Save Jennie Moore

March, 2009 – Plans are in the works to demolish Jennie Moore Elementary  and build a new one, but it won’t go without a fight.

At the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival 2008 at Laing Middle School.

The school is nestled within the Sweetgrass Basket corridor on Hamlin Road in Mount Pleasant. The Community Action Group for Encouragement, or CAGE posted signs and have petitions to stop demolition plans.

The school district plans to build a three school community on the existing site.
Charleston County school officials plan to look at three design options for the new Jennie Moore Elementary and Laing Middle schools campus in Mount Pleasant.

A group of residents has lobbied district officials for more than a year to spare the existing Jennie Moore building, and two of the three options would allow that to happen. The district plans to rebuild Jennie Moore on its existing site, add a new Laing Middle building and build a kindergarten through second-grade school on the same campus.

Gullah Heritage Preservation doesn’t want to see Jennie Moore or Laing Middle torn down because both schools have historical significance to the black community, said Jeannette Lee, a member of the preservation group and resident of the Seven Mile community.

It’s especially important because most things associated with black history are destroyed, said George Freeman, a member of the group. Jennie Moore was a school for blacks, and Freeman said the intent was not educate them but to keep them isolated.

He compared the destruction of Jennie Moore to the postwar destruction of detention centers built for Japanese-Americans in World War II. Today, some people don’t know Japanese-Americans were detained in camps because they no longer exist, he said. If Jennie Moore is demolished, the history of segregated schools also will be destroyed.

He called Laing and Jennie Moore the “only remaining educational structures still standing to preserve the educational history of African Americans in Mount Pleasant.”

—–

Bin Yah: There’s No Place Like Home is a documentary for sale on this website: presented by Justin Nathanson and The ChasDOC Film Society, the film explores the potential loss of important historic African American communities in Mt. Pleasant, S.C due to growth and development. Through the testimonies of the residents themselves, the film explores the culture, the history, the importance of land and the concept of home, giving a voice to those who seldom have had a chance to be heard.

A proposed highway extension threatens to bisect these close-knit neighborhoods of cousins and kinfolk, established by freed slaves and home to generations of their families for hundreds of years. Many residents are artisans and craftspeople, practicing traditional skills including sweetgrass basketmaking, brought over from West Africa and handed down from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. Today, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina is the primary place in the U.S. where this grass is harvested and “sewn” into this particular type of basket.

Bin Yah will attempt to preserve – at least on film – the memories of the special places that may be lost forever as the struggle between the real “bin yahs” and the “come yahs” escalates.