From the Series: Schools for the Colored

Schools for the Colored is an extension of the ideas that formed the project Small Towns, Black Lives, in that, it is a continuation of my journey through the African American landscape. I began making photographs of historically African American school buildings during the very first weeks of the Small Towns, Black Lives project more than twenty years ago. In Schools for the Colored I began to pay attention to the many structures and sites (also making photographs of places where segregated schools once stood) that operated as segregated schools.

The architecture and geography of America’s educational apartheid, in the form of a system of “colored schools,” within the landscape of southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois is the central concern of this project.

I recently contributed a fully illustrated essay about the origins and influences that shaped this project to Buildings and Landscapes (vol. 22.1), the academic journal for the Vernacular Architecture Forum.