James G. Birney Elementary School opened across the street in 1901 in a handsome Italian Renaissance building. Its wood-frame predecessor, the original 1889 Birney School, was the first school built with public funds for African American children in Anacostia and Hillsdale. Although Congress created a public school system for the District's black children in 1862, it developed slowly, especially in rural areas, and education continued through other means. Before 1889, African American children in this area attended the Hillsdale School, sponsored by the Freedmen's Bureau and built by Barry Farm residents in 1871, and earlier they attended privately run schools including the Mount Zion School, later the Howard School, on Douglass Road. When a third Birney School opened at 2501 Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in 1950, students loaded wagons with supplies and moved them from the old classrooms to the new. This building briefly housed the first junior high for African Americans on this side of the river. At the same time, the new Sousa Junior High for white children opened on Ely Place, SE, and when black children tried to enroll there, Sousa became the center of Bolling v. Sharpe, a lawsuit that ultimately became part of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools nationwide. Until Anacostia Junior-Senior High School opened at 16th and R Streets, SE, in 1935, white Anacostia teenagers attended schools across the river, while African American children continued crossing the river for high school until schools were desegregated in 1954 and Anacostia High School admitted all.
