The Park Hill School District broke ground on the future Angeline Washington Elementary School in the Creekside area of Kansas City, Mo, on Feb. 29, 2024. The namesake for the school is part of the deep history of Park University and its founder George S. Park.
The name was decided by the Park Hill Board of Education naming committee on Feb. 22, 2024. The name was selected from hundreds of other community and student name suggestions, according to Mike Kimbrel, the Superintendent of Park Hill School District, during the groundbreaking ceremony. “The naming committee wanted to express the story of Angeline,” he said, “the perspective of her life as an enslaved woman to a freed woman who married, owned land, had children, pioneered educational and religious opportunity, and bonded a community.”
At the same time on Feb. 29 as the groundbreaking ceremony, Missouri State Representative for Platte County Jamie Johnson spoke to the Missouri House of Representatives in Jefferson City. She said, “[Washington’s] journey, fraught with hardship and triumph, resonates as a testament to the strength that emerges from the depths of adversity.”
Washington was born a slave in April 1837. According to a letter from Parkville Presbyterian Reverend George Woodward in the 1840’s, George Park was asked by Washington’s mother to purchase her so that Angeline might stay in the area and be treated well. Park purchased Washington in 1844 for $350. The Frances Fishburn Archives at Park University retains the original purchase deed. However, manumission documents have not been found.
“Embracing the actual contract that transferred Angeline, as property with a fixable monetary value, from one owner to another owner, heartens the connectivity of our local human narrative to the ties of history and ongoing struggles that form a better community,” said Timothy Westcott, a member of the naming committee and the associate archivist at Park University. Instead of ignoring our past, said Westcott, naming the school after Washington is a step towards rectifying past injustices.
Washington was married by Woodward in spite of Missouri laws that prohibited African American marriage in 1855. “Their union symbolized resilience in the face of adversity,” said Johnson.
Washington was also a member of the Parkville Presbyterian Church. It is probable that Park emancipated her around this time as he fled the state that year after the destruction of his newspaper press, the Industrial Luminary. “The Washington’s, as freed individuals, denoted the local disputes that confronted citizens on Missouri’s western border between 1854 and 1865,” said Westcott.
Washington and her husband, William, stayed in Missouri at land deeded to them by Park in 1886. Washington mothered eight children and had many grandchildren who were taught at one or both of the Banneker schools. Washington and William were both chartered members of the Washington Chapel Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (today the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church) in 1870. The Chapel was dedicated to the Washingtons in 1907.
The new elementary school is the first in the district to be named after a woman, and a person of color. It will be the 12th elementary school in the district.
The school is being built to remedy current district problems, with some schools having more students than intended and others less, said Kelly Wachel, the chief of communication for Park Hill School District. Over the fall of 2024, the district will be undergoing a redistricting to more equally distribute the student population. “The district is using an engagement process to garner community and parent feedback about the redistricting,” said Wachel. “We want parity across the district in terms of student size.”
The district is working with parents and local communities to work out which school the families will go to. “We try to limit moving students between schools more than once during their elementary school career, but balancing population parity of the school sizes and redistricting is not always easy,” said Wachel.
The school is expected to open in fall of 2025. It is currently on budget, costing approximately $40 million. According to Wachel, the funds came from the 2022 bond. The school will cost more than the last elementary school, Hopewell Elementary, due to rising inflation of building materials. But the project is “well within the capacity” of the bond, said Wachel.
