Booker T. Washington School
Borger, Hutchinson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON SCHOOL TWO YEARS AFTER BORGER’S FOUNDING, A 1928 SCHOLASTIC CENSUS COUNTED FIVE AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS IN TWO FAMILIES. BETHEL BAPTIST CHURCH, ON THE CITY’S WEST SIDE, HOSTED THE FIRST SCHOOL FOR BLACK CHILDREN, WITH MRS. TALLIE ANDERSON SMITH, WHO STAYED FOR ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS, HIRED AS THE FIRST TEACHER FOR SIX GRADES. IN 1929, THE SCHOOL, STILL HOSTED BY THE CHURCH, MOVED TO THE NORTH SIDE OF BORGER. IN 1931, IN A ONE-ROOM FRAME BUILDING AT BRAIN AND 11TH STREETS, THE BORGER ISD ESTABLISHED ITS FIRST SCHOOL FOR BLACK STUDENTS, NAMED BOOKER T. WASHINGTON SCHOOL FOR THE NOTED EDUCATOR. IN 1936 THE CAMPUS INCLUDED A ONE-TEACHER SCHOOL AND AS MANY AS FIFTY STUDENTS. R. G. COFIELD AND HIS WIFE, MAYE DELLA, CAME TO BORGER IN 1946 TO FURTHER EDUCATION OF BLACK CHILDREN. UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF MR. COFIELD AS PRINCIPAL AND HIS WIFE AS A TEACHER, THE FACULTY GREW FROM TWO TO SEVEN, A NEW BRICK BUILDING WAS COMPLETED, AND TWO FORMER BARRACKS FROM PAMPA AIR FORCE BASE WERE ADAPTED AS A GYMNASIUM AND ADDITIONAL CLASSROOMS. THE SCHOOL WAS ALSO EXTENDED TO TWELVE GRADES, WITH JOHN L. MILES THE FIRST GRADUATE IN 1949. THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM CONTINUED TO GROW, AND THE DRAGONS AND DRAGONETTES EXCELLED AT BASKETBALL AND OTHER SPORTS. AFTER BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION IN 1954 INITIATED NATIONWIDE DESEGREGATION OF SCHOOLS, THE BOARD OF EDUCATION VOTED TO INTEGRATE GRADES SEVEN THROUGH TWELVE IN SPRING 1956. THAT FALL, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON BECAME AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AND OLDER BLACK STUDENTS WENT TO SAM HOUSTON JUNIOR HIGH AND BORGER SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLS. AS A RESULT OF DESEGREGATION, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON SCHOOL CLOSED IN 1964, AND MOST OF THE TEACHERS LEFT BORGER TO SEEK OTHER JOBS. THE SCHOOL IS FONDLY REMEMBERED AS AN IMPORTANT PART OF BORGER’S AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY. (2013)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the oil-boom town of Borger counted just five African American students in 1928, their first classes met under the roof of Bethel Baptist Church with Tallie Anderson Smith as teacher. By 1931 the district had opened a one-room school named for educator Booker T. Washington, and under principal R. G. Cofield after 1946 it grew into a twelve-grade campus with new buildings, a proud faculty, and championship Dragons and Dragonettes teams. Desegregation after Brown v. Board reshaped it into an elementary school and finally closed it in 1964.
Why it matters
Its arc from a church classroom to a thriving school and then to closure captures the whole Jim Crow-to-integration story of Black education in one Panhandle town.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1926 the discovery of oil beneath the Texas Panhandle turned a stretch of open grassland into Borger almost overnight. Boomtowns like this one drew thousands of newcomers chasing wages in the fields and refineries, and they grew far faster than schools, churches, or any settled order could keep up.
Within two years a scholastic census counted only a handful of African American children in the whole town — five of them, in two families. That small number tells you how new and raw the place still was, and how far a Black family had to travel from the older, more established communities of East and Central Texas to reach this corner of the plains.
Across the South and in Texas, this was the era of Jim Crow, when law and custom kept Black and white children in separate schools. A boomtown had to build that separate world from scratch, and in Borger it began the way so many Black institutions did — not with a school board's money, but inside a church.
People & events
The first classroom for Black children met under the roof of Bethel Baptist Church on the west side of town. Tallie Anderson Smith was hired as its first teacher, and she carried an enormous load: six grades of children in one room. She stayed for roughly fifteen years, long enough to be the steady center of a community's schooling through its most uncertain early years.
The school moved with the town's needs — to the north side in 1929, and by 1931 into a one-room frame building where the district finally established its first official school for Black students, naming it for the educator Booker T. Washington. By 1936 a single teacher might face as many as fifty children in that room.
The turning point came in 1946, when R. G. Cofield arrived as principal and his wife, Maye Della, as a teacher. Under their leadership the faculty grew from two to seven. A new brick building went up, and two surplus barracks brought over from the airfield at Pampa were pressed into service as a gymnasium and extra classrooms. The school stretched to twelve grades, and in 1949 John L. Miles walked across the stage as its first graduate. Its teams, the Dragons and Dragonettes, made their mark on the basketball court and beyond.
Its place in the American story
The whole arc of this one campus is the story of Black education in America compressed into a single lifetime. It begins where so many did — in a borrowed church pew, taught by one determined woman — and grows, through the effort of families and a few devoted educators, into a full twelve-grade school with a name, a building, and a team to cheer for.
Then came 1954, and the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that separate schools were inherently unequal and set the nation on the long road to desegregation. Borger's board voted to integrate the upper grades in the spring of 1956; that fall, older Black students moved to the town's junior high and senior high, and Booker T. Washington became an elementary school.
There is a bittersweet turn here that played out in hundreds of communities. Integration was a hard-won victory, but it often meant the closing of the beloved Black schools and the scattering of their teachers. Booker T. Washington closed in 1964, and most of its teachers left Borger to find work elsewhere. Progress and loss arrived in the same moment.
If you visit
Stand here and picture the scale of it: a school that began with five children and one teacher, and grew into the heart of a community, all within a few decades. The marker itself is the monument now — the buildings and the games and the graduations live in memory and in the words carved here.
This is a stop for anyone tracing the African American story across Texas, and it pairs naturally with the larger history of the oil-boom Panhandle all around you. The town you drive through today was built in the same rush that brought those first families north.
Take a moment to read the names. Tallie Anderson Smith, the Cofields, John L. Miles — these were real people who built something lasting out of very little. A marker like this asks only that you remember them, and remembering is free.
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
- · Tallie Anderson Smith
- · R. G. Cofield
- · Maye Della Cofield
- · John L. Miles
Related events
- · Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
Themes & tags
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East Ward Elementary School
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