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.

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.

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.

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.

“The Montevallo lynching had "set the entire population, white and black, into a flame, and a murderous conflict may be expected at any moment."

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.

Susan is notable for her brief and perhaps unwelcome service nursing one of Wilson's raiders.

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.

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.

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.

From 1895 to 1902, in the coal mining town of Aldrich, a Black-edited newspaper was published weekly.

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.

A small wooden schoolhouse for negro children once stood at the corner of Island and Bloch Streets in a Black community then known as Jacksonville.

At the height of the Jim Crow era, in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, African Americans who could afford to travel routinely consulted the Green Book, a travel guide offering "Assured Protection for the Negro Traveler."

A neglected graveyard in a little-visited corner of Shoal Creek Park on Highway 119 may turn out to be the first stop on Montevallo's African American Heritage Trail.

1969 was a momentous year in Alabama high school basketball. The papers were calling the February tournaments the "most interesting ever." Why? For the first time they included Negro schools. A star player on one of those breakthrough teams was Montevallo's own Lawrence "Butch" Lilly, center for the Prentice High School Dragons.

The best game ever: that's what baseball was for Montevallo's two inductees into the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.

This announcement, which ran in the Alabama Time-Piece in 1898, provides a rare look at a local "negro" school's course of study and fairly bursts with insight into the yearning for real education felt by Aldrich's African American community at the turn of the century.