Colored School No. 5 was a one-story brick schoolhouse at Montgomery Street and Leffingwell Avenue, built in the late 1860s or early 1870s as part of St. Louis's post-Civil War system of segregated schools for Black children. The building featured a curved Baroque-style parapet above the entrance facade, a central arched doorway, and arched windows along the side elevation — a modest but distinctive design typical of the period's institutional vernacular. An 1875–76 photograph preserved in the St. Louis Public Library's Bicentennial Lantern Slide collection shows students and teachers gathered on the sidewalk in front of the school. Around 1890, when the St. Louis school system renamed its numbered "colored schools" after prominent African Americans, the building became Banneker Elementary School, honoring Benjamin Banneker (1731–1804), the self-taught Black mathematician and astronomer who helped survey Washington, D.C.
The St. Louis school board built Colored School No. 5 in 1885 at Montgomery Street and Leffingwell Avenue, one of the numbered schools it ran for Black children under Missouri's segregated system; the school had operated earlier in rented quarters. Around 1890 the board renamed its numbered colored schools for prominent African Americans, and No. 5 became Banneker Elementary School — named for Benjamin Banneker and the first St. Louis school to carry the name. Before 1930 the Banneker name and its school community moved to the former Stoddard School at 2840 Lucas Avenue (now Samuel T. Shepard Drive) in Midtown, and the Montgomery-and-Leffingwell building was closed and demolished; the demolition date is not recorded. The Banneker name carried through two further buildings — the Stoddard School, demolished in 1939, and the 1940 Art Deco building by George W. Sanger, which stands in Midtown and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
