Colored Schools and the Losses of Integration

Story in the NY Times today about preservationists working to save one of the many schools built across the south for black children in the 1920s, with help from the Rosenwald fund. I find the attachment of many people to these schools, and the fond memories of former students, very interesting. A few years ago there was a story here about the old "Colored High School" in Howard County, and former students talked about how they cleaned it themselves, had bake sales and car washes to raise money for books, etc., and now they were raising money for the school's preservation. It was a little wooden building with one wood stove for heat, substandard by the criteria of any educational bureaucracy, but it was theirs, and they felt and still feel an attchment that nobody feels toward the huge, integrated, impersonal suburban schools that replaced it.