When Laverne Greene-Leech, founder and director for the R.E. Hunt Museum and Cultural Center, returned to the museum the day after an EF-3 tornado tore through in February 2019 she was distraught by what she saw.
“It was like I had lost a family member,” Greene-Leech told The Dispatch. “All I could do was stand there and cry, because when I looked at the doors, everything was blown off. There were holes in the roof and water was running down on everything. It was glass from one end of the room to the other.”
All the museum’s historical artifacts and pictures were bagged up and taken to a climate-controlled storage room in Columbus. The rest of the former Hunt High School – which Columbus Municipal School District at the time was using as an alternative school – also closed due to significant tornado damage.
Following more than $20 million in renovations, the school reopened in July as R.E. Hunt Intermediate School, housing the district’s fifth- and sixth-graders. By December, the museum will be open again, as well.
Greene-Leech said “it means everything” to have the chance to see the museum return to life.
More than 200 people gathered Thursday night to commemorate the historical significance of the recently reopened Hunt Intermediate School, with the unveiling of a historic marker and monument. The school, which opened in 1953 as R.E. Hunt High School, housed African-American students until CMSD desegregated in 1970.
The idea for the museum started in 2010 when Greene-Leech presented the idea to other Hunt alumni and members at her church.
She started with a petition and got together a long list of signatures from “every Hunt alumni” she could find in support of the museum, which she presented to the CMSD Board of Trustees, Greene-Leech said.
“I sent a letter to them also, and this building was just, it was not being used at all,” Greene-Leech said. “… It was just a storage building. … And when we walked in and looked at it … we said, ‘Oh yeah, we can handle this.’”
Greene-Leech said in 2012 the museum opened with four rooms in the back of the school. It aimed to bring light to the historical records and items of historical significance for students of historically Black schools in the area like R.E. Hunt High School and Union Academy but eventually expanded to all of Lowndes County.
‘The community’s history’
In its heyday, the museum housed more than 200 historical items, donated primarily by R.E. Hunt High School alumni, Greene-Leech said.
Some of those items included old class photos from R.E. Hunt High School and Union Academy, a display of photos and uniforms of Black veterans who served during the Vietnam War, photos of Robert Gleed, the first Black councilman in Columbus and a plough used by students who worked on farms before coming to school, Greene-Leech said.
“(This) is all we have in Columbus to tell our history. Because we don’t have antebellum homes, and even the homes that we did have, they’ve been torn down. So we didn’t have anything,” Greene-Leech said. “And this was the only place that our children could come and see where we had come from and (what) we want to instill in them.”
George Evelynn Brooks, an alumni of R.E. Hunt High School, said the museum has acted as a way to learn about and share stories of Black history in Columbus and she is glad its reopening along with the school.
“That’s our history, our school’s history and then the community’s history,” Brooks said. “So that is good. We don’t see ourselves in totality anywhere else in Columbus, but when we go to the museum, we can look at a picture and it really means something.”
Robert Smith, president of the CMSD Board of Trustees, said reestablishing the museum was a crucial part of the Hunt renovation.
“We hope that some of the students here, attending now, learn some of the history and they can carry this on forward as they grow older and get an education,” Smith said. “This is a beacon here in the African American community. If you think about it, if you ride across the state of Mississippi, most of your historically Black high schools are either destroyed or they are no longer open. But this is one school that is still here.”
Greene-Leech said she does not know how many of the museum’s items that were destroyed or damaged because of how quickly they were moved to storage.
“Everything was just grabbed up and put into a storage room … and it’s been there for six years,” Greene-Leech said. “So we’re going through it. We don’t know what shape it’s going to be in … and we have got to go through box by box.”
As Greene-Leech and her staff unpack the remaining boxes over the next few months, she said she is excited to bring the museum back to its former glory.
With the museum space now one room smaller due to the new bandroom at the school, Greene-Leech said she will rotate displays and incorporate the space into class lesson plans like during Black History Month.
“I love just coming in here, because I have got potential, and I can see what we can do,” Greene-Leech said. “… We just have to get started.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 29 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
