Spotlight: Janie Porter-Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls

     In the early 1900s, an eight-year-old African American girl in Newport News, VA was sentenced to six months in jail. This event would come to be known as the catalyst for the founding of the Virginia Industrial School for Girls by Janie Porter Barrett.

     

The Virginia Industrial School for Girls

Earlier posts in this blog touched on both the school and Barrett, and in this post I will be focusing a spotlight on both.

Janie Porter Barrett

     Janie Porter Barrett was born in 1865 in Athens, GA to a African American mother and man who was purported to be White. She was raised as a member of the White family that employed her mother as a housekeeper/seamstress. This led to her growing up in different circumstances than the majority of African Americans of her time. She went away to school and was trained to become an elementary school teacher at a school that instilled a love of her race, her fellow-man, and her country. 

     After marrying and having four children of her own, Barrett began developing community activity programs for African American girls in her area. Some of the programs focused on subjects such as crafts, sewing, cooking, and parenting. These led to her constructing a clubhouse on her land, which in turn led to the development of a settlement house, the Locust Street Social Settlement. This settlement house was to become the African American equivalent to a popular settlement house for Whites in Chicago, the Hull House.

     Barrett was very concerned about the welfare of African American children. After learning about about a little eight-year girl that had been sentenced to six months in prison, the home for girls that had so far just been a thought quickly became a reality. By this time, Barrett was leading the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Club and used this organization as a vehicle by which she could obtain the necessary funds to open her school. She began touring all around Virginia soliciting donations and in the process, she gained the support of quite a few White Virginian women.

     Barrett was a master at developing and nurturing interracially cooperative relationship. Though she was greatly aware of the segregation and racism of the south, she understood that a unified, interracial movement was going to be the key to her success. This interracial collaboration led to financial and material support that many programs similar to hers never gained access to. It also resulted in more community support for her school and what she was trying to accomplish there.

     Janie Porter Barrett, with her extraordinary commitment to social justice as well as her community, was a true social work pioneer. 

     

The Virginia Industrial School for Girls

The Virginia Industrial School for Girls

     Although the records from the Virginia Industrial School for Girls were sealed for 100 years, much is still known about the school and the girls it provided a much needed home and education for. 
     The school opened in 1915 with 28 girls on a 147-acre former civil war site in Hanover, VA. The land had been bought and donated by Barrett's Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Club. The plan for the school was that it would house girls that had been deemed delinquent and sentenced to prison. These girls would then be paroled directly to Barrett and the school. In reality however, prison was often the only option for African American girls in foster care at this time due to a lack of facilities. This meant that some of the girls sentenced to prison terms had never committed a crime. Also, some of the girls that came to the school were mentally disabled or arrived at the facility with a contagious disease.
     Barrett wanted to use this school to teach the girls self-direction and how to build character. Some of the curriculum that was provided included lessons on how to work, play, and worship. They learned skills such as gardening, animal husbandry, laundry, and dressmaking. They also learned how to folk dance, play games, and play sports. Barrett also made a strong commitment to giving the girls the best education they could, one that came as close to the type of instruction their White counterparts received.
     When it came to discipline, Barrett was completely against corporal punishment and that practice was banned from the school. Instead, the girls were under an honor code. If they were good students and citizens, they would eventually reach the level of "Honor Girl", where they would be given a white dress and accommodation in the Honors Cottage. If keeping them busy was not enough to keep them out of trouble and a punishment of some sort was needed, the girl would lose her white dress and have to re-earn it. If that was not enough of a consequence, she would then be given a brown dress and was given road work assignments. These assignments consisted of moving buckets of gravel filled to varying fullness from a pit to the school grounds. Then she would begin earning her white dress back. If a girl got all As in conduct, effort, work she was put on the weekly honor roll and given an American flag pin to were in assembly. There was also a Student Officers' Corps and these girls were recognizable by a bar worn on one sleeve. 
     Once a girl had achieved two years of successful work at the school, she was paroled yet again, this time to a Richmond family. Here, the girls would work for pay. She felt it was important that the relationship between the school and their students did not end here. Barrett was very adamant that the girls be treated fairly in their new homes and it was school policy that the girls keep in touch as to their conditions. The school staff was to keep tabs on the girls and alert the administration when trouble arose. 
     Barrett never stopped soliciting donations and support for the school. She realized that the only way the school would survive was if the whole community, and even the state, saw it as a worthy cause. She moved comfortably between the African American and White communities and was able to maintain a steady stream of support. The school did suffer its share of hardships, though. There were times they had no lights, the water pipes froze for weeks at a time, children were shoeless or only had one outfit, and they always needed more funding to hire more staff. Even 16 years after the school opened Barrett wrote that they still did not not have enough cows for all of the girls to get an adequate amount of milk.
     In 1920, the state of Virginia took control of the school, but Barrett stayed on as the superintendent until she retired in 1940. In 1942, the Virginia Department of Welfare and Institutions took over the administration of the school from the state. Then, in 1950, the school was renamed the Janie Porter Barrett School for Girls. It became racially integrated in 1965 and began admitting boys in 1972. In 1977, the school became a boy's school and was renamed the Barrett Learning Center for Boys. In recent years, there was major renovation and the school was turned into a correctional training center, which was closed a few years go.