Former black Alabama school campus will become memorial park

Councill memorial park

The campus of William Hooper Council High School in Huntsville, Ala., will become a downtown park honoring the former slave, attorney, educator and Alabama Supreme Court justice. The remaining school building, shown here, will provide bricks for park benches and paths.

After years of starts and stops, Huntsville officials broke ground Friday on a downtown park honoring black leader William Hooper Councill. The park will be constructed near the downtown public library on the site of Councill High School, the city’s former high school for black students.

“We started this journey many, many years ago,” Mayor Tommy Battle said. “We worked through many iterations of what could make this a lasting memorial to the school and something that was special for the community, too, because this school is special.”

Battle said the school was “a place of education but also a place of community and that’s what it’s going back to, a place for the community.”

“Believe in the legacy, do that memorial, but you are leaving a legacy with your interactions with the individuals who come come behind you,” Devyn Keith, Huntsville’s first black City Council president, told Councill alumni in the audience. “I am a product of that legacy. You have done a lot for the landscape of this community. I don’t take that lightly.”

The park will sit behind the main public library in an area of Huntsville that is rapidly changing with the addition of new hotels, commercial buildings, restaurants and soon a federal courthouse. Its seat walls and columns will be made of bricks from the last Councill school building still on the site. Battle said the city hopes to finish the park in 2019.

The park’s design will mirror the floor plan of Councill High School. The school’s gym, auditorium, cafeteria, courtyard and classrooms will be represented in the layout. The design largely came from the school’s alumni, Battle said, because it was not the city’s place to design a park honoring their experience.

The park will have water and electrical infrastructure to host events, and it will be connected to other renovated areas of downtown.

Brenda Chunn, president of William Hooper Councill Alumni Association, opened the event relating Councill’s legacy and the school’s impact on generations of black students. A former slave, Councill founded Alabama A&M University and went on to become a legislator and lawyer who practiced before the Alabama Supreme Court.

“He trained himself at the highest level,” Chunn said. “There was no aspect of community life that William Hooper Councill, the man, did not access.”

In the black community, Chunn said Councill’s “standard of excellence” was what the school stood for. And if you were black in Huntsville for many years, you graduated there.

“I think of the Dorothy Turner term papers and how to footnote those,” Chunn said to laughter from alumni present. “I mean she had no humor when it came to the quality of our work as our English teacher.”

Chunn said Councill students “knew that every single teacher in the school was giving their best, and they expected no less from each and every one of us.” She called the school “a treasure” in Huntsville and the park “a fitting memorial” to that treasure.

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