A ribbon-cutting ceremony and dedication to commemorate the conclusion of a 40-year restoration project of the Banneker School, a historic one-room structure built in 1885 in Parkville to educate children of color, will be held on Saturday, Oct. 25, starting at 10 a.m. at the school, located at 31 W. 8th St. (Rain location — Jenkin and Barbara David Theater within Alumni Hall on the Park University campus in Parkville.)
The ceremony, hosted by the Banneker School Foundation, will also include a dedication of the building’s North Star Wall in honor of Timothy Westcott, Ph.D., a longtime member of the Foundation’s board of directors who was an integral contributor to the “Brick by Brick: Building a Legacy” capital campaign. Westcott is also a professor of history, chair of the Department of Culture and Society, associate university archivist and director of the George S. Robb Center for the Study of the Great War at Park University.
The aforementioned capital campaign was launched in 2022 to raise $575,200 — a number determined by the 5,752 bricks that were used to construct the outside of the school with individuals or organizations purchasing $100 sponsorships of each brick. In 2024, the Missouri General Assembly appropriated $100,000 from the Budget Stabilization Fund and the Missouri Department of Education provided $50,000 to assist in the restoration. In addition, the Foundation received $150,000 from the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, which will support a history trail through interpretative panels, commissioned public art and an immersive virtual tour of the building and the outdoor trail with accessible and location-aware content.
The Banneker School was named for Benjamin Banneker, born in 1731 in Maryland to a free African-American mother and a father who had been formerly enslaved. Banneker, who was not formally educated, but mostly self-taught, was a landowner who worked as a surveyor and farmer. He became known for assisting Maj. Andrew Ellicott in the survey that established the original borders of the District of Columbia. The school was one of three in Platte County, Mo., built to educate African American children (as well as Dunbar School in Platte City, Mo., and Mary Bethune School in Weston, Mo.).
Post-Civil War African American children in the Parkville area were initially educated in the basement of Park University co-founder and Parkville’s namesake George S. Park’s Missouri Valley Hotel, then in the University’s Bergen Hall. Dr. John A. McAfee, Park University’s first president, determined that the students needed their own facility, and land previously purchased by the University was allocated for the construction of a one-room school for the specific purpose of educating African American children. Construction for the Banneker School commenced in the fall of 1885 when Park University students fired the bricks in the University kilns and assisted with construction.
In the 1980s, Lucille S. Douglass, who taught at the Banneker School in the 1940s, discovered that a developer had purchased the land the school was on and planned to demolish the structure. It was her foresight and leadership — with the support of Gaylon Hoskins, a descendant of one of the first students, Frank Hoskins — and a grassroots community initiative to purchase the property from the developer.
In 1985, Douglass deeded the school to the Platte County Historical Society which maintained the school until 2008 when the Banneker School Foundation and Historic Site was established to carry on the mission.
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 for its significance of ethnic heritage and Black education. In 2008, it was listed on Missouri’s Most Endangered Historic Places because of its significant deterioration.
