It was an important centre for the Black community and provided the data for an influential study on how individual teachers matter.

Construction of the school was approved in 1868, and after operating temporarily in a church basement, the new building was opened by Queen Victoria's son Prince Arthur on 11 February 1870.

Crowded tenement houses were interspersed with an automobile repair shop, a dry-cleaning plant, and an armature-wiring factory.

[12] Royal Arthur was the elementary school attended by most Black students[13] and the primary source of youth in programs at the Negro Community Centre of Montreal (NCC).

[21] In 1968, Professor Eigil Pedersen of McGill University started studying how IQ changed from Grades 3 to 6 for students who had attended Royal Arthur about 30 years earlier,[22] and how this was correlated with adult status and achievement.

"[23] Pedersen's paper greatly surprised most education researchers who then generally believed that individual teachers had little effect on long-term student success compared to factors such as financial/social status and family structure.