AC Repair in St. George, SC

Rosenwald Schools helped educate Black students in segregated South. Could a national park follow?

ST. GEORGE, S.C. (WCSC/AP) - A part of history in St. George that was set to be bulldozed now has a bright future.

The Rosenwald School in St. George was a building many people may never have been aware of, but it was one of thousands across the south that educated black children during segregation. It opened in 1925 and closed in 1954, eventually falling into an extreme state of disrepair with a caving ceiling, deteriorating floors and chipped, peeling walls.

But a group of former students got together and came up with a plan to save their historic upper Dorchester County school. The newly renovated St. George Rosenwald School will officially become a museum and community center.

It was in schools like the Dorchester County site, and nearly 5,000 others built in the American South a century ago, that Black students largely ignored by whites in power gained an educational foundation through the generosity of a Jewish businessman who could soon be memorialized with a national park.

They are now called Rosenwald Schools in honor of Julius Rosenwald, a part-owner and eventual president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who teamed up with African American educator and leader Booker T. Washington to create the program to share the expenses of schools for Black children with the community.

There was no public transportation for the school’s students so most had to walk to school except for the lucky few, like Ordie Brown, who caught a ride on a donated bus.

“My father was fortunate enough to buy an old school bus and by getting that bus, I was able to drive that bus from the St. Mark community, bringing children from there, here to this school,” Brown said.

Rosenwald School historian Andrew Feiler says every county in the state had at least one Rosenwald School. Some had up to five. With no public transportation, attempts were made to place the schools in central, accessible locations.

Rosenwald gave $1,500 to each school; the remainder of the cost of each school had to be split between the Black community and local governments. For the Black community, cash, land, material or labor could count as their contribution, Feiler said.

“The leaders of this program reached out to the Black communities of the south and they said, ‘If you would contribute to the schools, because we want you to be a full partner in your progress.’” Feiler said.

Ralph James attended first and second grade at the school and now serves as chairman of the group of seven responsible for restoring the school to repair a caved ceiling, decayed floor and chipped, peeling walls.

“It’s a center of hope. It’s a center of encouragement,” James said. “It inspired us in spite of the odds and challenges we faced.”

The 76-year-old retired municipal judge has made it his life’s goal to restore his old school.

“Education has always been the key to success. Julius Rosenwald gave us that key,” James said.

The six-classroom building will now serve as a museum, historic site, field trip venue and community gathering place for years to come. When visitors walk inside, they will see some of the original floors and some of the original student desks.

The building will feature memorabilia from the school including yearbooks, homemade band uniforms, major red uniforms, and pictures of graduating classes.

State Sen. John Mathews secured $65,000 in state funding while the group raised around $4 million for the project on their own.

“This community came together in a great way to make this project work,” U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn said. “This is the kind of thing that brings people together, and I’m so pleased that they are preserving this history.”

The St. George school was one of the larger ones with six classrooms and an auditorium. Most schools only had one or two classrooms. More than a third of America’s Black children in the first half of the 20th century were educated in a Rosenwald school.

Other Rosenwald schools have been converted into senior centers, town halls, special event venues or restaurants. Many remain recognizable by the careful plans Rosenwald approved. Tall windows oriented to the east and west assured an abundance of natural light and ventilation in rural areas where electricity often didn’t reach until after the Great Depression.

In St. George, the vision isn’t just restoring the school, but providing a sense of the thriving African American neighborhood surrounding it during segregation. Businesses including a grocery store, barber shop and pool hall benefitted the Black community.

Inside the restored school, two classrooms look almost as they did 70 years ago. Another classroom is a public meeting room. The auditorium has been turned into a multipurpose space and will have exhibits detailing the school’s history and hands-on science displays, James said.

“You can feel what it was like just like I did,” he said.

A grand opening is planned for September.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Growing up, Edith Williams-Oldham never realized the historical impact of her small school that sat just a “stone’s throw away” from her home.

She knew that she learned to play basketball on the St. George Rosenwald School’s dirt court and that the school was where her favorite literature teacher inspired her to be a writer and poet herself.

But it wasn’t until she started researching for her book, “What Grandma Forgot to Tell You,” that she realized that her years at St. George Rosenwald School in the late 1940s and early ‘50s were an important part of history in St. George, S.C., and across the country.

By 2014, when the school property was given to the town of St. George, the walls were decaying and the basketball court was full of shrubs. But now, after an extensive restoration effort lead by alumni and community members, the school is on track to reopen to the public this fall.

From a place that afforded precious opportunity to generations of Black children to a place that fostered community and progress in the Civil Rights era, the newly restored St. George Rosenwald School is a place community members now hope will inform and inspire the next generation.

The St. George Rosenwald School is one of many schools built throughout the South by Julius Rosenwald, a philanthropist and president of Sears and Roebuck, and with the help of educator Booker T. Washington.

The historic South Carolina property was built in 1925 during a time when segregation and Jim Crow laws made it harder for Black students to receive a quality education. The building served as a school and gathering place for Black students until 1954 and after was a meeting space and community center for the surrounding area.

“If you saw the pictures before they cleaned it off, we even wondered if it could be salvaged,” Oldham said.

The school was one of only two Rosenwald Schools in Dorchester County and is the only one still standing, according to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

Ralph James, the chairman of the St. George School Board and one of the last students to attend the school before it closed, said the school was partially preserved by the neglect.

“It really was neglected to allow these trees to grow up around it, and then there were a lot of cement blocks and cement pieces stored around 6, 7, 8 feet high all around it,” James said. “So when the storm wind blew, that buffered the school from a lot.”

Since 2014, the board, made up of alumni and local legislators, has worked on restoring the building. They have added a kitchen, bathrooms and a board room. They also plan to recreate the old principal’s office and fill the small library with a mix of modern books and ones that James and his classmates would have read.

The school’s updated auditorium will include updated stage lighting, a projector and multicolor walls, which James said tell a story.

When the school hosted an early childhood education program, different walls were painted different colors for different age groups, James said. When the wooden boards from those walls were cleaned and reinstalled, all the colors were mixed up.

“So this was the pattern that was placed up there with intent to paint, and a few persons came in said not to paint,” James said. “It’s original, and it tells a story.”

However, one part of the south wing of the St. George Rosenwald School will feature two rooms most similar to what the building would have looked like while it was open. The board plans to host classes for visiting children in two classrooms fitted with original floors, a blackboard and a stove that would have been used to heat the classroom in the winter.

With the help of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, old desks were located from across the county and restored so that visiting students can sit it them while learning about the history of the school.

Doug Reeves, the vice president of the St. George Rosenwald School board, said the desks were just part of the board’s effort to preserve the memory of the school.

“We’ve got some alum that’s graduated from that school, and they keep coming back saying, ‘OK, well, this is where it was, you know, when I was here. …Yeah, you ought to do this, or do that.’ And that’s what we kind of kept in mind the whole time,” Reeves said. “We wanted to save as much of that as we possibly could.”

The project has become a community effort, according to Oldham, who said the alumni group even sponsored the restoration of a nearby restaurant themselves.

In the 1920s, the Black community held fish fries and fundraisers to be able to build the Rosenwald school, and Oldham said for the restoration project, the alumni did the same.

“Well, what we did was we just emulated what our parents, foreparents had done,” Oldham said. “We raised money.”

Oldham said she hopes the continued effort to rebuild the school and surrounding buildings will help to uplift the community that the school sits in the center of.

For Oldham and James, the Rosenwald school represents a time of unity and support throughout the Black community in St. George.

James described the school as “the jewel, the pride of the community.” The Black community flourished around it, with restaurants, shops and movie theaters creating a vibrant uptown St. George that was nicknamed “Little Harlem.”

“As I walked the streets as a child, everyone knew of me, and you could just, from house to house, you can depend on a little helping hand along the way,” James said. “You were never a stranger. So that feeling is something that can’t be duplicated in a way, but it does tremendous to build citizenship and to strengthen humankind.”

Oldham said that the St. George Rosenwald School itself was so popular that it was overfilled and had to hold classes in the nearby church or in auxiliary buildings.

For many students, Oldham said the school was a life-changing opportunity that many Black children didn’t have. One of the school’s oldest alumni even begged her mother to ride their family’s bull to school during a particularly bad storm so she could maintain her perfect attendance.

“This school was a prayer, an answered prayer,” Oldham said. “To be in a room where there was no leaking room, there were heaters with wood, coal burning to keep them warm, there was toilet paper, even though it was an outdoor toilet, it was flushable.”

Even after the school closed, it acted as an organizing place in the Civil Rights movement, according to the National Park Service, which recognized the school as a part of the African American Civil Rights Network in 2021. The building was used to prepare community members to vote and hosted “Project Deep” which helped prepare Black students to enter integrated schools in Dorchester County.

“That school has been a venue for progress since the day it was built,” Oldham said. “We want to make it even more so now.”

James said the additions to the St. George Rosenwald School were made to help make the building a community space again. He hopes to see the school host everything from history lessons to Rotary Club meetings to birthday parties.

“Hopefully, we will be able to demonstrate not only here what can happen, but to other communities just what would happen if you would, again, begin to find something that would bring you together, bring the area together and give you a common cause,” James said. “Give us hope, again, create love for one another and more than that ... an education and to stimulate our minds and to do good things.”

In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces, the updated St. George Rosenwald School will partner with the Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry to include informational exhibits for younger visitors on the south side of the building, James said.

“I think one of the slogans, ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste,’” James said. “So here we are not wasting minds, but we are rejuvenating them, we are strengthening them.”

To Oldham, involving and engaging the youth, which she considers anyone from children to 40-year-olds, will lead to the success of the project.

“This is the greatest gift that your foreparents could have given you. The opportunity to learn about where you came from, who they were, why you’re here and how you got here and what this school has contributed to the community in St. George and surrounding areas,” Oldham said. “We would hope that you would take interest and learn and keep supporting it to build a better community.”

According to James, the St. George Rosenwald School is on track to host a grand opening in September.

This story was originally published August 4, 2023, 5:30 AM.

DORCHESTER COUNTY, S.C. (WCIV) — Not one, but three pine trees fell on a house in St. George when severe thunderstorms rolled through Monday night.

"So, it’s a lot to take in, and then thinking about the process that we have to go through to get the work done is something else too," said Shawn Calvin.

St. George family recounts moments trees fell on their house during Monday night's storms (WCIV)

Calvin and her husband, Frederick, have owned their home on Davis Terrace for about 15 years. They are devastated and overwhelmed by the mess.

Read more: Komoroski denied bond; Women accused of killing bride and injuring groom will remain in jail.

"About 9 o'clock is when the weather started to shift," she said. "It started raining really heavily, and the wind started blowing, and then by 10 o'clock is actually when it got really bad. So at that point, I was in the den talking to my sister and my husband was in bed."

She told her sister she was going to put the dog up in the other room and get ready for bed. That's when the ceiling came crashing down.

"I noticed that the middle part of the ceiling in the den fell in, and rainwater was coming in at that point," she said. "When I went down the hall to grab my purse, I noticed some of the insulation was coming down in the hallway."

They just finished remodeling the home, so the damage hit hard, but they are still grateful.

Read more: Ex-banker Russell Laffitte sentenced to 7 years in prison for role in Murdaugh fraud conspiracy.

"Well I’m full, but blessed because nobody was injured," Calvin said. "The dog and my husband, we all got out safely, but it’s just a lot to take in because we have had the house newly renovated. We haven’t been back here a year."

Now, they will find someplace to stay until they know if it’s safe.

"We’ll stay with relatives until we know the plan for repairs or what our next steps are," Calvin added.

But in the meantime: "So, we’re hoping that they can get it repaired in a few months or less, and we’ll move back in, prayerfully. Until then, we’ll just reside with relatives," Calvin said.

According to the National Weather Service in Charleston, there were 18 reports of wind damage across Colleton and Dorchester counties.

A developer is requesting to change more than 360 acres of residential land to industrial land.

ST. GEORGE, S.C. (WCSC) - Calling one place home all your life until a rezoning request sign pops up on your street. That is what happened to a group of people who live in St. George.

One developer is requesting to change more than 360 acres of residential land to industrial land that would affect large properties off Highway 78 one mile east of St. George.

Although Dorchester County’s plans do not say what exactly will be built in this area, a number of residents who have spent their whole lives here say they want their land to be kept the way they’ve always known it to be.

Richard Myers was born on Sugar Hill Road in St. George and has lived here all his life.

“Everybody seems to know that something big is going to happen in this area except the people that live here,” Myers said.

He owns around 37 acres, which has the possibility of turning into industrial land.

“All of this that we’re standing on now used to be our farm, but as the years changed... the farm got smaller,” Myers said. “But we still got a farm, and we want to keep it that way. We don’t want a factory sitting in the middle of it or a warehouse.”

Another resident in the area, Barbara Felder, is the sixth generation in her family to live here. Her grandparents and aunt’s home is still on the land.

She was asked what her reaction was when she first saw the Dorchester County rezoning sign down the street.

“We were shocked,” Felder said. “There were no letters or no communication about the changes in our area.”

Felder says she worries about how this rezoning could affect pollution, their roads and access to emergency vehicles.

“We shouldn’t let the county nor the developer to come in our community and tell us what to do as taxpayers and for our future,” Felder said.

Myers says he has no intention of selling his land but knows his taxes will rise if he doesn’t.

“If they want your property, they’re going to get it because they’re going to run your taxes sky high until you say, ‘Enough,’” Myers said. “‘I got to sell it because I can’t pay the taxes.’”

Both of them say they want to be involved with the rezoning process.

“We are tired of explaining and they need to change and not think about the almighty dollar that’s coming into Dorchester County area,” Felder said.

Dorchester County did not respond for a comment because Monday was a holiday. This rezoning still has to go through three readings before it can be approved.

To take a closer look at the official rezoning plan from the county, click here.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Employer: Armando’s Mexican Restaurant LLC

Investigation site: 5792 Memorial Blvd. Saint George, South Carolina 29477

Investigation findings: Investigators with the department’s Wage and Hour Division found that the employer allowed some employees to work off-the-clock without compensation, a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Employees performed work when they reported to work before their scheduled shift time or stayed after their shift ended. In addition, Armando’s paid a fixed salary to some employees, failing to pay an overtime premium for all hours over 40 in a workweek. Investigators also determined the employer failed to keep complete and accurate records of the number of hours worked by employees.

Back Wages and Liquidated Damages Recovered: $38,610 for 17 workers and an equal amount in liquidated damages.

Quote: “Restaurant workers are some of the community’s lowest-paid workers. When employers fail to pay these workers all of their legally earned wages, workers and their families find it harder to make ends meet. Illegally withholding wages also give employers an unfair advantage over their law-abiding competitors,” said Wage and Hour District Director Jamie Benefiel in Columbia, South Carolina. “The Wage and Hour Division is able to provide resources to both employers and employees to help understand their responsibilities and rights under the law.”

Background: Employers can contact the Wage and Hour Division at its toll-free number, 1-866-4-US-WAGE. The division also offers numerous online resources for employers, such as a fact sheet on Fair Labor Standards Act wage laws overtime requirements. Workers who feel they may not be getting the wages they earned may contact a Wage and Hour Division representative in their state through a list and interactive online map on the agency’s website. Workers and employers alike can help ensure hours worked and pay are accurate by downloading the department’s Android Timesheet App for free.

Learn more about Wage and Hour Division.