The Banneker School, Philadelphia, PA, circa 1910.


The Philadelphia colored directory, 1910: a handbook of the religious, social, political, professional, business and other activities of the Negroes of Philadelphia.
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In the early 1800s, Pennsylvania Quakers and other abolitionists founded a number of fledgling institutions to provide free blacks the educational opportunities denied them in the state's private academies and colleges, and its public schools. Named for African-American scientist and inventor Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), the Banneker School educated black children in Germantown before it closed in the early 1890s.