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Reimagining the Past for the Future: The Calfee Cultural and Community Center

Calfee Institute

Title of Project: Reimagining the Past for the Future: The Calfee Cultural and Community Center

Project Period (duration): 2024-Present

Localities: Pulaski, VA

Principal Investigators (PIs): Dr. Max Stephenson, Professor and Director, Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (VTIPG), Dr. Neda Moayerian, Assistant Professor, University of Tehran and VTIPG Non-Resident Research Associate

Co-Investigators: Planning, Governance and Globalization PhD students Brad Stephens and Amin Farzaneh with assistance from Armin Firouzi, Alliance for Social, Political, Ethnical, and Cultural Thought PhD student

Key Community Partners: Calfee Community & Cultural Center leaders & Calfee school alumni

Description of Project: 

During the past several months, a team of researchers from the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (VTIPG) has had the privilege of learning about the work occurring at the Calfee Cultural & Community Center (CCCC) in Pulaski, Virginia. The original Calfee Training School in which the CCCC is located was a Black elementary and middle school, which closed with desegregation in 1966 and has been vacant for some years. A group of school alumni and Pulaski residents has mobilized to reimagine the physical space as well as preserve the important and too-little-known history of the school, whose parents and administration played a vital role in both the local Black community and in the national civil rights struggle. The school’s leaders pressed the Corbin et al. v. County School Board of Pulaski County, VA legal case, which helped pave the way for the Supreme Court’s landmarking ruling Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka., KS.  The CCCC will shortly open Phase One of the renovated school building, which includes a much-needed community child-care center. Phase Two will include a community kitchen, School archive and museum, event space, and outdoor play area.

We are grateful to have been able to help capture some of the stories of the past and present that illuminate how the school operated and how it is now being reimagined by a group of dedicated alumni and community members. We are interested in learning more about the ways through which these institutions (the historic school and today’s nonprofit organization reimagining and renovating the school building) have influenced the capacity of those engaged with them to imagine other possibilities in an otherwise racially and socially oppressive environment. We seek to understand if and how either or both institutions have fostered social imagination to envision alternate ways of living in society to those prevailing, then and now. Overall, we are exploring how imagination might be fostered more broadly and intentionally, in recognition of its vital importance in efforts to secure social change.

Project Goals: 

  • Help to document stories of Calfee’s past for the CCCC museum/archive (via donation of the interview transcripts and recordings of the interviews we have conducted as part of our research)
  • Help to document the reimagining effort for the CCCC museum/archive (via the interviews we have undertaken for our inquiry)
  • Publish at least two academic journal articles related to the Calfee reimagination initiative

Project Materials:

  • Conference paper presentation at the International Society for Third Sector Research Conference in Antwerp, Belgium in July 2024
  • Development of at least one additional article addressing the history and evolution of the Calfee Training School

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