About Us
Our Story
Henry Highland Garnett was born into slavery in Maryland in 1815. At the age of 10, his family escaped slavery and moved to New York. In the 1840s, he became an abolitionist. He was the first Black speaker to give a speech in the House of Representatives. Here in Charleston, one of 3 Black high schools in the county was named after him.
The Garnet School (the stone cutting company made a spelling error leaving off one t and the Board of Education didn’t require them to fix it) was founded in 1900 by C.W. Boyd in an elementary school, then in 1927 the school moved to the location we know today on the corner of Dickinson and Shrewsbury Streets. Located in an area called “The Block,” the school was a hub for black owned businesses and was a pillar of the African American community. The spring of 1956 was the last segregated class. In the fall semester of 1956, the building housed the Kanawha Co. Technical High School.
After integration, it housed Kanawha Co School Technical High School from 1954-1961 and then John Adams Junior High while the building we currently know was under construction then became the Career Center that Kanawha County Schools owned until 3 years ago when it was sold to the Garnet Foundation (alumni group).
Notable alumni include: Reverend Leon Sullivan, medical pioneer John C. Norman Jr., Tony Brown, and Ivin Lee (first woman to head a police department in WV).