Manassas High School / The Cora P. Taylor Auditorium

Manassas turned out a remarkable number of jazz players. Alumni include saxophonists George Coleman, Hank Crawford and Frank Strozier, pianists Phineas Newborn Jr. and Harold Mabern, trumpeter Booker Little, bandleader Jimmie Lunceford and singer Dee Dee Bridgewater. The photographer Ernest Withers studied here too, and Isaac Hayes attended without graduating. After desegregation a 1972 plan proposed making the campus a middle school, and it became a full high school again in 2001 and 2002. The current building stands on the site of the demolished Henry Oates apartments.

What the plaque says

Manassas High School / The Cora P. Taylor Auditorium Manassas High School: Manassas High School was established by Spencer Johnson and others in 1899 on the west side of Manassas Street. Originally a two-room framed structure in 1900, more rooms were added between 1902 and 1904. In 1918, a 16-room stucco building was erected. Additional improvements were made between 1920 and 1980. In 1924 Manassas High School, known as one of the largest Rosenwald schools and the first four-year accredited public school for Blacks in the county school system, graduated its first senior high school class. The Cora P. Taylor Auditorium: The Cora P. Taylor Auditorium was erected in 1927. It was named in honor of Mrs. Cora Price Taylor (1885-1932), who served as the first high school principal of Manassas from 1909-1929. She personally hauled bricks by truck from Millington to help build the auditorium that hosted school assemblies, public affairs and community events. In 1976, this historic auditorium was demolished to make room for improvements to Manassas High School.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sun Studio — 2.2 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• Beale Street — 2.4 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 2.9 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 3.0 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Isaac Hayes — steps away
• North Memphis Driving Park — 0.3 mi
• William Herbert Brewster, Sr. — 0.7 mi
• Burkle Estate — 0.8 mi