Longview Womack High School
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
BUILT IN 1930 ON GUM STREET, LONGVIEW NEGRO HIGH SCHOOL SERVED AS A SECONDARY SCHOOL FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANS. IN 1946, IT WAS DESTROYED BY FIRE, AND A NEW 16-ROOM SCHOOL WAS BUILT AT BOYD AND LUCKETT STREETS. THE SCHOOL’S NAME CHANGED CA. 1959-1960 TO HONOR AN OUTSTANDING TEACHER, MRS. MARY C. WOMACK. LESLIE J. WHITE AND J. L. EVERHART SERVED AS THE SCHOOL’S DEDICATED PRINCIPALS AND WERE BOTH RECOGNIZED BY THE EAST TEXAS BLACK EDUCATORS HALL OF FAME. WHEN A FEDERAL DESEGREGATION ORDER WAS ISSUED, THE SCHOOL WAS CLOSED AND LATER TORN DOWN. DESPITE THE CHALLENGING TIMES, LONGVIEW/WOMACK HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATED AND DEVELOPED ITS AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS INTO VALUABLE CONTRIBUTORS TO SOCIETY.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Opened in 1930 on Gum Street as the Longview Negro High School, this campus gave African American students a secondary education in the era of legal segregation. Rebuilt after a 1946 fire and later renamed for beloved teacher Mary C. Womack, it produced graduates guided by principals honored in the East Texas Black Educators Hall of Fame. A federal desegregation order finally closed and razed the school.
Why it matters
Womack High stands for the segregated Black schools that, despite chronic underfunding, cultivated generations of leaders—and for the bittersweet cost of integration that closed those beloved institutions.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When this school opened in 1930, the American South ran on the rigid, legally enforced system of segregation known as Jim Crow. Under the doctrine of separate but equal, Black and white children were sent to entirely separate schools — schools that were reliably separate and almost never equal. Black institutions were chronically underfunded, expected to make do with less, and still asked to prepare their students for a hostile world.
It was within that system that this school was built to serve African American students in Longview. Its very original name announced the era it belonged to. For Black families, such a school was far more than a building; it was one of the few institutions fully their own, a place of pride, ambition, and protection in a society organized to hold them back.
The decades this school spanned — from 1930 into the civil rights era — were among the most consequential in the nation's history for questions of race and education. The building's whole life unfolded against the long struggle to dismantle the separate-but-equal order that had called it into being.
People & events
The school's history is written in resilience. Built in 1930 on Gum Street, it served as a secondary school for African American students until 1946, when it was destroyed by fire. The community did not let that be the end; a new sixteen-room school rose at Boyd and Luckett Streets, larger than what had been lost.
Around 1959 to 1960 the school took a new name, honoring an outstanding teacher, Mrs. Mary C. Womack. To name a school for a teacher is a particular kind of tribute — a community declaring that the person who had shaped its children deserved to be remembered above all. Leadership mattered here too: principals Leslie J. White and J. L. Everhart guided the school with such dedication that both were later recognized by the East Texas Black Educators Hall of Fame.
Then came the ending the marker records plainly. When a federal desegregation order was issued, the school was closed and later torn down. Yet the inscription refuses to let that be the final word. Despite the challenging times, it insists, the school educated and developed its students into valuable contributors to society — a legacy carried not in a building, but in the lives of everyone who passed through its doors.
Its place in the American story
The story of this school is the story of Black education in segregated America, told in miniature. Denied resources and hemmed in by law, Black communities across the country built schools that became engines of achievement anyway — cultivating teachers, professionals, and leaders in the very teeth of a system designed to deny them. The dedication of educators like the two Hall of Fame principals honored here was the fuel that made that possible.
The school's closing carries the era's deepest paradox. The federal desegregation orders that finally dismantled Jim Crow's schools were a genuine victory for justice — and yet integration often meant that beloved Black schools were shut down and demolished, their students dispersed, their communities stripped of an institution they had built and cherished. Progress and loss arrived in the same order.
That bittersweet cost is the national significance of this site. It stands for thousands of segregated Black schools that gave so much while receiving so little, and for the hard truth that the end of legal segregation, however necessary and right, also closed the doors of places that had been sources of enormous pride.
If you visit
There is no building left to tour here, and that absence is itself part of what you have come to understand. The school was torn down, so the marker stands in for a place that the community can no longer walk into — which makes reading it, and pausing over it, an act of remembrance.
Carry the names with you as you stand here: Mary C. Womack, the teacher the school chose to honor, and principals Leslie J. White and J. L. Everhart, whose dedication was recognized well beyond Longview. Behind those names are the countless students they guided into full and contributing lives. Those graduates, scattered across the decades, are the true monument to this school.
This is an essential stop for anyone tracing the African American story of East Texas. Give it the seriousness it asks for. Think about what it meant to build excellence under segregation, and about what was lost as well as won when the doors finally closed. The lesson here is not carried by a building, but by the memory the marker keeps alive.
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
- · Mary C. Womack
- · Leslie J. White
- · J. L. Everhart
Themes & tags
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