Fayette County Public Schools officials and students, along with representatives from the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government will break ground on a brand new community school in downtown Lexington on Saturday, May 12.Groundbreaking for William Wells Brown Elementary School, which will replace Johnson Elementary and the now-closed Russell Elementary, will begin at 10 a.m. at the construction site located at 555 East Fifth Street (near the corner of Sixth Street and Shropshire Avenue).
The new $15 million community school is being built jointly by the school district and the city. The community school will not only offer a world class education for children during the school day, but will offer educational and recreation activities for residents of all ages after school and on weekends.
The school will open its doors to students in the fall of 2008.
The school was named for William Wells Brown, who was born in Lexington 1814 and was the first African-American to publish a novel, a play, a travel book, a book-length historical account of the Civil War, a military study of his people, and a study of African American sociology.
At the age of 20, he escaped from slavery and took the name of a Quaker who assisted him along the Underground Railroad. He immediately began to educate himself to read and write and in 1844 he began his career as a dynamic spokesman in the abolitionist movement.
Distinguishing himself as an unusually articulate playwright, novelist, essayist, and historian, Brown was a practicing physician, who advocated prison reform, temperance and equal rights for women. He published more than a dozen books and pamphlets including travel books, novels, a drama, histories and lectures.
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