On August 17, 2016, Director Kimberley Springle (right) joined me for my “first visit” photo outside the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives.
Kudos to Kimberly Springle, Director of Washington DC’s Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives. Springle brings boundless energy and passion to her work, and she is busy building collections and programs–and winning new friends and supporters for the institution.
Founded in 1872 during the Reconstruction Era, the Sumner School was one of the District’s first public high schools constructed for African American students. Today, the beautifully refurbished historic building includes gallery space, meeting facilities, offices, and lecture halls.
Located at 17th and M Streets, NW, the museum offers research opportunities for students, scholars, and others with an interest in the history of public education in the District. In the reading room, for example, visitors can examine minutes from meetings of the DC Board of Education and manuscript materials dating from the 19th century, some of which document the career of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, the esteemed DC educator and author of A Voice From the South, By a Black Woman of the South (1892).
For more information on the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, please see the May 28, 2016 Washington Post feature article on the institution, visit and like the museum’s Facebook page, stop by 17th and M for a visit, or call (202) 730-0478.
The Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives
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About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 