DENMARK – Voorhees University unveiled a bronze statue of its founder Thursday, with delighted onlookers gasping and whispering “beautiful, just beautiful.”
The National Trust for Historic Preservation gave 5 historically Black colleges and universities funds to help preserve their campuses, including Voorhees College.
A “Tuskegee” for South Carolina
While she was studying at Battle Creek Sanitarium from 1893 to 1896, Jessie Dorsey met Almira S. Steele of Boston, Massachusetts, a humanitarian who was trying to open schools for destitute Black children in the South. At Steele’s invitation, Dorsey went south in June 1896 to work with Elizabeth E. Wright in establishing a school for Back students in South Carolina following the model of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where Wright had studied. Wright had great vision but was frail and sickly. The two women faced a great deal of prejudice against teaching Black children to read, and several of their places were burned down by angry men.