In the Beginning

According to an apochryphal story, the embryo for Lincoln School grew out of the Civil War when a Union Army soldier started teaching former slaves how to read and write somewhere in Marion. Some have said near the Birmingham highway on the northeast side of town. It is not known with certainty why the soldier remained, but a story that may be valid says that the soldier recuperated while teaching. Historical research leads one to believe that should the story be true, the soldier might well have come from Minnesota. For sometime between March 31 and April 2, 1865, Minnesota and Wisconsin troops of General James A. Wilson en route to Selma to destroy Confederate ironworks, attacked troops of General Nathan Bedford Forrest at a place called Ebenezer Church - a site east of Marion.

And just before the war ended, the Minnesota Volunteer Infantry was a part of the occupation force in Selma, according to Civil War Times, and other sources. The Methodist chaplain of the Minnesota unit, Elijah Even Edwards kept a diary, and "commented on the swarms of Negroes who poured into Selma and told of their widespread murder by disgruntled whites...." These events took place only days before the Civil War ended.

The school's formal history began in 1866. Clifton H. Johnson, the former director of the Amistad Research Center, wrote an article entitled, "Powerful Little School," for the N.A.A.C.P.'s Crisismagazine in May of 1972. According to Johnson, several local black men became the original trustees for Lincoln School. The men were James Childs, Alexander Curtis, Nicholas Dale, John Freeman, David Harris, Thomas Lee, Nathan Lavern, Ivey Parrish, and Thomas Speed. All of these men had been slaves. They gathered for the first time on May 17, 1866, for the purpose of considering "the subject of assisting freedmen to acquire a common school education." It had probably come to their attention that the recuperating Union Army soldier's efforts were highly inadequate for the needs at hand. The new institution was to be known as the Lincoln School of Marion.

It was a good time to begin a school for former slaves: the Freedman's Bureau had been organized; Fisk University was organized in 1866; Lincoln University and Wilberforce University were founded some ten years earlier. The school that became Cheyney State University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has an even longer history. It came into being as the Institute for Colored Students in 1837. Hampton University was founded in 1868. The Fifteenth Congress of the United States for the first time. The martyed United States President had been dead three years.

Lincoln School of Marion, Alabama, was incorporated on July 18, 1867. Richard Bailey states in Neither Carpetbaggers Nor Scalawags, 1867-1878, that "the trustees laid the foundation for noe of the earliest schools for African Americans in Perry County."

What is not generally known is that there were fierce struggles between former slaves and church organizations immediately at the end of the Civil War. Free Blacks, especially after the Freedman's Bureau, Methodist and Congregational Churches with their domestic missionary organizations descended upon the South. One should understand the background.

In Perry County, Alabama, most Free Blacks and former slaves were affiliated with the Baptist and Methodist persuasions, a fact in the South that may have given rise to the statement, "If a Negro is not a Baptist or a Methodist, somebody been missin' with his religion."