Black Education in Bryan
Bryan, Brazos County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On March 30, 1885, the City of Bryan purchased seven lots in this area as a site for a public school to provide separate but equal and impartial instruction for black children of the community, as prescribed by the Texas State Constitution of 1876. The "Bryan Public School for Colored" was the first educational institution established for blacks in Brazos County. When school opened in the fall of 1885, its principal was A.H. Colwell, who later became a prominent leader of black Republicans, and was named as a presidential elector from Texas in 1896. The original faculty included Mrs. Anne Alberson, Misses Mamie Burrows and Beatrice Calhoun, Mrs. Ada Scott Hall, and Mrs. Lenora Green, a classmate of Dr. William E.B. Dubois. The first school building of this site was a two-story frame structure, furnished with planks supported by kegs for seating. After the school burned in 1914, a brick edifice was constructed. In 1930, when the Kemp Junior-Senior High School was built across town, this facility became Washington Elementary School. After its destruction by fire in Sept. 1971, Washington Elementary was not rebuilt and the black students were integrated into the Bryan Public School System. Washington Park occupies most of the original site.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1885 the City of Bryan bought seven lots here for the "Bryan Public School for Colored," the first educational institution for Black children in Brazos County, opened under the 1876 Texas constitution's "separate but equal" mandate. Its first principal, A. H. Colwell, later became a prominent Black Republican and a Texas presidential elector, and its early teachers included Lenora Green, a classmate of W. E. B. Du Bois. The school rebuilt in brick after an 1914 fire, became Washington Elementary in 1930, and after a 1971 fire its students were integrated into the Bryan schools.
Why it matters
The site marks nearly a century of African American education under segregation and the eventual move to integration, embodying the long struggle for schooling and equal opportunity in the South.
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Related people
- · A. H. Colwell
- · W. E. B. Du Bois
- · Lenora Green
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John Mitchell
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Born in Tennessee about 1836, John Mitchell reached Texas in 1846 and began buying Burleson County land in 1870. Serving in the 12th and 14th Legislatures, he championed education for African Americans, and as a delegate to the 1875 Constitutional Convention he defended Governor Davis and was among eleven who voted against the new constitution that closed out Reconstruction in Texas. He later farmed and ranched and gave land for a church and school bearing his name.
Allen Chapel A. M. E. Church
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Methodism among African American Texans reached back before the Civil War, and after emancipation freed people gathered to build churches of their own. Named for Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal movement in 1787, Allen Chapel's Bryan congregation was meeting by the late 1860s — first in brush arbors under Reverend Emmanuel Hammitt, its first minister in 1866 — and bought land for a chapel in 1870. It later sheltered a school for Black children after theirs burned in 1914, rebuilt in 1920 and again in 1961, and backed causes from the NAACP to sickle-cell research.
Ibarra Elementary School
Bryan, TX
In 1935 the Bryan school board built a two-room wooden school in West Bryan for Spanish-speaking children in grades one through four, naming it for Rev. Guillermo Ibarra, a local Baptist pastor who preached that education was the key to advancement. In the segregation era Hispanic students often struggled just to reach school, and pupils here recalled being punished for speaking Spanish even as the campus offered meals, citizenship classes for aspiring Americans, Boy Scout meetings, and outdoor movie nights for the community. It served children until 1949, when it was renamed San Jacinto Elementary, remaining a school until 1960.
African American Education in College Station
College Station, TX
Formal schooling for Black children in Brazos County took root after the Public School Act of 1871, first in scattered community and church schools and later in a district that bused older students to Bryan. Rising numbers led the A&M Consolidated District to open its own high school in 1941, soon renamed Lincoln School, which served the community until a 1966 fire and the closures that followed. The City of College Station preserved what remained, and in 1980 the campus reopened as the Lincoln Center, still a gathering place today.