African American Education in Belton
Belton, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Bell County school districts were formed in 1854. The earliest record of public education for area African American students dates from 1882 when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." Professor Thomas Breckenridge Harris (1862-1907), a graduate of Fisk University, became the first instructor of the African American High School in 1890. The name "West Belton School" was chosen in 1900. In 1936 a new building was erected on this site to house African American students of all grade levels. By petition the school was named "T. W. Harris" for its revered former principal. The last class graduated in 1966; Belton schools were integrated the following year. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Public education for Black students in Belton dates to 1882, when Mrs. Aleck McGee was hired "to teach the colored school." In 1890 Fisk University graduate Thomas Breckenridge Harris became the first instructor of the African American high school, and in 1936 a new building rose on this site for students of all grades, named T. W. Harris in his honor. The last class graduated in 1966, and Belton's schools integrated the following year.
Why it matters
The school embodies the long era of segregated "colored schools" and the Black educators who sustained them, right up to the desegregation that ended them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When public schooling first came to Bell County, Texas, in 1854, the promise of a free education did not extend to everyone. For enslaved and, later, freed Black Texans, learning was something built from the ground up in the decades after the Civil War. The years from Reconstruction through the turn of the century were a time of both hope and hard limits across the American South, and Belton was no exception.
By 1882, when the county's earliest record of public education for Black students appears, the region was settling into the long pattern that would define it for generations: separate schools for Black and white children, funded and staffed unequally, yet held together by communities determined to see their children learn.
That determination carried Black education in Belton across two distinct eras of American life — the Reconstruction and Gilded Age world of its founding, and the Progressive and modern decades in which it grew, was rebuilt, and finally closed.
People & events
The story begins with a hiring in 1882: Mrs. Aleck McGee, brought on "to teach the colored school." It is a small line in the record, but it marks the first documented commitment of public resources to educating Black children in the area — one teacher, one classroom, one beginning.
Eight years later came the figure whose name the school would one day carry. Thomas Breckenridge Harris, born in 1862 and a graduate of Fisk University in Nashville — one of the historically Black colleges founded to train a new generation of teachers and leaders — became the first instructor of the African American high school in 1890. To have a Fisk man leading a Texas classroom was no small thing; it linked this community to the broader movement of Black educators fanning out across the South.
The institution grew and took on names that reflected its community: "West Belton School" in 1900, and in 1936 a new building on this very site to house Black students of every grade level. By petition — a deliberate act of the community's own voice — it was named "T. W. Harris" for the revered principal who had died in 1907. The last class walked its halls in 1966, and the following year Belton's schools integrated.
Its place in the American story
The arc of this one school traces, in miniature, the whole national history of segregated education in America. From the first "colored school" teacher hired in the 1880s to a dedicated building in the 1930s to the desegregation of the late 1960s, Belton lived out the same story that played across thousands of towns.
Schools like this one were the institutions the Supreme Court had in mind in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared separate schools inherently unequal. Yet as the closing date here reminds us, the end of legal segregation did not arrive overnight; it came town by town, often a decade or more after the ruling, as Belton's 1967 integration shows.
And the naming of the school for T. B. Harris speaks to something the wider record often overlooks: the Black educators who sustained these institutions were the backbone of their communities. A Fisk graduate teaching in a segregated Texas school embodied a national investment — the founding of Black colleges after the Civil War — paying forward exactly as its founders had hoped.
If you visit
Stand on this site and picture the 1936 building that once rose here for students of every age, from the youngest children to the graduating seniors of the high school. This was a single campus carrying an entire community's educational life under one roof — a common arrangement for Black schools in the segregation era, when resources were stretched thin.
As you read the marker, let the names sink in: Mrs. Aleck McGee, the first teacher, and Professor Thomas Breckenridge Harris, the Fisk graduate whose community loved him enough to petition for his name. Those two names bracket the human story here far better than any date does.
Belton sits in central Texas, and a stop here pairs naturally with exploring the wider history of Bell County. If you're building a road trip around African American heritage or the history of American education, this quiet spot rewards a slow, thoughtful visit — a place where you can feel the long distance traveled between 1882 and integration, and the people who made that journey possible.
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
- · Thomas Breckenridge Harris
- · Aleck McGee
Themes & tags
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