Abilene Negro High School
Abilene, Taylor County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first public school for African Americans in Abilene was established in 1890. Located in the 200 block of Plum Street, the one-room school was named the Abilene Colored School. Its first class consisted of 22 students and one teacher. In 1902 the school moved to a one-room structure built at North 7th and Magnolia, and had two teachers serving 84 students. The colored school held its first graduation in 1923 at the Macedonia Baptist Church for one student. A five-room school was constructed at 541 North 8th Street in 1929. That year the student body consisted of 217 pupils. The building was later used for the Americanization School for Abilene's Hispanic Youth, and as a community recreation center. A 10-room brick school was erected in 1936 here on a campus of more than 6 acres. A 4-room expansion was added in 1941. By 1951 the school became Carter G. Woodson School. In 1953 it became Woodson Elementary School with the opening of the Carter G. Woodson Junior-Senior High School at 342 North Cockrell Street. It was closed in 1968 when the Abilene School District became integrated. The structures continue to serve the Abilene community for various educational purposes. (1996)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Abilene's first public school for African American children opened in 1890 as a one-room building with a single teacher and twenty-two students. Over the decades it grew and moved repeatedly—holding its first graduation, of one student, at Macedonia Baptist Church in 1923 and rising to a ten-room brick campus by 1936. Renamed for historian Carter G. Woodson in 1951, the school served until 1968, when integration finally came to the Abilene district.
Why it matters
The school's long story embodies both the perseverance of Black education under segregation and the coming of integration that reshaped American public schooling.
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Related people
- · Carter G. Woodson
Related events
- · School integration
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Macedonia Baptist Church
Abilene, TX
In the Jim Crow West Texas of 1898, Abilene's Black community built its own institutions of faith and learning, and Macedonia Baptist Church became one of the sturdiest. Organized by the Rev. J. H. Herron with a handful of charter members who bought this ground and raised a frame sanctuary by 1903, the church did far more than hold Sunday services — it hosted the first commencement for the city's African American students around 1923 and steadied the community through decades that were sometimes genuinely dangerous for its pastors. Under H. D. Cumby's long ministry it grew into a modern building, and its leaders are credited with easing tensions through the turbulent 1960s and '70s.
Dyess Elementary School
Abilene, TX
On January 21, 1963, Dyess Elementary became the first school in the Abilene Independent School District to integrate, enrolling 38 African American children — most from military families at Dyess Air Force Base who had been bused past this closer school to the segregated Woodson School. Texas had tried to stall desegregation with House Bill 65, but after the state attorney general declared it unconstitutional in 1962 and the Defense Department threatened to cut funding, the district's board voted unanimously to begin. Full integration of Abilene's schools followed step by step, completed only in 1970.
Mexican-American / Americanization School
Abilene, TX
For generations, schooling for Mexican American children in Texas ranged from nonexistent to nominally equal, and Abilene's history tracks that hard road. By 1910 the city ran a separate public school for Mexican American pupils in the lower grades, and in 1920 opened an "Americanization" school meant to press English and Anglo customs on its students — facilities that were often visibly inferior to those given Anglo children. Only across the mid-20th century, as Mexican American Abilenians pushed into higher education and public life, did attitudes and institutions slowly integrate, until the neighborhood's old campus was repurposed in 1979.
Eugenia Pickard
Abilene, TX
Born in Georgia around 1877, Eugenia Pickard settled in Abilene in the early 1900s and quietly transformed its Black neighborhoods, owning properties she offered rent-free to poor families with children and setting aside places for African American children to play where the city gave them no parks. At her death in 1945 she willed her savings and land to Abilene for a new Black schoolhouse; when the funds fell short, the community instead dedicated the Eugenia Pickard Library inside Carter G. Woodson High School. It became an educational and social hub for the surrounding neighborhood.