The final Saturday in February has been slated for a mini-reunion of former Charlie Brown School students at the historic Columbia Rosenwald School in West Columbia. February is Black History Month and the Columbia Historical Museum has been hosting special events each Saturday this month to honor Black history in the West Columbia/East Columbia area.
The Rosenwald School, located at the corner of Clay and Broad streets in West Columbia directly behind the museum at 247 East Brazos Avenue, was originally built in East Columbia as a place for Black children to attend school during the days of racial segregation. The building stopped being used for that purpose in the 1940s and was being used as a hay barn for decades until Columbia Historical Museum board members rescued it and had it moved down the highway from East Columbia to West Columbia earlier this century.
The museum is inviting the general public but primarily encourages anyone who went to school at either the Rosenwald School in East Columbia or Charlie Brown School in West Columbia prior to desegregation in the mid-1960s to gather Saturday for a special reunion at the Rosenwald School in its new location. The open house is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, February 24, 2024. Admission is free.
For further information about Saturday’s open house, contact the Columbia Historical Museum at (979) 345-6125.
The historic Rosenwald School at the West Columbia museum is one of five out of over 500 built in Texas left standing. It is being used today as an interpretive center and maintained by the Columbia Historical Museum as a model one-room schoolhouse representing a typical school for Black children in the 1920s and 1930s.
