Lucy Simms oral histories

Collection

Identifier: SdArch 20

Not requestable
Staff Only

Scope and Content

The oral history collection includes the recollections of Carlotta Harris, Edgar Johnson and wife, Wilhelmina Johnson, Louise Winston, and Elon Rhodes, former students of Lucy Simms, and Ellen Walker, current owner of the Lucy Simms house. Topics discussed include Lucy Simms as an educator and her teaching style; local African American education more broadly; and social, economic, and demographic changes to Harrisonburg’s African American neighborhoods.

Dates

2000

Creator

Getachew, Wondwossen (Interviewer, Person)

Access Restrictions

Collection open to research. Researchers must register and agree to copyright and privacy laws before using this collection. Please contact Research Services staff before visiting the James Madison University Special Collections Library to use this collection.

Use Restrictions

The copyright interests in this collection have been transferred to the James Madison University Special Collections Library. For more information, contact the Special Collections Library Reference Desk (library-special@jmu.edu).

Bio/Historical Note

Lucy Frances Simms was born into slavery in 1856 at the Hill Top Plantation located along Harrisonburg's northeast boundary. After Emancipation, her family settled on the same land where they were formerly enslaved, known as Newtown. As a young girl, Simms attended the Whipple School, Harrisonburg’s first African American schoolhouse near Blacks Run, and later enrolled at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia where she studied alongside Booker T. Washington. After graduating in 1877 with a teaching certificate, Simms returned to the Harrisonburg area, where she taught three generations of Black students over the course of five decades. She began her teaching career at Long’s Chapel schoolhouse in Zenda where she taught for one year before taking a position at the Effinger Street School in Harrisonburg. Simms taught there for fifty-one years until her death in 1934. She is buried in Newtown Cemetery. Her advocacy and commitment to teaching was commemorated by the Lucy F. Simms School which was built in 1939 as the city’s new school for Black students and named in Simms’s honor. The school, now known as the Lucy F. Simms Continuing Education Center, was in operation until 1966 when the local schools desegregated.