Ada Jenkins School and African-American Education

Biography of Ada Jenkins and the Davidson Colored School authored and illustrated by students in Ms. Kenzie's 4th and 5th grade class in the LEARN Works After School Enrichment Program at the Ada Jenkins Center in Davidson, North Carolina. Kenzie Bell '20 volunteered as a teacher in the LEARN Works program while at Davidson.

The facility that we now know as the Ada Jenkins Center has a proud history. For thirty years it served, first as the Davidson Colored School and then as the Ada Jenkins Elementary School, as the only school for African Americans in Davidson. As such, it was the center of Davidson's Westside community. It then housed one of Mecklenburg County's first kindergartens, an integrated program which served hundreds of Davidson five-year-olds. When the kindergarten moved to Davidson Elementary school in the early 1970s, the Ada Jenkins building was used as a recreation center which also offered some social service programs. In 1991 Reverend Robert Shirley of the Davidison Presbyterian Church founded the Ada Jenkins Families and Careers Development Center in the building, and in 1998, spearheaded by Bonnie Brown and fueled by the efforts of hundreds of community and college volunteers, it became the Ada Jenkins Center as we know it today. Over the past thirty years, the center has grown and flourished into a facility this is a vital lifeline for citizens from across northern Mecklenburg County

History of the town of Davidson from its founding to the early 21st century.

"This oral history project has been made possible in part through a Common Heritage grant from the National Endowment for the Humanites."