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 and academic 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.

I greatly appreciate the participation of the many individuals who agreed to be interviewed for the exhibitions. Not all interviewees appear in these exhibits due, primarily, to the vagrancies of the mail system and my inability to obtain formal permissions to include their quotations and images.

These 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. I am 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 from participants and researchers.

Craig Kridel, Curator

Contextual Information

Introduction to the Secondary School Study

“The Transformation of an African American Progressive Educator: William A. Robinson, the Atlanta University School, and the Secondary School Study (1940-1946)” by Craig Kridel, Vitae Scholasticae 38:1-2, 2021, 22-41.

Progressive Education in the Black High School
(Rockefeller Archive Center Research Report)

Alice Epperson,
associate curator for the Pearl High School research, Nashville, TN

Thelma Brown Rush, associate curator for the Magnolia Avenue High School research, Vicksburg, MS

Alma Loftin Johnson, associate curator for the Natchitoches Parish Training School research, Natchitoches, LA

Genevieve Lancaster, associate curator for the Booker T. Washington High School research, Rocky Mount, NC

Beverly Washington and James Mallard, associate curators for the Terrell High School research, Fort Worth, TX

Dale Williams, associate curator for the Moultrie High School for Negro Youth research,
Moultrie GA      

Fannie Phelps Adams,
associate curator for the Booker T. Washington High School research, Columbia, SC

In memoriam:
Miss Callisto Bell
(1914-2012)