Timeline: 1952
Booker T. Washington Elementary opened at 606 E. Grove Street in Champaign, IL. Originally built for African American students it was integrated in the 1970s becoming a Magnet School.
Dunbar Court, a 26 unit Public Housing complex, was built in Urbana, IL, at Wright and Bradley Streets, across from the new Booker T. Washington Elementary School.
Ellen Bell Treadwell Rivers became the choir director and of Bethel AME Church and the head of its youth missionary society. During the 1930s she had her own jazz band in the St. Louis/Alton, IL, area that travelled the Midwest. As a teenager in 1917, she experienced the East St. Louis Riots where approximately 250 African Americans were murdered by roaming white mobs.
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