Kilgore Colored and C. B. Dansby Schools
Kilgore, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formal education of Kilgore’s African American youth is recorded as early as 1873 through Kilgore Baptist Church. On August 27, 1906, Kilgore residents voted to incorporate the Kilgore Independent School District (KISD), which included segregated African American schools. On this site in 1935, the KISD constructed a new brick building for African American students. The original building included seven classrooms, a principal’s office, book room and 400-seat auditorium. A year later the school expanded with four additional classrooms and indoor plumbing. In 1939, growth continued with a science and agriculture building, followed by a cafeteria in 1944 and a band hall in 1954. C. B. Dansby (1898-1955) was the beloved principal for nearly twenty-five years, and under his tenure the school expanded from six grades to twelve and consolidated surrounding rural schools. Tragically, principal Dansby died during a graduation ceremony. The school was officially renamed in his honor in 1956. Hired upon Dansby’s death, Odis H. Turner (1908-1992) was the final principal from 1955 to 1970. Dansby High School continued to educate African American children of KISD until desegregation of the district on August 8, 1970. The Dansby High School buildings housed KISD specialty classes for two years after the school’s closing. Later, private investors purchased the property and used the campus as a multi-service facility for the community. The property passed to the jurisdiction of the city of Kilgore, who demolished the buildings in 2013. Although no longer standing, the Kilgore Colored and C.B. Dansby high schools provided a quality education to students all while teaching and providing love, care and respect. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
African American education in Kilgore reached back to 1873 and its Baptist church, but in 1935 the school district built a substantial brick campus here for Black students under segregation. For nearly twenty-five years principal C. B. Dansby grew it from six grades to twelve, and the school was renamed in his honor after he died during a graduation ceremony. Dansby High served the community until Kilgore's schools finally desegregated in 1970.
Why it matters
The school embodies both the injustice of 'separate but equal' and the fierce pride with which Black educators built excellence within it, until the civil rights era brought integration.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The education of Kilgore's Black children began long before any brick was laid on this site — as early as 1873, the marker tells us, through Kilgore Baptist Church. That is a telling starting point. In the years after emancipation, when public schooling for Black children was scarce to nonexistent, it was the church that first opened a classroom.
When residents voted in 1906 to incorporate the Kilgore Independent School District, they built segregation into it from the start: separate schools for Black students, under a system that would soon be enshrined nationally as 'separate but equal.' The brick campus raised here in 1935 was born of that arrangement — a real investment, and an unequal one, in the same breath.
The timeline that follows unfolds across the Progressive and modern eras, through the Depression and into the postwar years. It is the story of a segregated school steadily, stubbornly growing, even as the law kept it walled off from the schools white children attended.
People & events
The 1935 building was substantial from the day it opened: seven classrooms, a principal's office, a book room, and a 400-seat auditorium. And it kept growing — four more classrooms and indoor plumbing the next year, a science and agriculture building in 1939, a cafeteria in 1944, a band hall in 1954. Each addition is a small monument to a community determined that its children would have more.
At the center of that growth stands C. B. Dansby (1898–1955), the beloved principal for nearly a quarter century. Under him the school expanded from six grades to twelve and absorbed surrounding rural schools, becoming a true regional institution. His death is the marker's most piercing detail: he died during a graduation ceremony — at the very ritual that embodied his life's work. In 1956 the school was renamed in his honor.
Odis H. Turner (1908–1992), hired upon Dansby's death, served as the final principal from 1955 to 1970. Dansby High School educated the district's Black children until desegregation arrived on August 8, 1970. Afterward the buildings held district specialty classes for two years, later served as a community facility under private owners, and finally passed to the city of Kilgore, which demolished them in 2013.
Its place in the American story
This site holds two American truths that can only be understood together. The first is injustice: a school built and maintained precisely because Black children were forbidden the ones white children used, in a nation that called that arrangement equal when it never was.
The second is the fierce excellence built inside those walls anyway. Educators like C. B. Dansby, and the community that kept adding classrooms and cafeterias and band halls, refused to let segregation define the ceiling of their children's lives. Schools like this one produced generations of graduates and stood as sources of deep community pride — proof of what Black communities achieved despite the system, not because of it.
The 1970 desegregation date, and the school's closing, mark the arrival of the civil rights era's promise in Kilgore. Yet that transition carried its own losses. When such schools closed, communities often lost a treasured institution and its Black educators and leaders along with it. That the campus was demolished in 2013, leaving only this marker, makes the act of remembering all the more necessary.
If you visit
Come knowing that the buildings themselves are gone — demolished in 2013 — so what you are visiting is a site of memory rather than a standing structure. That absence is part of the story. Stand where the campus stood and picture the seven classrooms, the 400-seat auditorium, the band hall, the graduating classes filing across a stage.
Read the marker slowly; it is unusually rich, naming the buildings, the years, and above all the people. Let the moment of Principal Dansby's death during a graduation ceremony land — few markers carry a human detail so stark, and it tells you everything about a man who gave his life to this school.
If you are traveling East Texas with an eye to civil rights and African American history, this is a stop that rewards reflection over sightseeing. It sits in the same landscape as the region's freedmen-era churches and communities, and together they trace the long arc from the first church classroom of 1873 to integration in 1970. Give it the quiet attention a vanished place deserves, and carry the names Dansby and Turner with you.
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
- · C. B. Dansby
- · Odis H. Turner
Themes & tags
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