A Boyds, Maryland, school named for the Howard University graduate and educator who pushed to improve schools for Black children during segregation has been added to Montgomery County’s master plan for historic preservation.
The county council voted unanimously on July 11 to designate the Edward U. Taylor School a historic site.
When the council took its vote, Council member Andrew Friedson told his colleagues that preserving the history of what he called the “the architecture of racial segregation” creates a way to “educate the public, provide spaces to deliberate past and modern race relations, and discuss social justice and tolerance.”
The Edward U. Taylor school, located on White Ground Road in Boyds, now serves as a storage and processing facility for science kits for Montgomery County schools. It was completed in 1952, one year after Taylor died.
According to a program produced by Montgomery County Public Schools, Taylor, who had served as the supervisor for the county’s schools for Black children, pushed for higher teacher salaries, improved training and maternity leave for staff.
Rebeccah Ballo, the historic preservation supervisor with the Montgomery County Planning Department, told WTOP in an interview that Taylor was “instrumental in bringing improved school facilities” to the county’s Black school children.
The Taylor school was desegregated in 1961, the last school in Montgomery County to do so.
According to Ballo, the historic designation means that any changes the Montgomery County Public School system wants to make to the building would have to come before the county’s historic preservation commission for permits.
Noting that the school stands across the street from the Boyds Negro School, a one-room schoolhouse that was built in 1895 and now serves as a museum, Ballo said when you travel to the site, “You see almost 100 years of the architecture of Black education before Brown v. Board right there, in that very small place.”
Ballo was referring to the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown V. Board of Education, which ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.
