The very successful Booker T. Washington Magnet High School was built in 1948, and it appears to have been the first of the avalanche of school construction following WW II. It preceded the T L Bear school design formula, but certainly was a forerunner. The building was erected on the site of the old “Swayne College”, which occupied this corner from 1869 to 1937, when it closed. General Wager Swayne served under the infamous and despised Yankee General William Sherman, and he participated in Sherman’s needlessly destructive “March to the Sea”. After the Civil War ended, Swayne commanded the Union Army’s Occupation of Alabama, during which time he founded high schools in Selma, Montgomery and Mobile. The citizens of Montgomery were quite pleased in 1949 to see the Swayne school replaced with something named for the much admired Booker T. Washington.

-Charles Humphries