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Moultrie High School for Negro Youth
Moultrie, Georgia

“I will always cherish the memory of this school. We were a community.
If someone was in need academically, other students would help each other.
The teachers encouraged us to help. Cooperative and community—
that was Moultrie High School for Negro Youth.”
Otis Baker, a student during the time of the Secondary School Study



The Secondary School Study Web Exhibition
by Craig Kridel, Curator

  

Moultrie High School for Negro Youth was added to the list of participating sites in 1942 after the closing of Atlanta University Laboratory School and its withdrawal from the project. During the 1940s, Moultrie, located in Southwest Georgia, was primarily an agricultural community. While the setting represented a rural-town school, the teachers were closely aligned with Albany State College, although Moultrie did not serve as an off-campus laboratory school student-teaching site and Albany State maintained an official laboratory school. Moultrie High, with its extensive 1946 final report, Miss Parker: The New Teacher, was one of the more active participants in the project, an interpretation confirmed by Cynthia Gibson Hardy’s research where she referred to the school as one of the more experimental programs.
Selected and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, seventeen of the most distinguished black high schools in the United States participated in an experimental program to reexamine administrative, curricular, and instructional practices. The University of South Carolina’s Museum of Education is pleased to feature Moultrie High School for Negro Youth and its participation in the study.

 

Comments about the 2018 publication,
Becoming an African American Progressive Educator

"After reading Becoming an African American Progressive Educator and the chapter, Miss Parker: The New Teacher, published in 1946 and written by faculty of Moultrie High School for Negro Youth, Odessa Walker Hooker stated that the chapter brought back so many vivid memories of school life and displayed the importance of community. 'The format used in reporting was appealing; the letters between Miss Parker and Miss Mitchell added warmth and reality to the research. Our Moultrie teachers treated us as people and not just as students. As a professional educator, this is a lesson I have never forgotten'."


Odessa Walker Hooker, 1947 graduate of Moultrie

    
   



W. A. Robinson

Letter of Invitation to Participate in the Study

January 23, 1940
We would like to include the most promising high schools in the Region. For instance, the school should have as principal one of the most promising principals in the state from the standpoint of his training, energy, capability and general alertness to educational progress. The staff should have good fundamental training and an intellectual approach to their work with materials, with boys and girls, and with community problems. We should select in each state the school that has already made the most intelligent approach from each of these angles, that is, is already carrying on a successful program.

Sincerely yours,
W. A. Robinson, Director
Secondary School Study
Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA

      
While the Association sought to achieve accreditation for its member schools and to make strides for equitable support—separate AND equal—for black education, some educators believed teachers were not involved in progressive education’s “stream of educational ideas” and, thus, were placing too much emphasis on traditional instructional practices. For this reason, the Rockefeller Foundation invited distinguished schools to help define promising practices and to serve as a laboratory for determining goals for black youth.    
     
With oral history interviews conducted in December 2009 with
          

 

left to right:
Otis Baker
Ira Thompson IV           
George Walker


  

         

 

 

Dale Williams
La Shay James

With special thanks to LaVerne McLaughlin and Shabreda Ray of Albany State University, La Shay James of the Frank Ryce Community Center, and Dale Williams of the City of Moultrie, and with great appreciation to Otis Baker and George Walker for providing important source materials for this exhibition. Archival materials from University Archives, James Pendergrast Memorial Library of Albany State University were used in this research. 

        
   


“As students, we did not know the relationship between the segregated school system and the black and white teachers. We knew that our books were always hand me downs from the white school. Sometimes the pages were missing. We always got seconds. But we were proud of that because whatever we got, we made good use of it. And that is where the teacher became so important because whatever we didn’t have, they would help us.” Otis Baker,
a student during the time of the Secondary School Study


      
The Museum of Education’s Web Exhibitions center primarily on the academic life of individual schools during the 1940s and early 1950s, the focus of the Secondary School Study. Our vignettes serve not to lessen the accomplishments and accolades from prior or subsequent decades nor do they diminish the significance of the social and athletic dimensions of school life. Instead, the Museum presents web exhibitions of the Secondary School Study schools as a way to feature the experimental efforts of progressive educators during the 1940s. Since these vignettes were not prepared to serve as school histories, we encourage alumni and historians to prepare their own comprehensive school accounts, histories, and memoirs of these important educational institutions.  

The Museum of Education’s Web Exhibitions have been prepared for a general audience and have not used professional terminology from the field of education. Our accounts are intentionally free of detailed bibliographic citations. The curator is currently writing a scholarly account of this project that follows accepted bibliographic practices.
   

Further, these exhibitions are conceived within a tradition of progressive education where a fruitful experience raises as many questions as it answers. Thus, the information on the various sites has been crafted intentionally to be suggestive—to allow important questions "to float" through the exhibitions rather than to be answered with a false sense of certainty. These sites are works-in-progress and represent an "educational research charrette" as additional historical material is discovered and fresh memories, recollections, and insights come forth by participants and researchers.

               
     
             
 
     
   

an institutional member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience
Museumofed@gmail.com