Penn School

The Penn School, formerly located at 4237 Pennsylvania Avenue, served as the first school built west of the Mississippi River for the express purpose of educating black children. Although its establishment is attributed to several dates around the Civil War, whatever schooling for African American children that had previously taken place in the vicinity of Westport was relocated to the simple brick building, at the terminus of Pennsylvania Avenue at its intersection with Mill Street and the old Westport extension of the trolley line, when the Westport school district acquired the property in 1869. 

Named for William Penn, the founder of the English colony of Pennsylvania, the school was built to serve the burgeoning African American community of the Westport area. Centered around two churches, St. Luke's A.M.E. Church, located near today's intersection of Roanoke Parkway and Southwest Trafficway, and St. James Baptist Church on the corner of 43rd and Washington, the community clustered together in an enclave of several blocks known as the Steptoe neighborhood. Many of the children's parents would have worked in the domestic service industry as maids, cooks, and housemen in the rapidly expanding Country Club District further south.  

During most of the school's existence, it taught students from kindergarten through seventh grade, before usually sending graduates to Lincoln, Central, or Manual High Schools farther from the neighborhood. Grades four through seven were taught in one room of the schoolhouse, the younger children in another.  

The decision of the United States Supreme Court to end school segregation and a dwindling enrollment caused the Penn School's shuttering in 1955. Attempts to reopen the school or to find new uses for the property were unsuccessful, and the vacant building was destroyed by a fire in 1963. In its place today is the site of a surface parking lot, although the adjacent corner was named Dr. Jeremiah Cameron Park, after a parks Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioner and college professor who attended the Penn School. Among other notable alumni of the school is Charlie "Bird" Parker, a seminal figure in jazz, blues, and bebop influential in musical development in Kansas City and beyond.