Mary & Mac Private School
Lubbock, Lubbock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1954, Lucille Graves established Mary & Mac Private School as a preschool for African-American students. Named for a version of the hand-clapping song “Mary Mack,” emphasizing aspirations for the students to become contributing members of society, the institution offered an alternative to local public schools in a time when private schools for African Americans were rare. Teachers received permission from the Rev. A.L. Dunn to hold their first classes in the auditorium of New Hope Baptist Church, before soon moving to two small frame houses on the 1300 block of East 24th Street. Lucille Graves taught classes along with her husband, Caesar; other family members later joined as faculty, as Graves expanded school services. To meet the needs of the growing school, Caesar Graves and the Mary & Mac Parent-Teacher Association began to raise funds for a new building, and in 1961, the school moved to a newly constructed structure at 902 East 28th Street. Here, Mary & Mac began offering junior high and high school courses. The faculty often worked multiple positions to meet the expanding activities offered at the school. At its peak, Mary & Mac Private School served a student population of approximately 120 students. Mary & Mac closed in 1993, shortly after Lucille Graves passed away. Besides her work with the school, Graves was noted for being the first African American accepted into Texas Tech; she later earned a doctorate from the Inter-Baptist Theological Center of Houston. Today, Dr. Graves is remembered for her activism and for Mary & Mac Private School, whose graduates have made significant contributions locally, regionally and throughout the nation. (2010)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1954, educator Lucille Graves founded Mary & Mac Private School in Lubbock as a preschool for African American children, at a time when private schools for Black students were exceedingly rare. Named for a version of the hand-clapping rhyme 'Mary Mack,' the school began in a Baptist church auditorium, grew into its own building by 1961, and eventually offered classes through high school for as many as 120 students. Graves — the first African American accepted at Texas Tech — ran the school with her family until it closed in 1993, shortly after her death.
Why it matters
The school stands as a monument to Black self-determination in education during segregation, and to a pioneering woman who opened doors for her community both in her classrooms and at Texas Tech.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Mary & Mac Private School opened in 1954, and the year matters. That spring the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional — but a ruling is not the same as a reality, and across Texas and the South, Black children still attended separate, and routinely underfunded, schools for years afterward. In Lubbock, on the South Plains, that gap between the law's promise and daily life was the world into which this school was born.
Private schools for African American children were exceedingly rare in that time and place. Building one meant raising money that families largely did not have, finding space that was not freely offered, and staffing classrooms with teachers willing to work for little. It was, in the plainest sense, an act of will.
So the founding of Mary & Mac belongs to the long history of Black self-determination in education — the tradition of communities who, denied a fair share of public resources, built their own institutions rather than wait. Its name captured that spirit: drawn from a version of the hand-clapping rhyme "Mary Mack," it carried the hope that its students would grow into contributing members of society.
People & events
The school was the work of educator Lucille Graves, who established it as a preschool and then would not let it stop growing. The first classes met by permission of the Rev. A.L. Dunn in the auditorium of New Hope Baptist Church — a reminder of how often the Black church served as the cradle for Black education — before moving to two small frame houses on the 1300 block of East 24th Street.
This was a family endeavor in the truest sense. Lucille taught alongside her husband, Caesar, and as the school expanded, other family members joined the faculty. When the growing enrollment outstripped the little houses, Caesar Graves and the Mary & Mac Parent-Teacher Association raised funds for a proper building, and in 1961 the school moved into a newly constructed structure on East 28th Street. There it began offering junior high and high school courses, its teachers frequently working several roles at once to keep the widening program alive. At its peak the school served roughly 120 students.
At the center of it all stood Lucille Graves herself — remembered as the first African American accepted into Texas Tech, and later the holder of a doctorate from the Inter-Baptist Theological Center of Houston. The school she built ran until 1993, closing shortly after her death, its life bound up with her own.
Its place in the American story
The importance of Mary & Mac reaches well beyond Lubbock. In the decades when segregation shaped American schooling, thousands of Black communities responded not with resignation but with construction — founding academies, church schools, and private institutions to give their children the education the public system withheld. Mary & Mac is a vivid instance of that national movement, carried out one classroom, one fundraiser, one added grade level at a time.
Dr. Graves's own path widens the story further. Breaking the color barrier at a major state university, then spending her life running a school for her community, she embodies two fronts of the same struggle: opening doors that had been closed, and building rooms of one's own when the doors stayed shut. Both were forms of the same insistence that Black children deserved a full education.
The measure of such a place is its graduates, and the marker notes that they went on to make significant contributions locally, regionally, and across the nation. That is how a small private school on the South Plains becomes part of the larger American story — through the lives it launched and the doors those lives, in turn, opened for others.
If you visit
Lubbock spreads wide and flat under an enormous sky, and a visit here is less about grand architecture than about standing where determination did its quiet work. As you trace the school's path — from a church auditorium, to two modest frame houses, to the building it finally raised for itself — notice that the story is one of steady expansion, each move a sign that the community kept believing in it.
Let the name stay with you. "Mary & Mac," borrowed from a children's clapping rhyme, sounds playful until you learn the hope packed into it: that these students would become contributing members of society. Carry that in mind as you look at the places where they learned.
This marker rewards the traveler interested in the human side of the civil rights era — not only its marches and courtrooms but its classrooms, and the families who staffed them after hours and on weekends. Pair it with Lubbock's other layers of history for a fuller sense of the South Plains, and give a moment to Lucille Graves, whose life connected a single Lubbock schoolhouse to the doors she opened at Texas Tech.
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
- · Lucille Graves
- · Caesar Graves
Themes & tags
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