America’s Largest Black Boarding School Is Thriving
The Piney Woods Country Life School is America’s largest historically black boarding school, and one of the few remaining, with a sprawling campus of pine trees and rolling farmland just 20 miles south of Jackson. It opened in 1909 as the vision of an educated African American man from St. Louis who felt a desire to teach the illiterate children of freed slaves how to farm and read. In the face of hunger, poverty, and lynching threats, Dr. Laurence Jones and his wife fought to keep the school open in the segregated South.
Now, more than 100 years later, the vocational agriculture school has transformed into a rigorous, college-prep high school for low-income African American students from across the United States.
Expectations at Piney Woods are high, and so is the pressure. Graduating is a given—every student here is expected to go to college. It doesn’t matter if they come from a ghetto in the Bronx or the suburbs of Detroit. Some 97 percent of students who graduated from Piney Woods last year got into schools such as Spelman College in Atlanta and Kings College in Pennsylvania.
The Atlantic
4/25/16
Magnolia Tribune
