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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Abilene grew up in the 1880s as a railroad and cattle town in West Texas. Like the rest of Texas at the time, it built its public institutions under segregation. Black and white children went to separate schools by law, and the schools for Black students almost always got less money, fewer buildings and fewer teachers.
Across the South and Southwest, African American families responded with determination. They pushed for schools, supported teachers, raised money and often held graduations, meetings and celebrations in their churches, the institutions they controlled most fully. Education was seen as a path to opportunity and dignity at a time when both were deliberately withheld.
The twentieth century brought slow change. The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, but in many districts, including many in Texas, integration took years or even more than a decade to arrive. Abilene's Black school carried the community's hopes through that whole long arc.
People & events
Abilene's first public school for African American children opened in 1890 in a single room on the 200 block of Plum Street. It was called the Abilene Colored School, and it began with twenty-two students and one teacher. By 1902 it had moved to North 7th and Magnolia, where two teachers served eighty-four students, which gives some sense of how crowded and demanding those classrooms must have been.
The school's first graduation came in 1923, held at Macedonia Baptist Church for a single graduate. The number is moving. It speaks to how hard it was to reach the end of the road, and to a community that turned out to honor one student's achievement. In 1929 a five-room school went up on North 8th Street for 217 pupils. That building later served as an Americanization School for Abilene's Hispanic youth and as a community recreation center.
In 1936 a ten-room brick school was built on a campus of more than six acres, and four more rooms were added in 1941. By 1951 the school carried the name of Carter G. Woodson, the historian often called the father of Black history, who championed the study of African American history and launched the observance that grew into Black History Month. In 1953 a separate Carter G. Woodson Junior-Senior High School opened on North Cockrell Street, and this campus became Woodson Elementary. It closed in 1968, when the Abilene school district integrated.
Its place in the American story
The history of this school follows the history of Black education in America in miniature: a one-room start, persistent growth despite unequal resources, a proud identity, and finally the closing that came with integration. Communities across the country lived some version of this story, and many of the schools involved have since disappeared.
The name Carter G. Woodson carries special weight. Woodson spent his career insisting that African Americans had a history worth studying and teaching. Naming a segregated school after him was an act of pride and a statement about what its students deserved to learn about themselves.
The 1968 closing reflects a mixed legacy that historians and former students often describe. Integration was a hard-won legal and moral victory. Yet the end of schools like Woodson also meant losing institutions that had been centers of community life, often staffed by devoted Black teachers who knew their students and families well. Both parts of that story belong to the national memory of the civil rights era.
If you visit
The campus you're visiting grew out of that 1936 brick school, set on more than six acres. As you look around, remember the whole sequence behind it: a single room on Plum Street, a few teachers stretched across dozens of children, and a community that kept building better schools in the face of deliberate neglect.
The buildings still serve Abilene for educational purposes, so be mindful of any activity on the grounds and respect posted access rules. The marker itself is the best place to pause and take in the story.
Abilene has plenty to fill a day, and this stop adds real depth to a visit. If you're traveling with young people, it's a good place to talk about Carter G. Woodson, about what it meant for a community to hold a graduation for just one student, and about how recent the end of school segregation really is.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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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
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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
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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
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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.