These stories initially appeared monthly in Montevallo's Chamber Chatter. From the start, we have sought to give voice and visibility to people of African descent in and around Montevallo. Some stories include dark moments in our town’s history. Taken together, however, the stories display for all to see the dignity, pride, resourcefulness, kindness, and hospitality of the African American community.
Untold Stories of Black Montevallo
I. REMEMBERING SLAVERY: The King Plantation
Finger impression on brick produced by slave labor for construction of Fort Pulaski in Georgia. From “Words Have Power,” National Park Service.
How the "little school" got built
The building itself, constructed perhaps in the early 1920s, was modest enough. It was a two-roomed clapboard structure like other such schoolhouses, nothing fancy, just a frame structure. But -- and here the story gets interesting -- it was built to bring a public education to black youngsters. A public education. This was huge! In the previous century it was against state law to teach people of color to read and write, and now the county was paying the salaries of its black teachers.
A CALL to Action!
We are looking for citizen volunteers to help tell the story of an important historic site in Montevallo, the "little school" on Island Street. This two-room wooden schoolhouse, which opened around 1924, was the first public school for Black children in Montevallo. It stood at the corner of Island and Bloch "alley" in a mostly Black community then known as Jacksonville. Black youngsters went to school there until 1939, when the county opened Almont Elementary School.
Called to Teach: The Legacy of Blanche Coger
Tough but loving, feared but beloved. Coger pushed students of all colors to learn to their fullest capacity. (After teaching in "negro" schools from 1934 to 1969, including Prentice High School, she was transferred in 1970 to the newly integrated high school in Montevallo.) Some of her Prentice students were inspired to go into education themselves. Two shared their thoughts on her shaping role in their lives.
The South's Great Generation of Black Teachers
I can't say it was the case with all Black teachers of my mother's generation, who had come of age in the South, but I know that many of them saw themselves as on a mission. Education was about the individual students but there was an additional component; an explicit mission of race uplift. . . . Becoming educated was an act of resistance. The classroom was a site of that resistance.
-- Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (Norton & Co, 2021), 50.
“They are tired of working for White people”
“The Montevallo lynching had "set the entire population, white and black, into a flame, and a murderous conflict may be expected at any moment."
Remembering Blanche M. Coger
Talk to people who attended Prentice HS, originally Montevallo Negro HS, and one name always comes up. Blanche M. Coger, a teacher of history who insisted on the highest standards for her students. She retired in 1974 after teaching for 44 years, the final four years at the desegregated Montevallo HS. In 1965 she was honored as Teacher of the Year for Shelby County. To this day her name is spoken with respect.
"Teaching ourselves how to rise the next day": Untold Stories from the Era of Bondage
Susan is notable for her brief and perhaps unwelcome service nursing one of Wilson's raiders.
J. S. Prentice: A Glimpse Behind the Mask
The picture, bearing the date 1916, is of a "Real Photo Post Card" of Joseph and his son Frank Herman Prentice. Somehow it found its way into the Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection now housed in Emory University's Special Collections.
"Not a problem, we got this": From Birmingham to Selma
The march actually began in Birmingham, however. Marchers, perhaps 20 strong, walked to Alabaster for an overnight stay, picked up more folks there, passed through Montevallo and then Centerville and at last arrived in Selma, their numbers growing as they went.
In Praise of the Pocket Watch: Aldrich's Time-Piece (part 2)
Alabama Time-Piece was one of nearly 100 African American newspapers circulating at the turn of the century but the only one originating in our area. It brings into view a vibrant community in Aldrich's Old Camp, a Black settlement within a racially mixed village not two miles from downtown Montevallo.
Keeping Times with the Times: The Aldrich Time-Piece
From 1895 to 1902, in the coal mining town of Aldrich, a Black-edited newspaper was published weekly.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN JACKSONVILLE
Only a few people today remember the once vibrant Black community of Jacksonville located on and just off Main Street where Jack's and the former Eclipse are now located.