Nonetheless, the Harmony school provided its students a good education and was a point of pride in the community, which wanted it to remain open. By the sixties, many of the structures were decrepit, a reflection of the South’s ongoing disregard for Black education. Rosenwald’s foundation provided the seed money, and community members constructed the building themselves by hand. The school was one of five thousand public schools for Black children in the South that the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded, beginning in 1912. According to local lore, Harmony, which was previously called Galilee, was renamed in the early nineteen-twenties, after a Black resident who had contributed money to help build the town’s school said, upon its completion, “Now let us live and work in harmony.” This story perhaps explains why, nearly four decades later, when a white school board closed the school, it was interpreted as an attack on the heart of the Black community. The town of Harmony, Mississippi, which owes its origins to a small number of formerly enslaved Black people who bought land from former slaveholders after the Civil War, is nestled in Leake County, a perfectly square allotment in the center of the state.
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