Langston School
Del Rio, Val Verde County, Texas
Marker Inscription
San Felipe ISD operated a school for African American students for a short time in the 1930s and again from 1945-56. Langston School on De la Rosa street was named for Langston Hughes, notable writer of the Harlem Renaissance. San Felipe ISD bought the property in 1934 and built a two-room schoolhouse, consisting of one classroom and a smaller storeroom. Sparse records indicate no principal for Langston and one teacher at a time, who taught up to thirty students in grades one to eight. Those wishing to attend high school went to Del Rio’s Tarver School or as far as San Antonio or Houston. Langston school did have a parent-teacher association (PTA). As the school district integrated, Langston closed in 1957. (2013)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
San Felipe ISD opened this two-room schoolhouse for African American students in the 1930s and ran it again from 1945 to 1956, naming it for Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. A single teacher taught as many as thirty children across grades one through eight, while those seeking high school had to travel to Del Rio or as far as San Antonio or Houston. As the district integrated, Langston School closed in 1957.
Why it matters
Langston School stands as evidence of the segregated 'separate but unequal' education imposed on Black children in Texas and of the communities that valued learning enough to sustain it despite scarce resources.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Langston School opened its doors in Del Rio, Texas public education ran on two separate tracks. Under the "separate but equal" doctrine the Supreme Court had blessed in 1896, Black children and white children were schooled apart across the South and much of the Southwest — and the "equal" half of that promise was almost never kept. San Felipe, the historically Mexican and African American district on Del Rio's east side, was itself a community that knew what it meant to be treated as separate.
The 1930s, when the district first bought this property and raised a two-room building, were the years of the Great Depression, when money for schools was thin everywhere and thinnest of all for the schools set aside for Black students. That a small district found the will to build even a modest schoolhouse says a great deal about how much the families it served wanted their children taught.
By the time Langston reopened in 1945 and ran through the mid-1950s, the ground was already shifting. In 1954 the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated schooling unconstitutional, and districts across Texas began — slowly, unevenly — to integrate. Langston's story runs right up against that turning point.
People & events
The school carried a borrowed name with real weight: Langston Hughes, the poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose verses gave voice to Black American life in the first half of the twentieth century. Naming a small Texas schoolhouse for a celebrated Black writer was itself a quiet act of pride — a way of telling children in a two-room building that they belonged to a larger story of Black achievement.
The day-to-day reality was humbler and harder. The building was little more than one classroom and a storeroom. Records are sparse, but they tell of a single teacher — no principal — carrying as many as thirty children across eight grades at once, from the youngest just learning their letters to teenagers finishing the eighth grade. A teacher in that room had to be arithmetic instructor, reading coach, disciplinarian, and mentor to all of them in the same hours.
Education here ended at grade eight. A child who wanted high school had to leave: to Del Rio's Tarver School, or far away to San Antonio or Houston, a journey beyond the reach of many families. And yet the community organized. The school had a parent-teacher association — parents who showed up, who pushed, who insisted that this small place matter. When the district integrated, Langston closed its doors for good around 1957.
Its place in the American story
Langston School is a local witness to one of the central struggles of the American twentieth century: the long, uneven road from segregation toward equal education. Its very modesty is the point. The gap between a two-room schoolhouse with one overworked teacher and the well-funded schools reserved for white children is exactly the inequality that made "separate but equal" a fiction — and that civil rights lawyers used to bring the whole system down.
The school's closing around 1957 places it among the countless quiet institutions that ended as integration arrived. Those closures were a victory, but they carried loss too: Black schools were often the proud center of their communities, and when they shut, something communal was scattered along with the injustice.
That a place this small was still named for a great American poet, still ran a PTA, still sent its most determined students hundreds of miles for a high school diploma — this is the grassroots history of civil rights, the part that happened not in courtrooms but in classrooms and on the roads families traveled to reach them.
If you visit
Stand on De la Rosa Street and let the scale of the thing sink in. This was never a grand campus — one classroom and a storeroom — and that smallness is what you've really come to see. Picture thirty children of every age filling that single room, and one teacher moving between them all day long.
Read the marker slowly, and think about the distances it names. Del Rio, San Antonio, Houston — for a family here, those were the price of a high school education, and many simply couldn't pay it. The marker turns an ordinary street corner into a measure of what segregation cost in miles and opportunity.
Langston sits naturally alongside the rest of San Felipe's history on Del Rio's east side, a district with its own deep story of a community holding together against the odds. Come here as part of that larger walk, and you'll leave with a truer sense of how everyday Texans built and defended learning for their children when the state gave them so little to build with.
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
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Tarver School
Del Rio, TX
Del Rio organized a school for African American students as early as 1901, and in 1929–30 the district built a one-room stucco schoolhouse on Ware Street. Chronically underfunded, it made do with books and equipment discarded from white schools, teaching a handful of students per grade under a tiny faculty. Later renamed for principal W. H. Tarver, the school closed in 1957 as segregation ended.
Nicolas Street School
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Built in 1938, the Nicolas Street School is the last surviving school telling the story of African American education in Uvalde. Its creation owed much to teacher Susie Harris, who — after the school board reneged on promised new facilities for Black students — wrote directly to Uvalde resident and U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner for help, and won a new campus. In an era of "separate but seldom equal" schooling, two teachers taught eight grades here, and the school served the community until 1965, a full decade after the district voted to integrate.
San Felipe Independent School District
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On Del Rio's east side, the historically Hispanic community along San Felipe Creek made education a priority, raising a schoolhouse by 1883. When Del Rio schools annexed the community in 1928 to capture its tax revenue, residents fought back—winning in court and then organizing their own San Felipe Independent School District in 1929. The district served the community until 1971, when a federal court ordered consolidation with Del Rio for integration.
Santos S. Garza
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Known as 'Don Santos' and the 'Father of San Felipe Schools,' Santos S. Garza came to Del Rio in 1898 and built a string of businesses—a theater, general store, dairy, pharmacy, ranch, and bar. His lasting legacy was civic: in 1928 he blocked the annexation of the San Felipe area by the Del Rio school district, keeping his largely Mexican-American community in control of its own schools, and he led the movement that created the San Felipe I.S.D. in 1929.