African American Heritage Center at Calfee
The mission of the African American Heritage Center is to honor the rich and continually unfolding legacy of the Calfee Training School, to fill the current void in the community’s understanding of local African American history, and to connect all of this to current struggles for equity and fairness by establishing and operating a museum and archive.
Our archive is specifically dedicated to the history of the Calfee Training School and African American history in Pulaski, VA as well as Southwestern Virginia more broadly. The museum will feature highly interactive and multi-sensory exhibits designed to share the story of Pulaski’s struggle for equal education for Black children in such a way that visitors will have no choice but to walk away inspired to act courageously in the face of injustices today and in the future.
Help us grow our archive!
Calfee Center is dedicated to preserving your donated materials so they remain accessible to community members and researchers for generations to come. Once accepted into our archive, items are housed in a secure, climate-controlled environment, where trained staff care for, manage, and preserve them in accordance with archival standards. The collections will be accessible to you and your family, as well as the public and researchers — including students, educators, genealogists, and journalists — helping us share a more complete history of education and African American life in Southwestern Virginia.
To ensure donated items are properly cared for, all materials for the African American Heritage Center at Calfee (Calfee Museum & Archive) must be arranged in advance and accompanied by a signed Deed of Gift. Please do not drop off historical or archival materials without first connecting with a Calfee Museum & Archive representative. We want to ensure every item is received safely and accurately documented.
If you’re interested in donating archival materials or historical artifacts to Calfee’s Museum & Archive, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact our Research Director, Clay Adkins, at clay@calfeeccc.org, or our Executive Director, Jill Williams, at jill@calfeeccc.org or 540-440-9081.
Examples of donated materials:
Photographs
Personal papers or letters
Newspaper articles
Scrapbooks/photo albums
School materials such as report cards, homework, and student newspapers.
Administrative records, lesson plans, speeches, or lectures.
Yearbooks or school publications
Family or genealogical information
All spaces at the Calfee Center are named for the historic school’s educators whose portraits and biographical information grace the hallways.
Calfee student portraits greet visitors as they enter the building.
Thanks to grants from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s Commonwealth History Fund, the Quiet Courage exhibit has been designed and is ready to produce when the front portion of the building has been renovated.
Check out the 23/54 Project site to learn about the 23 brave Pulaski families who took on the Pulaski County School Board in a struggle for equal educational opportunities for Black children.
The 23/54 Project is sponsored by the Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia initiative of Virginia Tech, funded by the Mellon Foundation.
