Our feature OKI Wanna Know is your chance to ask the questions: Who, what, when, why, and how? This time we check to see if a local high school was the first of its kind in the entire country, with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
Brynn Thomas is a teacher at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati. Her students were doing research on Gaines High School for the Walnut Hills Historical Society.
"Windsor, in particular came across a discrepancy between Gaines being the oldest public Black high school in the state of Ohio, and then finding a school in Washington, D.C. — Dunbar, which has the claim to fame as being the oldest Black high school in the country," she says. "And their starting date is after Gaines. Which is the oldest?"
The Windsor she mentioned is student Windsor Holman, who says Gaines opened four years before Washington, D.C.'s Dunbar.
"Gaines High School was founded in 1866. It was in the old West End," Holman says. "It was a place where Black children could come and get an education that would put them on a — if not the exact same — at least a similar playing field as white children their age."
Many sources cite Dunbar High School as the oldest in the nation, but it didn't open until 1870, four years after Gaines. So why is the D.C. school getting the credit?
"Well, that's a controversial subject matter."
Eric Jackson is a professor of history and Black studies at Northern Kentucky University.
"Starting in the early 1800s, late 1700s, there seems to be a number of high schools that were created, from the D.C. Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School; there's a high school in Columbus, Georgia, 1797. There is no consensus, that's the problem."
Jackson says among education historians there's no question Gaines was the first Black public high school in Ohio.
"The argument is because it initially had private funding, was it the first public high school in the United States?" he says. "The school in Columbus, Georgia, and also a school in Washington D.C., initially started with only public money. There was no private money involved."
Gaines isn't the first school for Black students in Cincinnati. Jackson says there were a couple of other private schools in the West End that came before. They came from churches.
Jackson says being private gave the schools autonomy. They could control what was taught, and who could be a student.
"Then African Americans are one of the first groups if not the first groups to argue for universal public education soon after the Civil War ends."
Jackson says there was some pushback against the end of segregation among Black Americans.
"What starts to happen with integration is African American teachers and administrators start to lose their positions with integration."
Jackson says he's made the argument for Gaines being the first public Black high school in the country, but that funding source — public versus private — is the sticking point.
Gaines was founded by Peter Clark, and he named it after John Gaines, who helped pass the state law that allowed education for Black children.
Whether or not it's the oldest, the school made its mark, according to Devyn Moorefield. She was in Brynn Thomas's class.
"I studied a graduate. His name was Peter Smith. After he graduated, he went on to be the first African-American doctor in Kentucky. And he performed abortions."
Jorge Garay says he studied Peter Clark's daughter, Consuelo Clark.
"She was the first African-American woman licensed to practice medicine in Ohio, which is another reason it should be memorialized," Garay says. "If you go now to where Gaines used to be, there's this little plaque, it's like the size of a base in baseball."
"We think it deserves something a little bigger than that," Garay says.
That Ohio Historical marker at the intersection of Court and John streets mentions Peter Clark, and John Gaines, and how the school was nationally recognized for excellence for 20 years. What it doesn't say is that Gaines was the first school for Blacks in the country.
Student Windsor Holman says she doubts her class is the first to wonder if Gaines was first or not.
"One of my hopes when I discovered this was less that Gaines would go down as the first, and more that people would start being aware that there are certain discrepancies that exist and start being more interested in their own local history."
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