The forgotten schools that hold an answer key to today’s St. Louis

Few of us know the revealing history of our 19th-century African-American high schools.

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This week’s post was inspired by an Etsy shirt that listed the names of high schools in St. Louis—even a few 50 miles outside the city limits—yet did not include a single historically African-American high school.

Not many St. Louisans know the story of these four schools, which date back to the 19th century. Two of them, Frederick Douglass High School in Webster Groves and Kinloch High School, are gone, but Sumner High School and Vashon High School still stand in the City of St. Louis, the former in a historic building and the latter in a new one.

It’s impossible to fully understand the history of the African-American community in St. Louis without understanding the history of these schools. They were vital cultural institutions—particularly in the years when graduation rates in America in general were very low. For example, in 1899–1900, only 6.4 percent of all 17-year-olds in the U.S. graduated from high school. 

In other words, education was a precious goal to obtain, particularly in segregated St. Louis. Sumner High School stood out as a beacon in the African American community, whose middle class was centered in The Ville neighborhood. While this might seem strange today, Sumner was not named after an African-American leader, but after Charles Sumner, a white Republican senator from Massachusetts who served during the Civil War. For all of his accomplishments, Sumner might be best known (though his name is often dropped from the story) for being the recipient of a physical assault at the hands of the pro-slavery Rep. Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate. Perhaps that incident led Sumner, a Radical Republican, to be one of the most vociferous champions of a robust war effort against the Confederacy and complete emancipation of all slaves.

The first African-American high school west of the Mississippi River, Sumner High School included several grades below traditional high school. Its original location, when it opened on September 14, 1875, was at 11th and Spruce, at the former whites-only Washington School. Like many African-American schools that followed, Sumner occupied a building that was already in poor condition. But when the new Sumner opened at 4248 Cottage Avenue in 1909, the burgeoning African American community had already begun to make The Ville the center of its middle class. The Ville was one place in the city where African Americans could buy houses. Millionaire Annie Malone had her Poro College and orphans’ home nearby, and several decades later, Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the famed African-American hospital, would rise a block away.

What was so remarkable about the “new” Sumner High School was that for once, the school district was not giving African Americans an old, obsolete building, but rather a brand-new, Georgian Revival edifice designed by William Ittner and built from the ground up. State of the art, the building towered over the small houses of The Ville like a palace of education.

This photograph of the faculty is also a wonderful document of the pride of Sumner High School. As former Comptroller Virvus Jones once told me, back during segregation, an African American with a Ph.D. could either “preach or teach.” Many of the faculty of Sumner High School held Ph.D.s and were in fact noted scholars or scientists in their fields. Sumner is the alma mater of so many noted African-American cultural icons that it’s impossible to name them all here. A quick sampling: Arthur Ashe, Chuck Berry, Dick Gregory, and Tina Turner.

Across town, in the historic African-American community of Mill Creek Valley, Vashon High School once stood at 3026 Laclede Avenue (now the campus of Harris Stowe State University). As the center of the city became predominantly African-American, this second high school had opened to serve the hundreds of students who couldn’t easily reach Sumner. This time, the name of the school was taken from a family of African Americans. George Boyer Vashon was the first African-American graduate of the famously abolitionist Oberlin University, and his son John Vashon was an educator in St. Louis.

Vashon’s new building stood out from the aging Second Empire mansions that were now starting to show their age and lack of indoor plumbing.

After the Mill Creek Valley was demolished in the 1950s, Vashon moved to the former Herbert S. Hadley Vocational School building at 3405 Bell Avenue.

Now on the North Side, Vashon was closer to most of its students. But its building, befitting its name, had a utilitarian, industrial appearance, and the move brought back bad old memories of taking over lackluster former white St. Louis schools. That’s what happened with Sumner in 1875, and now it was happening again in 1963.

Once again, the age of the building quickly became apparent as its structure deteriorated. The old Hadley school building did have its architectural charms, but a new building—designed by the African-American architectural firm of KAI Design and Build—replaced it at the beginning of the school year in 2002.

Links for images from the Missouri History Museum collection:

Sumner High School, ca. 1908

Schoolgirls gathering near Sumner High School

Sumner High School faculty

Vashon High School, first location

A Vashon hobby show

Hadley Vocational School, the future second location of Vashon

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