The Davis Colored School

West Virginia law required separate school facilities, and in Tucker County the closely connected African American communities of Davis and nearby Coketon each had their own schools. A joint Emancipation Celebration promoted in the Charleston Advocate reflected those ties. The Davis Colored School, also called the Charles Sumner School, opened in September 1910 in affiliation with Mt. Zion Baptist Church. A 1917 report card belonged to Eugene "Gene" Barmer, son of Mt. Zion's minister. Born in 1907, Gene later worked in local mines until a 1947 closure pushed him into other work in the area and in Ohio and Pennsylvania, after which he returned to Davis and retired from the West Virginia Correctional Facility for Boys. He and his wife, Elaine, raised two children. Their son Peter, known as Pete, attended Coketon Colored School from first through fourth grades beginning at age six in September 1950. After the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in May 1954, most of West Virginia, including Tucker County, integrated schools that September, and Peter then began attending Davis Elementary School. The wider local history also included an 1894 civil rights case in which Coketon teacher Carrie Williams sued the Tucker County Board of Education, with J.R. Clifford, West Virginia's first African American attorney, winning one of the first rulings in U.S. history to declare racial discrimination illegal.

Davis, West Virginia · United States