Valerie Coleman & Marian Coleman, Curators, Descendants of Rosenwald School Builder Webster Wheeler

Valerie Coleman and Marian Coleman--Curators, Descendants of Rosenwald School Builder Webster Wheeler

The Great Migration was the movement of six million African Americans out of the South to the urban centers of the North, Midwest, and West. Motivated by segregation, violence, and lack of economic opportunity, it was one of the largest internal movements of people in world history. At the migration's outset in the mid-1910s, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South. By the end of the 1960s that figure had fallen to 53 percent.

Webster Wheeler left Cassville, Georgia, and arrived in Detroit as part of the migration. The photograph of him that is in the frame dates from his time in his new city. As Isabel Wilkerson points out in The Warmth of Other Suns, her Pulitzer Prize-winning treatise on the Great Migration, to have one's photograph taken was "a ritual of arrival that just about every migrant did," for it proved that one had reached a promised new land. Trained as a carpenter, Wheeler spent his career working for the Ford Motor Company. Upon hearing that his hometown had been awarded a Rosenwald grant, he returned in 1923 and, along with community member Daniel Harris, built the new school.

The Noble Hill School (Bartow County, Georgia, 1923-1955) today serves as a cultural heritage center with a focus on Black life in North Georgia. It hosts picnics, weddings, meetings, and numerous educational tours for students from elementary school to college. The center is curated by Valerie Coleman (left), the great-great-granddaughter of Webster Wheeler. Marian Coleman, one of the last graduates of Noble Hill, is the great-granddaughter of Wheeler. She preceded her niece as curator. They stand, holding the photograph of Webster Wheeler, in front of an original blackboard and under the gaze of Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and President Barack Obama.

About the photographer: Andrew Feiler

Andrew Feiler is a fifth-generation Georgian. Having grown up Jewish in Savannah, he has been shaped by the rich complexities of the American South. Andrew has long been active in civic life. He has helped create over a dozen community initiatives, serves on multiple not-for-profit boards, and is an active advisor to numerous elected officials and political candidates. His art is an extension of his civic values.

Andrew's photographs have been featured in such publications as Smithsonian, Wall Street Journal, Architect, Preservation, Slate, Lenscratch, Oxford American, and The Bitter Southerner. His work has been displayed in galleries and museums including solo exhibitions at such venues as the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Octagon Museum in Washington, D.C., International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, NC, and Burrison Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His work is in a number of public and private collections including that of Atlanta University Center and Emory University. More of his work can be seen at andrewfeiler.com.