School
Segregation
opened September 1924
City of Atlanta

Booker T. Washington High School (1924)

Atlanta's first public high school for Black students, opened in September 1924 and the city's only one until 1947. It is often called Georgia's first, but Augusta's public Ware High School had served Black students from 1880 to 1897.

See it on the map All Segregation records

The record

The school opened under the Atlanta Board of Education with Charles Lincoln Harper as principal; until then Atlanta's public high schools were for white students only. The Neighborhood Union and the local NAACP had pushed for it, in part by registering Black voters and defeating school bond issues in 1918 and 1919 that did not fund Black schools (Georgia Historical Society marker). Eugene C. Wachendorff designed the building, three stories over a basement level, with medieval and Byzantine details and a main entrance of five arches in two tiers. In 1927 a replica of Charles Keck's Tuskegee statue 'Booker T. Washington Lifting the Veil of Ignorance' was placed at the entrance. The school was listed on the National Register in 1986.

Today: Still an Atlanta public high school at 45 Whitehouse Dr SW, west of the AUC.