Roanoke’s 1929 Addison High School gave secondary education a purpose-built home

A building devoted to secondary education

When Lucy Addison High School opened in 1929, Roanoke obtained its first purpose-built high school for African American students. Virginia DHR identifies Edward Frye as the architect and describes the building as a substantial Georgian Revival design.

The opening gave Black secondary education a physical institution constructed specifically for that purpose within the segregated city school system.

The distinction between a program and a purpose-built home matters. Academic secondary instruction had already developed at Harrison School under Lucy Addison’s leadership.

The 1929 building did not create that educational effort from nothing. Instead, its name recognized an educator and its construction supplied a new setting for work that students, families and teachers had already made important to the community.

A formal design announced public investment

Georgian Revival styling gave the school a prominent institutional character. DHR’s 2025 nomination records the architecture of the former school, allowing its design to be considered alongside its educational function.

A dedicated high school building represented resources committed to classrooms and other school spaces, as well as a public acknowledgment that Black students needed secondary education.

Such investment existed inside a system of inequality. Separate buildings did not make segregation fair or eliminate differences in opportunity.

The school’s importance to its community should therefore be understood without praising the legal restrictions that made a racially separate institution necessary. Educational achievement and institutional exclusion belong to the same historical setting, even though they deserve different judgments.

The name moved to a newer school

In 1952, a new Lucy Addison High School opened on Fifth Street, and the 1929 building became Booker T. Washington Junior High.

DHR’s chronology keeps these institutions distinct. A familiar school name can continue while the building that originally carried it takes another name and serves a different group of students.

The change also reveals growth in an educational system. A building that once housed high-school students could become part of the junior-high arrangement when a newer facility opened.

Alumni memories attached to the Addison name may consequently concern different places and generations. That does not make one set of memories more authentic; it means the institutional timeline needs room for both buildings and their separate working lives.

Integration created another turning point

The Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling held state-sanctioned public-school segregation unconstitutional.

Roanoke’s transition did not occur on that date alone. DHR records that, following the city’s school integration in 1971, Booker T.

Washington Junior High ceased school use and the building became administrative offices.

The sequence—1929 opening, 1952 renaming and the post-1971 change—makes the structure a record of institutional development rather than a single frozen moment. Families can recognize the school’s place in Black education while understanding why its sign and purpose changed.

Preserving that chronology honors students and teachers from more than one generation and keeps a surviving building connected to the educational work once carried out within it.

The movement of a school name between buildings creates a history of commemoration as well as instruction. Lucy Addison’s name recognized educational leadership, while the older structure continued serving students under another distinguished name.

Each identity linked the institution with a wider Black history, but neither name alone describes its entire use. Holding the dates together gives alumni from separate generations their own places in the record, including those who knew the building as a junior high rather than as Addison High School.