Alice O. Wilkins School

🏛️The era

Port Lavaca sits on the shore of Lavaca Bay along the middle Texas Gulf Coast, a town shaped by the water, by shipping and by the cattle country behind it. In the late nineteenth century, like every Texas community, it lived under a hardening system of racial segregation. After Reconstruction, Texas law required separate schools for Black and white children, and the Black schools almost always got less: less money, shorter terms, older buildings and fewer teachers.

Across the South, African American families answered that neglect by building education themselves. Churches lent their pastors and sanctuaries, parents raised money, and teachers held classes in whatever rooms they could find. Port Lavaca's first school for Black children began this way, as a single room with a single teacher.

In the early twentieth century a new force arrived. Starting in the 1910s, the Rosenwald Fund, created by Sears, Roebuck and Company leader Julius Rosenwald, who worked with educator Booker T. Washington, offered matching grants to build schools for Black children across the rural South. Local Black communities had to raise part of the cost themselves, and they did, in thousands of towns. Port Lavaca's Rosenwald School, built in 1923, was part of that movement.

The story ends with the long fight against segregation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but in much of Texas real integration took another decade. In Port Lavaca the school system did not fully integrate until 1965, which closed the chapter this school had written.

👥People & events

The story starts before the woman whose name the school carries. In the late 1800s a teacher named James Choice ran a one-room school for Port Lavaca's Black children. Later the Rev. A.K. Black, a Baptist pastor, took over. Under him the school taught grades one through five at Ann and Mulberry streets. Pairing preacher and teacher was common at the time, because the church was often the strongest institution a Black community controlled.

Then, in 1907, a teenager stepped off the train from Chicago. Alice Ora Crawford was only sixteen, yet she already held a degree from Fisk University in Nashville, one of the most respected Black colleges in the country. She took charge of the classroom, and over the following years she built it from a five-grade schoolhouse into a ten-grade school. In time she became its principal.

The marker remembers her as 'positive, yet stern', the kind of teacher students feared a little and loved a lot. She moved her students from the old one-room building into better quarters as they became available, including the Rosenwald School of 1923. Her personal life brought hard losses. Her first husband, Horace Miller, died, and her second husband, Dr. John H. Wilkins, died in 1917. Through it all she kept teaching.

In 1937, while she was still working, the Calhoun district school board renamed the Black high school, then called Rosenwald, in her honor. Honoring a living educator this way was rare. Five years later, in April 1942, she was decorating the school for a prom when she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She died the next day in Victoria and is buried there in Evergreen Cemetery. She had served Port Lavaca's children for more than thirty-five years.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Alice O. Wilkins belongs to a large and mostly unnamed group of Black educators who kept learning alive under Jim Crow. These were often women, many trained at historically Black colleges like Fisk, and they went to small towns and stayed for decades. They taught with secondhand books in underfunded buildings and sent generations of students into the wider world. Most of them got no marker. This one stands for many.

The Rosenwald School in her story ties Port Lavaca to one of the most remarkable partnerships of the early twentieth century. Rosenwald grants helped build schools for Black children across the South, and every one needed local matching money, much of it raised by Black families with little to spare. Each of those buildings stands for a community's own investment in its children.

The school's long life, from a one-room classroom in the 1800s to integration in 1965, also traces the full arc of segregated education in America. It shows that Brown v. Board of Education did not end segregation overnight. In many places the separate schools went on for years, and it was teachers like Wilkins who made them places of real learning in the meantime.

🧭If you visit

Port Lavaca is a quiet bayside town, and this marker invites you to slow down and imagine. Picture a sixteen-year-old teacher fresh from Chicago, facing a room of children in a Gulf Coast town. Then picture the same woman thirty-five years later, still on the job, hanging prom decorations for her students.

The marker mentions the school's early site at Ann and Mulberry streets. As you walk the nearby streets, think about how much of the town's Black community life once centered on its church and its school. Little of the original setting may survive, so let the marker's words do the work.

If your trip continues inland, Victoria is a short drive away. Alice O. Wilkins is buried there in Evergreen Cemetery, and visiting her resting place makes a quiet, meaningful pairing with this marker. Please treat it as the active burial ground it is.

For families this stop makes a good conversation starter. Ask your kids what it would mean to have a teacher only a few years older than they are, and to keep going to a school that changed buildings again and again because the community kept making room for it.