Green Bay High School
Tucker, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Green Bay High School traces its origin to October 11, 1889, when eleven black men of the community formed a board of trustees and organized a school for the area's black children. The first school facility was provided by Green Bay Methodist Church. New school buildings erected in the early 1900s also housed the Mt. Sinai Masonic Lodge. Many dedicated teachers served in the Green Bay School, and students from a large rural area attended the school from its creation until desegration of area school systems was achieved in 1966. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1889, eleven Black men in the Green Bay community formed a board of trustees and organized a school for their children, first meeting in the Green Bay Methodist Church. Later buildings doubled as the Mt. Sinai Masonic Lodge, and generations of teachers served students drawn from a wide rural area until area schools desegregated in 1966. The school was a hard-won center of Black education in the decades after emancipation.
Why it matters
Founded and governed by Black citizens themselves, Green Bay embodies the fierce commitment to education that defined African American communities across the segregated South.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Green Bay A.M.E. Church
Tucker, TX
This congregation began in 1866, when Black workers at the Long Lake Cotton Plantation gathered informally to organize a church just after Emancipation. The plantation's owners set aside land the following year, and by 1868 the African Methodist Episcopal denomination formally recognized it as Green Bay A.M.E. Church, the first church in the Long Lake area. In 1870 its members founded a day school for their children, and the congregation went on to plant two more churches nearby.
Paul L. Rutledge, Sr.
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Mt. Moriah Baptist Church
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This historically African-American congregation grew from prayer meetings held in the 1870s under a brush arbor on the land of Jimmy and Moriah Nixon, and the church built in the early 1880s took Moriah's name. A tornado destroyed the original building in 1946, but the congregation rebuilt on the same ground. A school beside the church taught grades one through eight, and members helped establish a nearby high school for African-American students in 1938.
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