Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School, or King Arts, is a K-8 magnet school located in Evanston, Illinois. The school was formed in 1967 by combining Skiles Middle School, which had taught grades 6-8 and sat on the site of the current King Arts School and the original Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School, which had taught grades K-5 and was housed in the building of the old Foster School at Foster and Dewey.HistoryFoster School was a de facto segregated school in Evanston, Illinois named after Northwestern University president Randolph Sinks Foster. Founded in 1903 and opened in 1905, Foster School began with a one hundred percent white student body and faculty, but by 1945 it was nearly one hundred percent African American. Foster School was one of the only public schools in the Evanston area where African American children were encouraged to attend and where African-American teachers could find employment until 1967, when School District 65 was desegregated. The Foster School Reunion collection is housed at the Shorefront Legacy Center in Evanston, Illinois. The collection was processed by the Black Metropolis Consortium as part of the Color Curtain Processing Project.In 1967, Foster School transitioned into the Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School in which 25% of the school's student body was African American during the first year of enrollment. The school moved from the Foster School building into the Skiles Middle School building in 1976.