African American Schools in Grant County, KY
Start Year : 1881
End Year : 1958
The date of the first Negro school report in Grant County is said to be 1881 according to Samuel Elmore King's 1934 thesis titled A History of Education in Grant County, Kentucky, p.61. There was one school and one school district located in Dry Ridge [source: King, p.65]. There was a school census of 100 Negro children. Five years later, there were four school districts [source: 1886 Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Kentucky]. One of the colored schools was located in Williamstown in 1891, the teacher was Miss Grace Lewis [source: "The Williamstown Colored School," Williamstown Courier, 01/19/1891, last page - Grant County Public Library record]. By 1892, there were five colored schools and two were taught in school houses [source: King, p.62]. The number of school districts was reduced to three by 1905. A County Institute for Colored Teachers was held in Grant County in 1907-1908 [source: King, p.64]. There would be only the one colored school in Dry Ridge by 1934, and Zadah Thompson was the teacher [source: King, p.89]. The Dry Ridge Consolidated Colored School was restored as a a project of the Northern Kentucky African-American Task Force and the building opened in June of 2011 as the Grant County Black History Museum [source: N. Jameson, "White woman's passion leads to black history museum," Associated Baptist Press, 06/20/2011]. The museum was burned down by an unknown arsonist in October 2012 [source: "Arson destroys Black History Museum in Grant County," kypost.com, 10/15/2012, online]. The Grant County schools were integrated in 1958.

• Dry Ridge School
• Williamstown School

Subjects: Education and Educators, Grade Schools & High Schools in Kentucky, African American Schools in Kentucky (Counties A-Z)
Geographic Region: Grant County, Kentucky