Kenneth Cole put his car into park, turning the engine off and unbuckling his seat belt before exiting his car. A large building loomed in the distance, blighted and decayed from age and time. His architect friend, Roger Pryor, contacted him a few days prior, urging him to take a look into the Kenneth G. Neigh Dormitory Complex on the old campus of Mary Holmes College, a former historically Black college in West Point.
In 1892, the Board of Missions for Freedmen of the Presbyterian Church founded the school in West Point, Miss., with the purpose of educating Black girls from primary grades to high school before turning into a two-year accredited community college by 1969. The school lost its accreditation in 2002 and closed two years later.
Black modernist architect James Max Bond Jr. designed the dormitory, his first project with the architect company he co-founded with Donald P. Ryder, Bond Ryder & Associates. The dorm began construction in 1968, and after its completion two years later, it could house 550 college students.
“Crisply geometric in form and clad in brown brick, with deep-set windows and balconies, it was a play of solids and voids, light and shadow, with colored ventilation panels and doors animating its masonry walls,” Brian Goldstein wrote of the dorm in his article “Modernism as Liberation: J. Max Bond Jr. at Mississippi’s Mary Holmes College.”
“The dorm’s plan comprised two stopped, asymmetrical masses that defined a series of changing vistas, depending on the viewer’s position, and at the center, a continuous exterior public space embraced by the buildings,” Goldstein continued.
For Bond, architecture was about more than building structures; it was about making a statement. The Holmes dormitories are an example of Bond’s brilliance, designed to offer students spatial freedom and the freedom of choice, Cole described—a nice contrast to what Black students were facing in Jim Crow Mississippi during the 1960s.
Cole is building a substance-abuse facility in West Point for individuals who cannot afford to go to rehab. One idea he has for the old dormitory involves converting it into housing for a long-term residential-recovery program.
“What we’ve built is a program that gives that person a second chance before you send them to prison and ruin their life,” Cole told the Mississippi Free Press. “Give us a shot with them for 12 months.”
After thorough research and careful consideration, Cole settled on the old dormitory and hired architectural historian Alfred Willis to put together a nomination to have the property listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, which opens up various funding opportunities for the building.
“The Park Service unanimously voted to approve it as a historic site, and we went to work on building out the funding stack to save it,” he said. “But it’s a very difficult endeavor finding all the funding sources we needed. I think it was 2021 when we got listed.”
Years later, Brian Goldstein reached out to Kenneth Cole as the former has a vested interest in the property as someone serving on the Action Fund committee who is writing a book about Max Bond Jr. that mentions the Mary Holmes dormitories.
“I just explained to him what we were dealing with and that we’re spending our own money to try and save it and that I just don’t know how much more of that we can do,” Cole recounted.
Goldstein suggested the grant opportunities available with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund National Grant Program, which advances ongoing preservation activities for historic places like sites and museums that represent Black cultural heritage. The fund supports four areas: capital projects, organizational capacity building, project planning, and programming and interpretation.
“It was a pretty significant grant, not just the dollar amount, but just the effort it took to put it together,” Cole said. “It was a real commitment to write it, but we did. Six months later, we got the notification that we were awarded the grant.”
The $150,000 they received was for a Conserving Black Modernism grant, intended to empower and equip preservationists and stewards with funding and technical support to preserve material heritage, innovation and the legacy of modern sites that Black architects designed. Cole wants to use the funds for an adaptive reuse feasibility study, which he describes as “taking an existing building and adaptively reusing it for something.”
“So, the highest and best use of a dormitory is going to be housing,” he explained. “But it’s not in the capacity that it was from 1970 to 2000, so we’ll do something different with it. And then the feasibility study (will answer the question), ‘Is this even possible to do?’”
The building has many issues including heating and cooling as the building has no traditional HVAC system; very little room between the floors and traditional ducts; plumbing and electrical; fire suppression; and environmental concerns.
“These are all the questions that we’re having to ask ourselves and answer, and we’ve got 12 months to figure all this out,” Cole told the Mississippi Free Press in September.
‘Black Resiliency, Black Agency, Black Achievement’
The National Trust for Historic Preservation launched the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in response to the protests around the confederate monument in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
White supremacists organized a rally against the removal of the statute that drew various far-right groups from the country to the rally. Counter demonstrations ensued, and the day eventually turned deadly when a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of counter demonstrators, killing a woman and injuring more than 30 others.
Senior Director of Preservation Tiffany Tolbert said the interpretation of preserving America’s history through these Confederate statues highlighted the need to preserve African American sites, which are also considered American history. Enter the Action Fund.
“The fund was created as a $25-million initiative to focus on preserving 200 sites across the country that represent Black resilience, agency, civil rights, social justice and achievement, among other things,” Tolbert told the Mississippi Free Press.
Eligible sites for the Action Fund’s grants may include anything from homes to commercial buildings to churches, HBCUs and cemeteries—spaces that many Black people have touched, constructed, landscaped or otherwise had a hand in.
“The strong thing is having the opportunity with funding through our program to uncover stories and elevate the work of many people like organizations and entities across the country that have been stewarding and preserving these sites for decades,” Tolbert said.
“And being able to say … ‘How do we help them make sure these spaces are maintained for future generations so (that) people can know the true full history of this country and the contributions of African Americans and Black people?’” she added.
The grant program is very competitive and has four funding programs: capital projects, like rehabilitation and restoration; planning; capacity building; and organizational development and programming interpretation. Tolbert explained that the organization looks for readiness when viewing applications. The Action Fund wants to know that the applicant understands their project, its needs and costs, the strategies that may help them address those needs, and how the funding they’re requesting plays into that process.
The Unita Blackwell Freedom House in Mayersville, Miss., Alonzo Chatmon’s Juke Joint in Water Valley, Miss., and the Kenneth G. Neigh Dormitory at the former Mary Holmes College in West Point, Miss., were part of this year’s cohort of grant-fund recipients, with the old dorm falling under the Conserving Black Modernism program due to Black architect J. Max Bond Jr.
Around the mid-20th century, the modernist phase of architectural history emerged, a style that emphasizes volume, asymmetrical compositions and minimal orientation. Black architects were designing in this style for Black people, but their contributions are not widely recognized on the same level as white architects, Tolbert explained.
“Conserving Black Modernism is a program in partnership with the Getty Foundation to elevate the contributions of Black architects to the field of modern architecture,” she said. “There’s definitely modern influence in our communities as we still see them in churches; we see them in commercial buildings. It really also speaks to the growth of the Black middle class, the Civil Rights Movement.”
James Max Bond Jr. was considered one of the nation’s best Black architects. He founded his own architect firm, Bond Ryder & Associates, with fellow architect Donald P. Ryder. They designed the Martin Lurther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Ga.; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, N.Y.; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama. One of Bond’s first projects was the Kenneth G. Neigh dormitory on Mary Holmes College’s campus.
Tolbert said that being able to place, see and experience the location of historical events and people adds another depth of understanding to what people learn in history and what’s taught in school. It makes everything real, she said.
“There’s something to be able to learn about something, but also go to the place where it occurred,” the senior director suggested. “I think it’s also inspiring because there’s a continued fight for civil rights and social justice in this country, allowing these spaces to inspire future generations of historians and activists to take what they learned, experienced and felt and put that into their work.”
First Black Woman Mayor in Mississippi
Unita Blackwell was a civil-rights activist and the first Black female mayor in the state of Mississippi, presiding over Mayersville from 1976 to 2001. Born in 1933, she was the daughter of sharecroppers in Coahoma County, Miss., but she started her education in West Helena, Ark., due to a lack of educational opportunities for Black people in Mississippi. After completing her education through the eighth grade, she became a sharecropper alongside her parents.
When the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee visited Mayersville, Miss., an adult Blackwell signed up to be a field worker. Her assignment: to persuade her neighbors to register to vote. In Mississippi, Black people could be killed for registering to vote at this point in time. Blackwell and seven others went to the courthouse to take a voter-registration test, but while they were waiting outside, white farmers tried to intimidate them into leaving.
Only two could enter to take the test, and neither were told whether they passed or failed. Blackwell and her husband, Jeremiah, were fired the next day after their employer found out what they attempted to do. She and her family were left without steady income and were denied welfare, but the community pulled through with food, and the SNCC gave them $11 every two weeks.
After attempting the discriminatory test three times, she finally passed in the fall of 1964 and became a registered voter. She joined the SNCC after meeting Fannie Lou Hamer the summer of that same year. The two women would become lifelong friends with Hamer acting as Blackwell’s mentor for community organizing and freedom fighting.
Working with Hamer, Blackwell founded the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party in 1964. The party had two goals: to establish laws preventing Black children’s employment as sharecroppers and to establish schools that would teach math and science. As a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, she traveled with others to the Democratic National Convention to plead the party’s case to be seated to represent the state.
By 1967, she was a community development specialist for the National Council of Negro Women. She helped provide food and housing for rural families through programs like the Pig and Garden campaign. In 1976, after years of activism, she ran for and won the position of mayor of Mayersville, a town of 1,635 residents at the time. The first Black woman to hold the title in the state, she served her community in the position for 25 years.
As mayor, she led the effort to pave streets, to install street lights and sewers in the Black section of the town, to provide housing for the elderly and disabled, and to develop a public water system and other infrastructure changes. In 1979, she participated in the national Energy Summit that President Jimmy Carter organized. Ten years later, her colleagues elected her as chair of the National Conference of Black Mayors.
In 1983, Blackwell received her master’s degree in regional planning from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She became a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow in 1992 and released her autobiography, “Barefootin’: Life Lessons from the Road to Freedom,” in 2006. Unita died in 2019 at the age of 86 in Biloxi, Miss., after a long battle with dementia.
The Unita Blackwell property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. The property consists of the Freedom House, the Ranch House and the neighbor’s shotgun house. The Freedom House was Blackwell’s primary residence, and she used it to host numerous civil-rights meetings from 1964 to 1970.
The house hosted many groups associated with the Civil Rights Movement such as the SNCC, the Council of Federated Organizations and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Ranch House was included in the historic distinction for its association to Blackwell’s productive life as mayor of Mayersville, where she used the property for political work sessions and meetings. The shotgun house was included for its architectural significance and association to the civil-rights leader.
The Lighthouse, a nonprofit organization that offers programs focused on leadership development for Black women and girls, is spearheading the Unita Blackwell Museum, a project that educates audiences about the hard work and legacy of Unita Blackwell.
To continue the philanthropic efforts of Unita Blackwell, the nonprofit also founded the Barefootin’ Leadership Consortium, which awards groups and individuals who are developing, or have developed, organizations or programs working toward the liberation of Black, indigenous women and girls and gender-expansive persons of color.
The Freedom House is a recipient of this year’s Action Fund grant. Funding from the grant will go to structural rehabilitation of the home so that it can be used to host community-leadership training meetups and events for Black girls in the Mississippi Delta region, a press release from the Action Fund explained.
The Mississippi Free Press reached out to the Lighthouse for an interview about the funds but did not hear back before publication.
‘Dance, Drink and Socialize Safely’
Glen Allan is a tiny census-designated place nestled a few miles outside of Greenville, Miss. The town formed around the Linden Plantation, which Confederate General Wade Hampton III originally owned. The plantation rested near Lake Washington, a 3,000-acre oxbow lake that residents eventually used for hunting and fishing. The population has always been small, so everybody essentially knows one another.
The CDP is also home to one of Mississippi’s finest blues groups, the Mississippi Sheiks. The Sheiks were the country’s most prominent African American string band in the 1930s. They recorded classic songs like “Sitting on Top of the World,” “Stop and Listen Blues,” and “Winter Time Blues.” The group recorded from 1930 to 1935 until they lost interest with record buyers.
Henderson Chatmon, a fiddler, and his wife had 10 children between 1885 and 1904: Fred, Josie, Alonzo, Armenter, Edgar, Willie, Lamar, Vivian, Larry and Harry. Armenter and Sam Chatmon recorded as solo artists, but they also recorded with the Mississippi Sheiks, a music group in which Alonzo Chatmon played the fiddle.
None of the Sheiks were full-time musicians despite their success, so they still had to work as farmers most of their lives. Alonzo Chatmon’s income came from operating a café that turned into a juke joint at night.
“A juke joint was a gathering place after work on Saturday night, and it was a place that African Americans could go where they could be by themselves and not be watched in all facets of their life,” Mt. Zion Memorial Fund Vice President Shannon Evans told the Mississippi Free Press. They could essentially let their hair down and kick their heels up and dance, drink and socialize safely.”
Chatmon ran the juke joint through the 1930s and early ’40s before he and his wife, Phyllis, sold the property to Annie W. Spencer for $3,250 on March 12, 1946. Chatmon died sometime in the 1950s, according to accounts from his brother and his disappearance from government records. There’s no clear documented reason why Chatmon retired the juke joint and sold the store, though Evans believes old age may have factored into the decision.
“He was getting up there in age by then because he was in his heyday in the 1890s as a musician,” she said. “His brothers had passed, but I think at that point Sam was still alive.”
Spencer ran a store out of the building before Ollie Morganfield, Muddy Waters’ nephew, bought the property. Morganfield reached out to someone close to Mt. Zion Memorial Fund in need of helping finding important documents about the shotgun house turned juke joint and café.
“(Morganfield) bought it, and it’s become like a community center. Keith Johnson had a concert out there not too long ago on the front porch for the community,” Evans said.
Evans said that Morganfield wants to use the property to create a place for community members to take music lessons or learn about the blues. Those plans are continuing to become solidified through the $50,000 Action Fund grant awarded to the property this year.
“This building’s really important. One, it’s a connection back to the 1930s. The house is older than that, and we know that because we’ve had some historic preservationists come in and examine it,” she said. “We’ve been to the courthouse and done the deed search and found the deed Alonzo Chatmon had, so we know the provenance of the building.”
The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund had a federal grant that allowed them to work with Dr. Rolando Hertz at Delta State University to conduct research into the provenance of the building. That information will help them get the property on the National Register of Historic Places, which is in the works. Funding also went toward an engineering assessment of the building to make sure any further work done on the building stabilizes and preserves it.
“That (Action Fund) grant that we just got is for two buildings. The other is the St. James Missionary Baptist Church in Teoc, Miss., which is in Carroll County,” Evans said. “That building is where John Hurt attended school, where he worshiped, where they had their community center. That was everything to that community.”
Mississippi John Hurt was a singer, songwriter and guitarist from Avalon, Miss., who taught himself to play the guitar at the age of 9. Mary Francis Hurt, his granddaughter, bought the church and paid for it to be moved to the same property of the Mississippi John Hurt Museum in Carroll County, though the museum burned down on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
“That day, it was (going to be) announced that it had just been put on the National Register, so that’s why we are fighting tooth and nail to save this church. This church is really important, and we want to use it as a teaching tool,” Evans said.
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