Hope School

 Along  Hope Station Road outside Pomaria stands a modest two room wooden  building. It does not look grand, but its walls hold an important  chapter of Newberry County’s African American history. Known today as  the Hope Rosenwald School, it was built in 1925–1926 to educate Black  children living in the rural Hope Station community during segregation.

At  that time, schools for Black children received far fewer public  resources than schools for white children. Rural communities often had  to supply their own land, labor and money if they wanted a proper  school. Hope School was constructed through the Rosenwald School  program, created by Sears, Roebuck executive Julius Rosenwald in  cooperation with educator Booker T. Washington. The program offered  matching money, but local communities had to contribute as well. The  school cost approximately $2,900 to build. 

Hope  was a two teacher school. Two classrooms accommodated children from  several grade levels, reportedly first through eighth grade. One teacher  might instruct younger pupils while the other handled the older  children. There was no cafeteria, electricity or running water. Students  studied reading, writing and arithmetic. Many walked four or five miles  each morning to reach the school. Lunch was whatever a family could  send from home. Former students remembered carrying food in brown paper  bags; often a biscuit with fatback inside. Water had to be brought from  Summer’s Store, approximately half a mile away.

Hope  School closed in 1954 as Newberry County began consolidating its small  rural schools. Its closure came the same year the United States Supreme  Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring  segregated public schools unconstitutional.

But the old schoolhouse was not abandoned.  In  1958, nine members of neighboring St. Paul A.M.E. Church organized  through the Jackson Community Center and Cemetery Association and  purchased the building from the Newberry County School District for  $500. John and Willie Mae Flemon helped lead the effort. Community  members sold hot dogs, hamburgers and soft drinks to raise the purchase  money. The former school then became a meeting place and community  center.

Decades  later, the building needed substantial restoration. Members of the  Flemon family and former students began raising money to save it.  Tenetha Hall, whose nine older siblings attended Hope School, eventually  took the lead. Working with preservation officials, local leaders and  former students, she applied for restoration funding. A state grant of  $100,000 was awarded in 2007. Ron Hope reportedly agreed to oversee the  restoration without charging for his services, while Jay Hope became the  school’s historian.

The  building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on  October 3, 2007. It was restored and rededicated as the Hope School  Community Center in 2009. A state historical marker was erected in 2010.  Today it remains one of the few surviving Rosenwald schools in Newberry County.  Even  more remarkably, original desks from Hope School became part of the  collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American  History and Culture in Washington, D.C., carrying a small piece of  Pomaria history into one of the nation’s most important museums.

Hope  School represents more than an old building. It is the story of  families who wanted their children to learn, teachers who taught several  grades in the same room, children who walked miles carrying biscuits in  paper bags, and a community that refused to allow its history to  disappear. That is why the name fits so perfectly. It really was a  school built on hope.