Big Spring School District

🏛️The era

Big Spring grew up around water. The spring the town is named for was a landmark on the dry plains of West Texas long before any settlers arrived, and when the Texas and Pacific Railway came through in the early 1880s, a town took root beside it. Howard County was formally organized in 1882, and almost at once its leaders turned to the question of schooling.

Schools across Texas at the time were mostly small common-school districts, often a single room with one teacher. Like the rest of the South, Texas required racial segregation in its public schools, and in much of the state Mexican-American children were also separated into their own schools, by custom and local policy rather than by explicit state law.

The twentieth century then brought two waves of growth to Big Spring. The first was the discovery of oil in the Permian Basin in the late 1920s. The second came with the Cold War: an air base on the edge of town brought servicemen and their families, and their children filled the classrooms.

👥People & events

The district's story begins with the first commissioners court. It ordered a schoolhouse built and in 1883 created Howard County Common School District No. 1. Then, on December 14, 1901, the Big Spring School District was established, and a new brick schoolhouse called Central Ward opened to serve all ten grades under one roof.

Even at the start, the schools were divided. Records show that in 1902 the county paid $40 a month for a teacher for African-American students. That figure is a rare glimpse of how those children's schooling was funded in the district's early years. Within its first decade, the district added two more elementary schools and a new high school.

The oil boom set off a building spree. In the 1930s the district opened the Kate Morrison School for Mexican-American students and the Lakeview School for African-American students, along with three more neighborhood elementary schools. The district also launched an early vocational cooperative education program, one of the first of its kind in Texas, which linked classroom learning with real work.

Then came the turning point. In 1955, just a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional, Big Spring became one of the first school districts in Texas to enforce that decision. Many Southern districts resisted for years, even a decade or more. During the 1950s and 1960s, Webb Air Force Base drove further growth, and in 1964 Big Spring annexed the neighboring Gay Hill and Center Point districts.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 is one of the most famous rulings in American history, but a ruling is only words until local communities act on it. Across much of the South, districts delayed, resisted or closed schools rather than integrate. That makes Big Spring's early move in 1955 a meaningful part of the national story: some communities chose to comply rather than fight.

Big Spring's history also shows that segregation in the Southwest was not only a matter of Black and white. The Kate Morrison School reflects the separate schooling of Mexican-American children that was common across Texas. Mexican-American families and advocates challenged that practice in court in the years after World War II, and it is a chapter of civil rights history that deserves wider attention.

Finally, the district's growth tracks major forces in twentieth-century America: the oil industry that powered the nation and the Cold War military buildup that put bases, and young families, in small towns all over the country.

🧭If you visit

The marker tells the story of a whole school system, not a single building, so take it as an invitation to read the town itself. As you drive Big Spring's neighborhoods, notice the schools tucked into residential streets. Many of them carry the legacy of the expansion the marker describes.

The town's namesake spring and the rugged mesa that rises over town are reminders of why people settled in this dry country in the first place. The spring is worth seeking out to understand Big Spring's origins.

Big Spring sits on Interstate 20 between Midland-Odessa and Abilene, which makes it an easy stop on a West Texas road trip. For families, the marker is a good starting point for a conversation about Brown v. Board, and about how one town made the choice to follow it.