The One-Room School And What It Didn’t Teach
Diggs Chapel was built after the Civil War to serve the children of formerly enslaved people and Native Americans in the Hickory community of Princess Anne County, Virginia.
The school had no textbooks. Bible verses were used to teach reading until the school eventually inherited secondhand copies of whatever the local white school had discarded.
The specific conditions of a one-room segregated school in the rural South in the early 1920s — when Bessie Blount was a child — are easy to describe abstractly and hard to fully grasp in their human specificity.
No textbooks meant that the primary educational materials were whatever a teacher could draw on memory and whatever donated or inherited materials trickled in. The gap between the educational experience of a child in Diggs Chapel and the educational experience of a white child in a school with textbooks, trained teachers, and consistent resources was not a small one. It was a systematically constructed gap, maintained by deliberate policy and by the social structures of Jim Crow Virginia.
The school’s curriculum ended after the sixth grade because there was nowhere to continue. Not because Bessie Blount was done learning — she was demonstrably never done learning — but because the structures available to Black children in her community simply ended there.
The move north with her mother, after her father’s death from World War I injuries, represented the search for something better — better educational opportunity, better economic opportunity, better life. The Great Migration was not primarily about weather or scenery. It was about a fundamental human aspiration for children to have more available to them than had been available to their parents.
Blount arrived in New Jersey and kept learning. GED. Union County Junior College. Panzer College. Nursing school. Physical therapy registration. Each step forward built on the previous one, in the absence of any of the institutional scaffolding that makes educational progress easy.
The education she eventually assembled was not the product of a clear path through established institutions. It was a self-constructed pathway through whatever was available and accessible.