Laurine Cecil Anderson
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1853-1938) Born the son of slave parents in Tennessee, Laurine Cecil Anderson attended public schools in Memphis and college at Fisk University in Nashville. He came to Texas in 1880 to accept a position as principal of a training school in Brenham. He married Lizzie Pollard in 1882, and they had four children. After her death, he married Fannie Pollard, and they had one child. In 1884 Governor Oran M. Roberts appointed Anderson principal of Prairie View Normal and Industrial College, now Prairie View A&M University. When the Colored Teachers State Association was formed in Prairie View in 1885, he was elected its first president and served until 1889. In 1896 Anderson resigned his position at Prairie View to become Principal of Austin’s Robertson Hill High School, which was renamed E. H. Anderson High School in 1909 in honor of L. C. Anderson’s brother, also an educator. The school was at the time the only high school for blacks in the city, and L. C. Anderson served as its principal for thirty-two years. L. C. Anderson died January 8, 1938, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Two days after his death the Austin School Board voted unanimously to rename Anderson High School in his honor. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born to enslaved parents in Tennessee in 1853, Laurine Cecil Anderson educated himself at Memphis schools and Fisk University before coming to Texas in 1880 to lead a training school in Brenham. He went on to head what is now Prairie View A&M University, served as founding president of the Colored Teachers State Association, and for thirty-two years led Austin's only high school for Black students. Two days after his death in 1938, the city's school board voted to name that school in his honor.
Why it matters
Anderson's life traces the path from slavery to the front ranks of Black education in post-Reconstruction Texas, building institutions that outlasted him by generations.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Old Anderson High School, Kealing Junior High School
Austin, TX
Austin's first high school for Black students opened in 1884 as Robertson Hill School and, through several moves and renamings, became L. C. Anderson High School, honoring a longtime principal. Kealing Junior High, the city's first junior high for Black students, opened on this site in 1930, named for educator Hightower Theodore Kealing, and later merged with the Anderson buildings. The schools here closed in 1971 under court-ordered desegregation, and the old buildings were later razed or lost to fire.
Desegregation of Texas Public Schools
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For generations Texas ran a segregated school system, its "separate but equal" doctrine cemented by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling began a slow, uneven dismantling of that system; over the following decades districts integrated grade by grade or by "freedom of choice," and beloved African American schools such as Austin's L.C. Anderson High closed their doors.
George Washington Carver Branch Library
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Austin's public library opened in a room over a downtown store in February 1926, then moved into this frame building near Wooldridge Park. In 1933, when a permanent main library was completed, the original building was relocated here to answer the Black community's request for a library of its own. Brick-veneered and named for the Black educator and scientist George Washington Carver, and directed by Hattie Henson from 1933 to 1943, it became the very first branch in the Austin library system.
Holy Cross Catholic Church and Community
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In 1936 Father Francis R. Weber celebrated the first Mass of Holy Cross, the first Catholic parish to serve Austin's African American community, in the home of William M. Tears—just as the city's 1928 plan pushed Black residents into East Austin. Parishioners built the church in 1937 and went on to found a second parish, a school, and Holy Cross Hospital, the first in Austin to let Black physicians practice, staffed by physician-nun Sister Mary Celine Heitzman. Its members shaped civic and political life, including the first Black speaker pro tem of the Texas Legislature.