From 1923 until 1958, when it was replaced by Rosa A. Temple High School, Magnolia High School served as the city’s high school for African American students in the Vicksburg area.

Dec. 28, in a special ceremony first at the City Hall Annex and later at the site of the school on Bowman Avenue, former students and city officials will remember the school and commemorate a historic marker honoring the school. The program will begin at the City Hall Annex and then move to Bowman Avenue for the marker unveiling. The city is paying for the marker.

The program was developed by the Magnolia Hisotrical Marker Committee, an organization formed to get a marker for the school.

“The other co-chair, Athenia Jefferson, and I approached Mayor (George) Flaggs and asked him if he would support getting a historical marker for Magnolia, and he agreed,” said Dr. Bettye Gardner, program co-chair.

The marker, Gardner said, is focused on what she said is the most significant part of Magnolia’s history, which involved its participation in a 1940 study of high schools in the southeast called the “Secondary School Study,” and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

“The study looked at curriculum development involving 16 black high schools in the southeast,” Gardner said. “Magnolia was one of the 16 chosen and it was the only black high school selected in the State of Mississippi. The study, too, was concern about what they called progressive education and the importance of what students learn and what their interests are.”

Magnolia, known officially, as Magnolia Avenue High School, was the second black high school built in the city. The first, she said, was in 1902 with the Cherry Street High School named for its Cherry Street location, “And as the number of students grew the need for a larger school evolved.”

Magnolia was later renamed Bowman High School after Magnolia’s principal, J.G.H. Bowman, after he died in 1944.

Many of the school’s teachers, Gardner said, were Magnolia graduates who went off to college and returned to teach. “Many of the teachers were former students,” she said.

“I think we were all pretty well prepared for college.”