Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(October 7, 1868 – January 26, 1972) One of Austin’s most revered African American civic and religious leaders, Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller is best remembered for her generosity, inspirational speeches, Baptist missionary activity, teaching abilities, and compassion for those less fortunate than herself. The daughter of Hugh and Anna Barry, Maud was born and reared in Lockhart where she attended public school. After completing her studies at Guadalupe College in Seguin and Tillotson College in Austin, she embarked on a distinguished teaching career that spanned 25 years. She married W. H. Fuller in 1914. Influenced by a deep devotion to her Baptist beliefs, Maud Fuller led efforts to organize several local and national youth organizations and led many international missionary efforts while an active member of the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Austin and the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention. She served the Auxiliary as corresponding secretary prior to her election as president in 1928. She became Dr. Fuller in 1954 after receiving an honorary humanities degree from the Union Baptist Theological Seminary of Houston. She and her husband owned and operated a funeral home in East Austin beginning in 1932. She was buried in Austin’s Evergreen Cemetery. (1993)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in Lockhart in 1868 and educated at Guadalupe and Tillotson colleges, Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller taught for a quarter-century before becoming one of Austin's most revered African American religious and civic leaders. A devoted Baptist, she organized youth groups and led international missionary work, rising in 1928 to the presidency of the Women's Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention and earning an honorary doctorate in 1954. She and her husband also ran an East Austin funeral home, and her long life stretched from Reconstruction to 1972.
Why it matters
It honors a Black woman whose leadership in faith, education, and community service left a lasting mark on Austin and the national Baptist movement.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
L. C. Anderson High School and Integration of Austin's Public Schools
Austin, TX
Founded in 1909 to serve Austin's growing African American community, L.C. Anderson High School became the heart of segregated East Austin—a place that, despite unequal resources, produced excellence in academics, athletics, and music. After Brown v. Board of Education, the district's "freedom of choice" plan left the school effectively segregated, and by 1971 a federal court's remedy meant closing Anderson and busing its Black students to white schools across the city. The shuttering of Austin's only Black public high school tore out a community's anchor even as it advanced integration.
Laurine Cecil Anderson
Austin, TX
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.
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
Austin, TX
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.