A 1942 classroom with old-style wooden desks, a chalkboard, and a large, blown-up grade-school class photo showing Charles L. Blockson, one of only a handful of Black children in a predominantly white group, greets you early in the exhibition.
Blockson looks shy and pensive in the class photo. But it was a fourth-grade history class that fueled Blockson, then just 9 years old, with anger and lifelong determination.
The reconstituted classroom is part of the “Charles L. Blockson Exhibition: an African and Afro-American Collection,” which opened Friday at the Centre Theater Gallery in Norristown, Pennsylvania, which is the celebrated historian’s hometown and birthplace.
