January 17, 2007

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            Allen Young was born in Wake Forest, almost certainly the son of former slaves. He had to go to work at a young age, but he was working for businessmen and Wake Forest College professors, some of whom took an interest in him and gave him private lessons. Later he did attend Henderson Institute, Kittrell College and Shaw University. For a while he worked as a teacher in the public school system, but he resigned after a minister inspired him to found a private school.

            In 1905 Dr. William Louis Poteat, who became president of Wake Forest College that year, helped him find space for his new school in a corner of an old bed spring factory. Young began by teaching the black children who would not have been able to go to school otherwise.

            It is useful to put that date in context. The violent overthrow of integrated government in Wilmington had happened just seven years before, in 1898, and Jim Crow laws were being enacted in all Southern states. There were no schools for black children in Wake Forest and few across the state, and, to be truthful, the school system for white children was woefully inadequate.

            At first Young taught just seven grades, but he had much more ambitious plans for which he needed money. He first approached white leaders in Wake Forest and then he went to the Freedman’s Bureau in Pittsburgh, Pa., which gave him some funding, enough to build a four-room frame structure on what is now Spring Street.

            His goal was to train the children to deal with the practical aspects of life they would face, “by educating the heart, head and hands – heart to obey God’s law, head to think and the hands to do with might what they find to do,” he told Washburn.

            That first building was soon followed by several more. Where did the money come from? He made trips north, using a chauffeur, and there were stories linking his name with John D. Rockefeller and Pierpont Morgan. There was also assistance from the national Presbyterian Church, and Young helped found the Spring Street Presbyterian Church.

            In the middle 1920s, there were 366 students and 11 teachers at the school, and he offered the first black high school in Wake County. The Allen Young boarding and day school, officially the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, sent out the first school bus for black students in Wake County. Although it served primarily the Wake Forest area, students also came from as far away as Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

            There were classes in Latin and French, but the boys were also required to do manual training and the girls to learn how to sew and keep house. The school day opened with a chapel period at 8:45 a.m. because “Christian work begins with a prayer.” When classes ended at 3 p.m., the boys chopped wood, cleaned rooms or made repairs while the girls sewed, cleaned or did laundry and ironing.

            Although there were few activities for a black school in that era, but the school did have a 15-member band that played for groups in the area and the choral group sang in many venues, including Wake Forest College and the University of North Carolina, which was then only in Chapel Hill. There was also a literary society, and every year all the students exhibited their manual training and sewing projects.

            On the campus just across the railroad tracks, basketball and baseball were highly competitive sports, and that was reflected in Young’s school. One of the college students began the athletic program, and other students attended some of the games.

            In 1926, the Rosenwald school for black children for grades one through seven was opened nearby through the efforts of many Wake Forest parents. It was part of the county’s school system and was called the Wake Forest Graded Colored School. Then in 1939 the county built a high school building next to the graded school, and the name was changed to DuBois High School.

            This growth in county- and state-supported education for black youngsters and youth would be a death knell for Young’s school. He was nearly 60 and his life’s work was slipping away.

            In addition, the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church withdrew its support.

            In 1956 several of the former school buildings still stood along Spring Street. Young was keeping his dream alive when he talked to Washburn. He had a half-finished brick building and over 500 books for a future library, but the campus was used for only a kindergarten and for meetings of civic and church groups.

            By 1971, Young was dead and only the store building remained. Two of his daughters, Maude and Ailey, watched as it was demolished and remembered when it was built in 1914, 30 by 50 feet with a soda fountain and an office in back. It sold ice and coal along with groceries, and later a side room, a bakery, was added. “Our stepmother was an excellent baker,” Maude told Wake Weekly reporter Jean McCamy.

            Young had a large family, nine children, and need of augmenting his income. They sold their stepmother’s rolls and bread on Fridays and Saturdays in the store. During the summer, the boys tended a large garden – “getting an education in ‘muleology,’ their father said” – and the girls weeded and canned. Some of the vegetables were used in the boarding school and they sold some to the boarding houses for college students.

            Maude and Ailey Young were then retired school teachers, living in a brick house on family land on Spring Street. Ailey Young was soon to be the first black person and the second woman elected to the town board of commissioners.

            Today the only building associated with Young that remains is the former Presbyterian church, now the Rebirth Deliverance Ministries, although a two-story white frame house may have been part of Young’s school.

            But there are still people in Wake Forest who cherish his memory and salute his legacy, including Ronald Williams, who attended the school for three years. “Quite a few of us attended Mr. Young’s school for Blacks.”

            Williams remembers A.P. Johnson who operated a kindergarten that same period and Luther Watkins Sr. “who drove the station wagon for kids.

            “There’s a bunch of history that will be told in due time.”