The National Park Service is studying whether the West Baltimore elementary school attended by late Supreme Court Justice and civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall could qualify for designation as a new National Park unit.

The school was integrated after Marshall won the Brown vs. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court in 1954. It was closed as a school in the early 1970s, then served until the 1990s as the Upton Cultural and Arts Center. It’s been vacant ever since.

But the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development last year awarded Beloved Community Services, a community development nonprofit, the rights to rehabilitate the building. The group’s president, the Rev. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr. — senior pastor of the nearby Union Baptist Church — said he has raised about $4 million of the $8 million needed for construction so far.

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