Cherokee Middle School was located at the eastern limits of Cherokee, Alabama

Cherokee, Alabama

Cherokee incorporated December 7 1871 is a town in west Colbert County, Alabama, United States. It is part of the Florence - Muscle Shoals Metropolitan Statistical Area known as "The Shoals". As of the 2000 census, the population of the town is 1,237....

 on the north side of County Road

County highway

A county highway is a road in the United States and in the Canadian province of Ontario that is designated and/or maintained by the county highway department...

 20. It served the children of western Colbert County

Colbert County, Alabama

Colbert County is a county of the U.S. state of Alabama. Its name is in honor of brothers George and Levi Colbert, Chickasaw Indian chiefs. George Colbert operated a ferry across the Tennessee River in 1790 near present day Cherokee....

 for grades 5 through 8. The decline of population in the western portion of the county caused the school to close at the end of the 2006 – 2007 school year and the grades merged into Cherokee High School and Cherokee Elementary.

History

Cherokee Middle School was originally Cherokee High School and designated the segregated

Racial segregation

Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...

 school for African American

African American

African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

 children. It was an original Rosenwald School

Rosenwald School

A Rosenwald School was the name informally applied to over five thousand schools, shops, and teachers' homes in the United States which were built primarily for the education of African-Americans in the early twentieth century. The need arose from the chronic underfunding of public education for...

. At that time the segregated school for “white

Caucasian race

The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...

” children was named Cherokee Vocational High School. After the original junior high school building (located on the Cherokee Vocation High School campus) burned in January, 1971 Cherokee Middle School began handling grades 5 through 8. The original building was removed in the 1980s and now the oldest buildings on the campus were in built in the 1960s.