Gaines High School

First week into the new job at an insurance company, and I am off to a shaky start!  I'm still learning the new internal database and I accidentally left work 30 minutes early! I'm in a carousel of my mind, thinking, or overthinking ahead to the week. I pray that I still have my job at least for the rest of this week!

In the meantime, I was walking on Court Street and came across this marker for the former Gaines High School.

Built in 1859 and renovated in 1866 and 1868, Gaines was one of the first African American high schools in the state of Ohio. Thanks to Reconstructon in the United States, African Americans had optimism and progress, and Gaines was a forerunner of schools for freedmen in the American South. Per Ohio law, the city of Cincinnati earmarked education taxes on black owned properties for "Colored Schools" in the 1850s. At that time, Black men elected the school board, the only election in which they were allowed to vote, and Walnut Hills resident Peter Clark was its first teacher and later principal. Clark is also remembered as the first African American socialist in the United States, running for Congress in 1878 under the banner of the Socialist Labor Party of America.

From 1870 Walnut Hills joined the Cincinnati Colored Public School system. In 1872 the Elm Street Colored School opened; it would later take the name Frederick Douglass School.

Happy Monday!