Douglass High School

Public money paid for most of the 1928 Douglass School. It cost $54,325, and the Rosenwald Foundation contributed $3,150. The Black community in the Riverview subdivision raised $400. Albert Howell and his wife Ellen had arrived from Tennessee A&I in 1924, and in 1931 the music teacher Bessie French wrote the school song, with its closing line spelling out victory. Douglass grew into the largest Black school between Knoxville and Roanoke before it closed in 1966.

What the plaque says

Douglass High School Side One The only school for African Americans in Kingsport began in 1913 as the Oklahoma Grove School near downtown. With Rosenwald and community funds, the first Douglass School building was constructed in 1928. A new structure was erected on this site in 1951 for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the school thrived under the strong leadership of longtime principals A.H. Howell and V. O Dobbins, Sr. Side Two African American students from Scott County, Virginia, also attended Douglass. It was accredited by the state in 1946, and by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in the 1960's, by which time it was among the largest black high schools in the tri-state area. Because of school desegregation, Douglass' final graduation exercises took place on June 8, 1966. Thereafter the building housed the V.O. Dobbins Community Center.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Long Island of the Holston — 2.5 mi
  A four-mile island in the Holston at Kingsport, Cherokee council and treaty ground, the start of Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, and in part returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1976.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 4.7 mi
  A state park around Fort Patrick Henry Lake on the Holston at Kingsport, named for the Great Indian Warpath, with an unfinished late-1800s railroad grade, mountain-bike trails and a marina.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 15 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 17 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.

More markers nearby

• Donelson's Flotilla — 0.5 mi
• Battle of Island Flats — 1.9 mi
• Gov. McMinn's Home — 5.4 mi
• Ford vs. Ford — 7.9 mi