WEST PLAINS, Mo. — The first Crockett Oaks came to Missouri in the 1920s from Arkansas. A descendant of slaves, he ended up in Howell County looking for work.
Oaks and his wife, Willie, settled on “The Hill,” an area on the northeast side of town with streets named after presidents — Jefferson, Washington, Jackson, Lincoln. Black people lived in the area during a time of deep segregation.
Oaks had two sons and three daughters. The oldest son, Crocket Oaks Jr., still lives in West Plains, just a few blocks from where he grew up. He described his dad, who worked in a railroad garage and as a janitor, as all “blood and muscle.” He believed in working hard for a living. Willie wanted her children to get an education.
For Black children in southwest Missouri in the first half of the 20th century, that meant going to a segregated school. The Oaks lived near the Lincoln School, a one-room building. It served Black students from West Plains and surrounding communities from 1920 until 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Brown vs. Board of Education that it was unconstitutional to force Black students into segregated schools that were not equal to the schools white children attended.
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Crockett Oaks III stands in front of the Lincoln School, a one-room schoolhouse in West Plains. He and his wife are preserving it.
After third grade, in 1954, Crockett Oaks Jr., transferred to the now-integrated schools in West Plains. He has melancholy memories about the experience. Sure, there was some racism, but he learned to get along with his new classmates.
“It didn’t bother us that bad,” Oaks Jr., who is now 78, remembers. “But I was young enough that I didn’t know any better.”
I visited with him recently because of an email I received from his son, Crockett Oaks III. The grandson of the original Crockett Oaks recently moved back to West Plains, where he is an associate vice chancellor at Missouri State University’s local campus. He returned to his hometown after a wide-ranging career as an FBI agent, Army Reservist, security specialist and investigator with the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office.
He found the Lincoln School, still standing in a neighborhood much less vibrant than in his father’s youth, in a state of disrepair.
Since the Lincoln School closed in 1954, it’s been used as a VFW lodge, a meeting place for Girl Scouts and, most recently, a home for a local Alcoholics Anonymous branch. Earlier this year, Oaks and his wife, Tanya, bought the building from the city. They’ve created a nonprofit and are turning it into a cultural center to tell the story of the Ozarks, particularly The Hill.
“This place deserved a higher calling,” Oaks III says. “The history of this building needed to be more prominently celebrated. This is really the only thing that remains from the historic African-American community in West Plains.”
Crockett Oaks III
His father is one of the last living graduates of the Lincoln School. Before desegregation, students who wanted to go to high school had to travel from West Plains to Kansas City or St. Louis. That’s what his older sisters did. Some would stay in the city, where there was a larger African-American population and more jobs.
As he goes about the process of fundraising and rehabbing the school, Oaks’ contractors have stripped the inside of the 635-square-foot building to the studs. The original wood floor is still there, but it needs to be sanded and buffed. The brick fireplace remains. The basement is being rehabbed. The plans also call for a mural telling the story of The Hill, a podcast studio, and a display space for artists and historians to tell the stories of forgotten local cultures.
His father doesn’t talk much about segregation and racism. But the younger Oaks is cognizant of the reemergence of white supremacism in some areas, political moves to paint “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” in a negative light, and efforts to whitewash America’s history.
Saving the Lincoln School is bigger than preserving a part of his family history, and the history of West Plains, Oaks says. It is part of making sure that “history doesn’t repeat itself.”
To learn more about the Lincoln School, go to lincolnschoolproject.com.