Daule School
Cuero, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Cuero Colored High School was founded in 1892 as the first African American school in Cuero. The building was a one-room wooden structure built on lot fourteen of the Morgantown addition to the city. Prior to the 1890s, schools for black children were available in the rural communities. A tax bond was passed to allow the first public school for black children to be built. Most of the pupils came from farm families and could only attend school when they were not working. The first teacher was C.H. Griggs, a 32-year-old graduate from the Southern University of Baton Rouge. The principal of the school was Eugene Daule, who played an important role in black education progress in Dewitt County for the next 40 years. He held extra literary programs for students and used the materials available to the school as best he could, though it was obvious that the schools were not equal in funding and supplies. In 1937, the name of Cuero Colored High school was changed to Daule High School. A new school building was constructed in 1948 using the latest school building design, built of hollow tile and concrete and painted white. In 1947, Principal George Anderson introduced a music program. Under the leadership of David Hegwood, the band excelled and received many Division I ratings at state competitions. The school also excelled in academics, agriculture, sports, homemaking and choir. The school closed in 1965 when Cuero public schools integrated. Daule High School and Cuero Colored High School remind us of the struggles of the black community and their resolution in the face of adversity.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1892 as a one-room wooden schoolhouse, Cuero Colored High School was the town's first school for Black children, drawing pupils from farm families who could attend only when field work allowed. Principal Eugene Daule guided Black education in DeWitt County for four decades, stretching meager, unequal resources as far as they would go; the school was renamed in his honor in 1937. Under later leaders it built a celebrated band and a broad curriculum before closing in 1965 when Cuero's schools finally integrated.
Why it matters
The school embodies both the injustice of separate-and-unequal education and the determination of a Black community that built excellence in spite of it.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This school was founded in 1892, in a South still working out what freedom would mean for Black Americans a generation after emancipation. It opened a few years before the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision would give legal cover to "separate but equal," but the separation was already the reality on the ground, and the "equal" was already a fiction.
In this part of Texas, public schooling for Black children had been almost entirely a rural, makeshift affair before the 1890s. The founding of this school marked a real advance: a tax bond was passed to fund the town's first public school for Black children, a one-room wooden building on a single lot. Modest as that sounds, it represented a community and a town committing public money to the education of children who had long been left to fend for themselves.
Most of those children came from farm families, and their attendance rose and fell with the demands of the fields. School happened when the work allowed it — a constraint that shaped Black education across the rural South and that makes what this school eventually achieved all the more striking.
People & events
The school's first teacher was a young graduate of a historically Black university in Louisiana, who arrived to take charge of a single room full of pupils of every age. But the figure who defined the institution was its principal, a man who would guide Black education in the county for the next four decades.
The marker is honest about the odds he faced: the schools were plainly not equal in funding or supplies, and he stretched what little he had as far as it would go, adding extra literary programs to enrich what the budget could not. His long service left such a mark that in 1937 the school was renamed in his honor — a rare tribute paid by a community to one of its own.
The story did not end with survival; it rose to excellence. A new building went up in 1948, built of hollow tile and concrete in the newest style of the day and painted white. A music program introduced in the late 1940s grew, under a gifted director, into a band that earned top ratings at state competitions, and the school also distinguished itself in academics, agriculture, sports, homemaking, and choir. When Cuero's schools finally integrated, the school closed in 1965 — its work, in a sense, complete.
Its place in the American story
The arc of this one school traces the larger arc of Black education in America. It begins in the era of separate-and-unequal, when Black communities were expected to accept whatever scraps of schooling the system offered, and it ends in 1965, more than a decade after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional — a gap that measures how slowly that ruling was carried out across the South.
What happened in between is the part that deserves to be remembered as clearly as the injustice. Denied equal resources, Black communities built excellence anyway — in their teachers, their bands, their teams, and their classrooms. The competitions where this school's band earned its honors were part of a whole parallel world of Black Texas schooling that produced achievement in spite of every obstacle placed in its way.
That is the double truth the marker asks us to hold. The school stands both as evidence of a wrong — the deliberate underfunding of Black children's education — and as a monument to the determination that refused to let the wrong have the final word.
If you visit
Visiting a site like this is an act of memory. It asks you to imagine the one-room wooden building where it all began, and then the white-painted school of 1948 that replaced it, and to hold in mind the decades of effort that ran between them.
Think, as you stand here, about the children who could only come to class when the fields released them, and about the principal who spent forty years making meager resources do the work of plenty. Picture the band rehearsing, the choir singing, the teams competing — a community pouring its pride into its young people. Those are the images the marker wants to leave with you.
The school sits within Cuero, in DeWitt County, and its story is woven into the town's own history. Take a moment to reflect on how much was accomplished here against how little was given, and you will understand why the community fought to have this place remembered.
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
- · Eugene Daule
- · C.H. Griggs
- · George Anderson
- · David Hegwood
Themes & tags
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