Before the construction of Douglass High School, Black high school students attended classes in an unsafe building on the 2nd floor of the Loudoun County Training School. The frame structure offered a limited curriculum in an unsafe building. In the late 1930s, the County-Wide League, formed from parent-teacher associations of various Black schools in Loudoun County, organized fundraiser events to purchase 8 acres (3.2 ha) of land on the east side of Leesburg from W.S. Gibbons to build an accredited high school. The property was conveyed to Loudoun County for $1 on December 16, 1940. The League purchased land and hired well-known civil rights attorney Charles H. Houston to help persuade county officials to allocate funds for the new school. The League successfully negotiated to sell the land for $1 to the county in exchange for a school. In 1941, the League succeeded and the School Board obtained a loan of $30,000 from the State Literary Fund. The school opened in September 1941. The school was named for African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass at the request of the community organizers. Since a bare minimum of furnishings were provided by the county, more private donations were sought to more fully furnish the school. With desegregation in 1968 the building became a middle school, then a special education and alternative school.[*]
Douglass is a testament to the Black communities’ determination to obtain an equal education for their children.[**]
[**] Source: LDAA