Lincoln High School

🏛️The era

Lincoln High School was conceived in 1937 and opened in January 1939, in the depths of both the Great Depression and the Jim Crow era. In that time and place, public schools in Dallas were segregated by law, and the education offered to Black children was deliberately separate and chronically underfunded. The very need for this school grew out of that injustice: the city's African American students had been crowded into too few facilities for far too long.

The timing also placed the school squarely within the New Deal. As the federal government poured money into public works to fight the Depression, a Public Works Administration grant covered nearly half the cost of construction. That federal investment is a crucial part of the story — it shows how national programs could, sometimes, help fund first-class facilities for communities the local system had shortchanged.

Architecturally, the building spoke the confident language of its moment. Its Moderne design, with horizontal lines, repeating windows, a cantilevered entry canopy, and a tower set with glass bricks, was thoroughly modern for the late 1930s. A school of this scale and style made a deliberate statement of permanence and pride in the neighborhood it served.

👥People & events

The effort began in 1937, when the Dallas school board appointed a committee to find land for a new high school for African American students. The committee selected eleven acres at this location and planned an unusually large and well-equipped campus: twenty classrooms, chemistry and physics laboratories, an auditorium, a cafeteria, and a library in the main building — facilities meant to rival any in the city.

When Lincoln opened in January 1939, it did so under pressure, welcoming 1,255 students and 31 teachers. Much of that crowd came from Booker T. Washington, then the only existing high school for Black students, some five miles north and badly overcrowded. The new school was relief and opportunity at once.

At its head stood Tueria Dell Marshall, the founding principal, who lived from 1883 to 1960 and led the school for sixteen years. Under his leadership enrollment surged past 3,000, and he earned a lasting reputation for giving his students genuine academic rigor and quality training. His devotion is written into the geography of the place: he is buried in the historic L. Butler Nelson Cemetery adjacent to the school he loved.

The building itself was the work of Dallas architect Walter C. Sharp, who designed schools across Arlington, Dallas, and Tyler, with the Dolph-Bateson Construction Company as contractor. Their Moderne design — emphatically horizontal, crowned by a glass-brick tower — became a neighborhood landmark. In later years, an incremental desegregation plan running from 1960 to 1971, together with the opening of new schools, drew down Lincoln's enrollment.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Lincoln High School embodies one of the central paradoxes of the segregation era: African American communities built institutions of real excellence within a system designed to deny them equality. Behind the walls of a separate-but-never-equal school, dedicated educators like Tueria Dell Marshall delivered rigorous academics and produced generations of accomplished graduates — the school counts more than two hundred educators among its alumni alone.

The school also illustrates how federal power and local determination could combine to lasting effect. A New Deal Public Works Administration grant helped pay for a first-class building, and the community filled it with ambition. That fusion of national investment and local resolve created an institution that outlived the very system of segregation that made a separate school necessary in the first place.

Finally, Lincoln's later history — the enrollment decline during the 1960–1971 desegregation plan — connects it to the long national struggle over school integration. The school's arc, from a proud response to segregation to a participant in dismantling it, mirrors the broader Civil Rights movement's transformation of American education.

🧭If you visit

Approach the building the way its architect meant you to and let your eye follow its lines. The Moderne design is all about the horizontal — repeating windows and a cantilevered entry canopy pulling your gaze sideways — set against the vertical drama of the tower with its glass bricks at the entrance. That tower was made to be a landmark, and it still reads as one.

The most moving detail sits just beside the campus: the historic L. Butler Nelson Cemetery, the resting place of founding principal Tueria Dell Marshall, who chose to remain near the school he built up over sixteen years. Knowing that as you look from the building to the cemetery adds a quiet human weight to the visit — a reminder that institutions are made by people who pour their lives into them.

Come with the school's history in mind and the place tells its own story: a campus opened in 1939 for students the wider system had failed, staffed by teachers determined to give them the best, and still standing as a landmark in its Dallas neighborhood. It's a meaningful stop for anyone tracing the history of African American education and the Civil Rights era in Texas.