By Karen LeBlanc, host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS
Longstreet Rosenwald School: DeSoto Parish’s Treasure
In Louisiana, we hold tight to the places that made us — the church, the dance hall, the corner store, the schoolhouse at the end of the road.
I’ve driven past plain little buildings like this one my whole life and never thought twice. So when I traveled to the far northwest corner of the state to DeSoto Parish, tucked along the Texas border just south of Shreveport, and pulled up to a modest white building off Louisiana Highway 5, I’ll confess I expected a quick stop. What I found instead was one of the most important rooms in Louisiana, and a circle of people who could tell me exactly why.
Meet the Class That Came Home
Word, it turns out, travels fast in a small parish. After it got around that our cameras wanted to learn about the school’s legacy, former students and teachers started arriving — an impromptu class reunion that nobody scheduled and everybody showed up for. (These are the moments I live for in this job. You cannot plan them. You can only be lucky enough to be standing there when they happen.)
Before we rolled a single frame, Pastor Joseph Pipkin, a former student, gathered his old classmates and led them in prayer. Then he told me what this place had given him.
“Thank God for Mister Rosenwald. He donated school. It got greater and greater. When I finished here, I went to another Rosenwald school — Logansport Rosenwald High School. I graduated from there.” — Pastor Joseph Pipkin
A boy who started in a one-room schoolhouse in Longstreet, carried up through a Rosenwald high school, and came home a pastor. That’s not a footnote. That’s the whole story, standing right in front of me.
What Are Rosenwald Schools? A Louisiana History Worth Knowing
Built in 1924, in the heart of the Jim Crow era, the Longstreet Rosenwald School is one of nearly 5,000 schools that rose across the segregated South between 1912 and 1932. The schools were born from a partnership between two men who, on paper, had almost nothing in common. One was Booker T. Washington, the educator of the Tuskegee Institute, who was born into slavery. The other was Julius Rosenwald, the son of German Jewish immigrants who built Sears, Roebuck and Company into the largest retailer in America. Together, they set out to do something the country was not doing: build good schools for black children in rural communities where public education was separate and anything but equal. It has been called the single most important initiative to advance black education in the early twentieth century.
Tuskegee architects drew up the plans, and because most of these communities had no electricity, they designed the rooms around banks of tall windows — daylight engineered right into the walls. (I stood in that light and thought about every child who learned to read in it. It does something to you.) The buildings themselves were the argument: a tangible statement that these children were every bit as worthy as any others. In their quiet, sunlit way, they stood in defiance of segregation — a grassroots challenge to the whole structure of Jim Crow, raised one rural community at a time.
The scale is staggering when you sit with it. By 1928, roughly one in three rural African American schoolchildren in the entire South attended a Rosenwald school. In Louisiana alone, nearly 400 were built — about one in four of the state’s rural black schools. The Longstreet school served as the only public elementary school for African American children in this area from 1924 to 1959, and it earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
But here’s what I most want you to understand, because it changes everything: these schools were never simply gifts.
The School the Community Paid for in Sweat
The Rosenwald Fund put up a share. The rest, the community had to raise and build itself through bake sales, through church collections, through donations scraped together by families who had precious little to spare. The sacrifice was the point. It made the building theirs.
In Longstreet, that sacrifice has a face and a name. Queenie Rogers attended school here, and she told me her father — a farmer — helped harvest and haul the very lumber that became these walls.
“When I started school at six years old, walking through the woods, crossing creeks and branches… and you know that when school is out, we go back home. Do whatever we need to do or have to do.” — Queenie Rogers
Sit with that picture for a second. A six-year-old, walking through the woods and across the creeks to reach a school her own father helped build out of lumber he hauled himself. That is not a story about a building. That is a story about what a community will do for its children when the world tells them no.
Then I sat down with Druzella T. Moham, who taught here from 1949 to 1950 and, at the time of our interview, was 94 years old, and is as clear-eyed as anyone I’ve met.
The way she talked about her elementary school students — well, you could hear the pride still warming every word.
“They were well mannered and well behaved, and most of that started at home.” — Druzella Moham
The detail that crystallized this school’s sense of community and commitment to its children was the basketball court. The school never had a gymnasium, so the court was simply outlined on the ground, drawn in the dirt, and on Saturdays, the children would come back to play ball as if it were a school day. No gym, no bleachers, no problem. (I have stood in some grand and gilded places for this show. I’m not sure any of them moved me more than a basketball court scratched into the Louisiana dirt by people who refused to let a thing they didn’t have stop them.)
I asked Druzella what it meant to come back to the place where she once taught.
“At age 94, I’m glad to sit here and look at you and share this with you, because it’s phenomenal — and it’s not to be forgotten.” — Druzella Moham
It’s not to be forgotten. I’ve been turning that line over ever since. It’s not a request. It’s an instruction.
A Building That Still Gathers People
Today, the Longstreet Rosenwald School serves as a community center and an extension of Travelers Rest Baptist Church, founded in 1878 and led by — yes — Pastor Joseph Pipkin, the same boy who once learned his lessons inside these walls.
When I asked the Pastor why this school mattered so much to the community, he gave me an answer I’ll be carrying for a long time.
“It did two things. First, it educated our minds. But it helped us morally… educate the mind, and without educating the heart, you are incomplete.” — Pastor Joseph Pipkin
Mind and heart. Roots, resilience, and remembrance. That’s what got built here, alongside the lumber.
Why You Should Visit the Longstreet Rosenwald School
I write about places all over the world, but I keep coming home to the ones that can’t be faked — the ones so rooted in their people and their soil that they could exist nowhere else. The Longstreet Rosenwald School is exactly that kind of place.
It’s one of the last of its kind — the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation reports that of the nearly 400 Rosenwald schools once built in this state, only 20 of the original buildings and a single teacher’s residence have been confirmed to still be standing. DeSoto Parish is fortunate enough to hold onto two of them.
That scarcity is no accident. When the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling struck down school segregation, the Rosenwald schools — once the pride of their communities — became, in the eyes of the system, obsolete. Many were closed, abandoned, or torn down. Nationally, of the more than 5,300 schools, shops, and teacher homes built, only an estimated 10 to 12 percent survive today. But the tide is turning toward remembrance: the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald Schools to its 11 Most Endangered list back in 2002, and in 2024 the National Park Service concluded that the Rosenwald story holds national significance, recommending a Rosenwald School Network Program to help communities save the ones that remain. (Which means a little schoolhouse off Highway 5 in DeSoto Parish is part of a story the whole country is finally catching up to.)
Most of all, it’s the people: Queenie, whose father hauled the wood. Druzella, still teaching me something at 94. Pastor Pipkin, who came home and never really left. They came back to remember out loud, and they let me listen.
So the next time you find yourself in northwest Louisiana, point your car down Highway 5 and go stand in that light. Read the back of the keepsake. Some places ask to be admired. This one asks to be remembered — and that, as Miss Druzella reminded me, is not to be forgotten.
You won’t read about this place in the mainstream travel guides — which is exactly why you should go.
If You Go
Longstreet Rosenwald School — Longstreet, Louisiana (DeSoto Parish), along Louisiana Highway 5, in the state’s far northwest just south of Shreveport.
- What it is: A restored 1924 Rosenwald school, listed on the National Register of Historic Places (2009) — one of only two surviving in DeSoto Parish.
- What to know: The building now serves as a community center and an extension of Travelers Rest Baptist Church (est. 1878). Visits are best arranged through the church and the local community.
- Pair it with: A wider loop through DeSoto Parish — Greek Revival churches, small-town comeback stories, and the wine country around Keachi. (Watch the full DeSoto Parish episode of LA64 on PBS.)
- Don’t rush it: This is a place to slow down, ask questions, and listen. The history here is still living, and the people are its keepers.
Discovering the people and places that make Louisiana one of a kind — one schoolhouse at a time.
Karen LeBlanc is a travel journalist and host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS. Discover more of the Louisiana you won’t read about in the guidebooks at DiscoverLouisianaTravel.com.
