Museum to honor farming school

FARGO - Floyd Brown first visited the small Monroe County farming town of Fargo in 1915.

Three years later, with $2.85 in his pocket, the 27-year-old graduate of Alabama's famed Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute returned and persuaded community members to help him establish a private, nondenominational high school for rural blacks.

From 1920 until 1949, the Fargo Agricultural School offered an education to hundreds of young blacks when few public schools accepted them. What began as one building on 20 acres with 15 students eventually grew to 14 buildings on 800 acres with nearly 200 day and residential students.

A newly expanded museum that preserves artifacts from the school will reopen Thursday. Directed by Geraldine Purcell-Davidson, a 1947 graduate of the school, the museum is just threemiles north of Brinkley and belongs to Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corp.

The grass-roots organization, which seeks to stem the loss of land by black Arkansans and encourages farming and landbased economic development in the state, bought the school site - including 266 acres of farmland - in 1983. The school museum's reopening will be part of the corporation's 27th annual two-day conference.

"I always wanted to be a history teacher," Purcell-Davidson said Tuesday during a tour of the museum's exhibits. She and her four sisters attended the school as boarding students.

"Had it not been for my mother and father going without, it never would have been possible," Purcell-Davidson said. Her own room, board and tuition cost $15 a month, when she enrolled as a ninth-grader in 1943, and was $18a month by the time of her graduation.

Brown motivated Fargo's students to study, work and improve themselves, just as he had been inspired to do by his mentor at Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington. The prominent black educator preached a gospel of self-help for black Southerners that emphasized economic advancement through vocational education. Students at Fargo Agricultural School, who followed a combined curriculum of academic and vocational training, helped build much of the school and produced 90 percent of their own food.

Many industrial-normal schools for rural blacks were founded by graduates of Tuskegee and of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va., said James Anderson, an education professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and author of the 1988 book The Education of Blacks in the South.

Also influenced by Washington, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., established a fund in 1917 to provide grants for the construction of schools for rural blacks in the South. By the program's conclusion in 1932, 5,357 school buildings had been built in 15 Southern states using Rosenwald grants, with 389 buildings constructed in Arkansas alone.

Other secondary and vocational schools for black youth had existed in Arkansas since the 1880s, but they typically were operated by the missionary societies of various Christian denominations. The Freedom Board of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., for example, operated the CottonPlant Academy from the late 1880s until 1932.

Many Fargo Agricultural School students went on to become doctors, lawyers and teachers. Harlan London, who grew up on a farm outside DeWitt, attended Fargo as a boarding student for four years.

"It gave me an excellent foundation for going on to college and also taught me a lot that I've been able to use in other ways in my adult life," he said.

After graduating in 1948, London attended Philander Smith College in Little Rock on a choral scholarship, completed a master's degree at Washington University in St. Louis and earned a Ph.D. at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., where he recently retired as a social science professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Some Fargo graduates became farmers. Despite the school's efforts, however, the number of nonwhite - predominantly black - Arkansas farmers dropped by 43.5 percent between 1920 and 1950, from 72,282 to 40,841, according to the U.S. Census. During the same period, the number of white Arkansas farmers fell by only 11.7 percent, from 160,322 to 141,588.

Since its founding in 1980, Arkansas Land and Farm Development has picked up where the Fargo Agricultural School left off, offering agricultural training and assistance to thousands of rural black Arkansans.

In 2002, the state had a total of 1,155 black farmers, with more than a third of them concentrated in just six counties: St. Francis, Lee, Jefferson, Phillips, Pulaski and Hempstead, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture. That same year, Arkansas had 67,209 white farmers.