In March 1867, African-American men in Rockville pledged to support a school by taking responsibility for money needed to pay the teacher’s board and washing and to provide fuel and lights for the schoolhouse, and a school likely opened soon afterward. Education was one way newly emancipated slaves could assert their independence and plan for the future. In 1872, Montgomery County began to provide public education to African-American students, and an elementary school was built in 1876 for grades one through seven. After the two-room schoolhouse burned in 1919, students moved into the basement of Jerusalem Methodist Episcopal Church, and the school was rebuilt in 1921 on the east side of North Washington Street. The second school served grades one through seven, but students seeking more education had to commute by streetcar into Washington, D.C., or board with a local family. In the mid-1920s, Noah E. Clark and other African-American parents petitioned for the county’s first black high school, and in 1927 the school board voted to build one in Rockville. The African-American community contributed $6,700 toward construction, matching a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation. Julius Rosenwald, president and CEO of Sears, provided matching funds for nearly 5,000 African-American schools across the segregated South between 1917 and 1948. Rockville Colored High School was built next to the elementary school on North Washington Street as the county’s only high school for African-American students, and many students traveled for hours by bus to attend until the school board bought land in Lincoln Park in 1934 for the new Lincoln High Scool.
