African American Education in Gonzales

🏛️The era

When Black families in Gonzales started teaching their children in the 1870s, Texas was only a few years out of slavery. Emancipation had come to the state in June 1865, and the years after it were full of hope, hard work, and danger. Freed people across the South wanted many things, and education was near the top of the list: land, family, church, and the chance to read and write, which had been denied to most enslaved people.

Gonzales already had a place in Texas memory. In 1835 the town was the scene of the "Come and Take It" fight over a small cannon, often called the first battle of the Texas Revolution. The Texas that town helped create was also a slaveholding republic and then a slaveholding state. So the Black community that grew up in Gonzales after the Civil War was building its future in a town whose celebrated past had not included them as equals.

After Reconstruction, Texas, like the rest of the South, settled into legal segregation. Public schools for Black children usually got less money, older buildings, and fewer supplies than white schools. In that world, a school was never just a school. Families and churches built it, defended it, and paid for it again and again, often from their own pockets.

This marker covers almost a hundred years: from the first lessons after emancipation, through the Jim Crow decades, to the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, when federal courts and then Congress finally began taking segregated schooling apart.

👥People & events

It started in a house. In the 1870s Myrtle Moses Mathis opened her home to teach Black children in Gonzales. We don't know much about her beyond what the marker records, but what she did was common in the years after emancipation and it took courage. Private homes, church rooms, and borrowed parlors were where Black education in the South began, well before any government built a proper schoolhouse.

By the 1890s classes had moved into a two-story community building. That move matters. It meant the community had grown enough, and organized enough, that schooling was a shared public project and no longer one household's gift.

About 1914 a brick schoolhouse went up on land donated by W.M. Fly and Josephine K. Peck. Brick meant permanence, a building meant to last for generations. In 1922 the school took the name George Edwards High School. By 1940 it had some 300 students and eight teachers. Those numbers suggest crowded classrooms and teachers carrying heavy loads, which was typical of Black schools under segregation.

The ending is bittersweet. In 1964, as schools desegregated under the federal Civil Rights Act, Edwards High School closed, and the building was sold in the 1970s. Integration opened doors that had been shut for generations. Across the South, though, it also often meant Black schools closing, and with them went institutions that had anchored whole neighborhoods, along with their teams, traditions, and teachers.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Edwards High School tells the whole story of segregated Black education in the South in one place. It began with self-help right after emancipation, grew into a community institution under Jim Crow, and closed in the civil rights era. Thousands of Southern towns had a school like this one, and most have no marker at all.

The school's history also shows how slowly national change reached local classrooms. The Supreme Court ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Many Southern districts delayed for years afterward. It often took the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the federal pressure that came with it, to actually close the separate systems. In Gonzales, the marker ties Edwards's closing directly to that law.

There's a harder truth here as well. Desegregation was a great moral victory, and it was also a real loss for many Black communities. Schools like Edwards were places where Black teachers taught Black children with pride and high expectations. Remembering them is part of telling the civil rights story honestly.

🧭If you visit

Come to this marker slowly and with respect. The school building was sold decades ago, so you're mostly visiting a memory. Try to picture it anyway: children walking to class in a brick building their community had worked for, and graduates who went out into a segregated world carrying what they learned there.

Gonzales is an easy stop in the South Texas countryside, and it rewards a wander. The town's pride in its 1835 "Come and Take It" history is on display, and it's worth taking that in alongside this marker. Seeing both gives you a fuller picture of who has shaped this town and whose stories get told.

If you're traveling with kids, this is a good place to talk about what school meant to families who had been denied it. Ask them to imagine learning to read at a neighbor's kitchen table because no school would take them. It's a short conversation they'll remember.

Fit it into a road trip through the historic small towns between San Antonio and Houston. Gonzales pairs well with other county-seat towns in the region, each with its own layers of history to find.