![]() ![]() “The whole issue of how African Americans were treated back in those days - it’s one that not a lot of people have wanted to discuss openly.” She is the author of “Thriving in the Shadows: The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County” (2007). “We’re in a phase in this country in which people are really torn by a discussion of the difficulties from our pasts,” says Flono, an award-winning journalist who retired as associate editor of The Charlotte Observer. ![]() She also worked to share the history of the school that had remained for a long time unknown to many in the area. Flono led fundraising and awareness efforts to relocate and restore the school. Saving the Siloam School has been an almost decade-long effort shepherded by Fannie Flono, the chair of the Save Siloam School Project, which was commissioned by the history museum. He considers it a privilege to work at the museum in his first full-time job. “My thought was, “How can I best prepare myself to communicate historical ideas with the public?’” says Dahm. He was promoted to his current role less than a year later. ![]() In May he joined the Charlotte Museum of History as an adult education specialist. His senior thesis in history examined how the media in a small town in California dealt with coverage of the Ku Klux Klan.ĭahm received a master’s in education from Wake Forest, then moved to Colorado, where he got a master’s of history at Colorado State University in Fort Collins in 2022. He double-majored in history and politics and international affairs. I had to fill my schedule with something, and I was like, ‘Oh, let’s take Latin American history,’” Dahm says. “I signed up for a Spanish class, but the class didn’t have enough people signed up and got canceled. He likes to tell the story of accidentally finding his first history class with associate professor Mir Yarfitz. So, yeah, I would definitely credit debate with that early interest in Black history.” ![]() On Wake Forest’s diverse team, debate challenged him “to think more critically, think more about my history and about the history of everything. “Debate was an opportunity for me to meet, interact, talk about the world with all sorts of people from around the country.” “Being from Iowa, it was a very white, sort of upper middle class suburb that I was in,” he says. Saving it has become a $1.2 million effort.īeginning in high school, debate opened his perspective. The school is on the National Register of Historic Places but endangered because of its deterioration. “It’s a microcosm of the whole story of Charlotte,” says Dahm, “starting in slavery through the modern day where we see massive growth of apartment complexes and the expansion of (the city).” For him, it prompts a question that he says he and his colleagues are still trying to answer: How can a community save local history amid a rush for development?ĭahm is leading the long-range planning for turning the structure into an educational space in which the Greater Charlotte community can interact - but not before the dilapidated building is relocated to the museum’s property and fully restored, down to its original Rosenwald-era paint colors. The school is a living piece of history that Nolan Dahm (‘19, MAEd ‘20) is helping to bring back to life as the programs and exhibits manager at the Charlotte Museum of History. The Siloam School is one of 5,000 Rosenwald Schools built across the South to educate Black children in the early 20th century. Weathered wood siding buckles from age, and the windows are boarded up, holding in the memories of the structure’s century-old history. The building is tucked within a grove of trees, reached by driving through an apartment complex. The one-room schoolhouse sits high upon red brick stilts atop a grassy hill in northeastern Mecklenburg County. ![]()
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