Charlotte Students Dig In The Past For Stories From 20th Century Black Education
Charlotte students, alumni and faculty have literally dug into history on the site of the Mount Vernon Rosenwald School near Charlotte. Rosenwald Schools were built almost a century ago to educate African American children in rural communities and are regarded as the most important effort to advance Black education in the early 20th century.
The site has been painstakingly scraped, inch-by-inch, through layers of red clay dirt in strategic spots around the school and brought the artifacts to a Charlotte anthropology lab to clean, catalog and research.
“In the archaeological record, children aren’t really written about too often,” Camille Richardson, a Charlotte masters in anthropology student, said. “We don’t hear about their experiences and the impact social or other factors have on them, particularly African American children. Work like this can give us a view into items they were using and what their lives looked like when they were at the school.”