Following the “separate but equal” decision passed down in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Oklahoma’s first state constitution required segregated schools for black and white children; not only the buildings but also the curriculum remained segregated. Unlike their white counterparts, Black children learned about the Haitian Revolution in school and at home. Despite efforts to promote white supremacy through textbooks authored, published, and taught by mostly white educators, Black Americans sustained a public memory of the Haitian Revolution and Black transatlantic identity through print and oral cultures. The curriculum in Black schools, like L’Ouverture, emphasizing historical moments like the Haitian Revolution was a form of resistance to the idea propagated by whites that Black students were incapable of benefiting from a white supremacist education. For instance, only days before the state legislature voted on the constitution, an editorial appeared in The Daily Oklahoman newspaper. The author wrote, “Give the negro a chance, by teaching him that he is a negro. He is not as intelligent as a white man. He will never be as intelligent as a white man and why not let him understand as much NOW.” The next year, the legislature passed a law that included fines for teachers violating the law segregating schools and white students who attended Black schools.
When McAlester erected an all-Black school in 1908, a Black teacher, Sayde L. Davis, who had recently moved to Oklahoma from Missouri, chose to name the school after Toussaint Louverture. L’Ouverture translates to “the opening.” The naming of the school was part of a Black Atlantic revolutionary tradition started in colonial Haiti, carried through the American Civil War, and continued in defiance and resistance to twentieth-century racial discrimination. Black Americans knew about the Haitian Revolution, including those in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. They saw Louverture and Haiti as powerful symbols. Even Davis’s home state of Missouri, has a town named Hayti, incorporated in 1895. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration added an art deco style gymnasium/auditorium to the L’Ouverture school in McAlester, a significant project, “because construction of it provided work opportunities for black unskilled and unemployed laborers who had long been without work and because it provided space for school and community activities that promoted a sense of identity and pride not widely known the black ward.” The school closed in 1968 with integration, but two members of the class of 1965, Class Valedictorian Herbert Keith and Class President Primus Moore purchased the property in 2014 to preserve it and repurpose it for the community.