginia I came upon this sign announcing that I was at the Ashburn Colored School at 20577 Ashburn Road in Ashburn, VA 20147. The school was opened in 1892, the same year the Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Fergusson that segregation based on race was constitutional. Many schools in the South that had biracial public schools reoriented to segregated schools with Black children being schooled in inadequate facilities offering little beyond an elementary education. By World War I, few Blacks in the South went to school beyond the fourth grade. The Black schools were often closed when “Separate But Equal” was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The schoolhouse was abandoned and fell into disrepair. In 2015 students at Loudoun School for Advanced Studies (LSAS) took on the project of raising funds to stabilize the site and restore it. When I visited several years ago, fundraising was underway. You can see the fundraising thermometer on the front of the building below.

The building is 130 years old and you can see the deterioration. In 2015 the students raised $20,00 giving the project a good start, but in 2016 white supremacists teens vandalized the building and painted racist slogans on its walls. The desecration included swastikas and “white power” graffiti. Five teenagers were later arrested for the attack and sentenced to an alternative to imprisonment.

The racist attack on the site was met by outrage in the Loudon County community and six hundred people became involved in removing the racist graffiti and repairing the structure. The photo below, the only photo on this page that I did not take, comes from the group that is working on restoring the site. You can see that progress has been made on making this a place for interpreting Jim Crow education.

While the school was emblematic of a century of educational segregation, it was begun by a local African methodist Episcopal congregation whose members feared that without it their children would be illiterate.

 

 

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