Site of Blackshear High School
Odessa, Ector County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In early 1890, Inez Rathbun earned money teaching area students at the Ector County Courthouse. About the same time, Ector County organized a public school system. Over the next decades, the number of students in the area steadily increased. In 1921, the Texas Legislature officially established the Ector County Independent School District (ECISD). Both Anglos and Mexican-American students attended the same school. In 1932, the district established the first African American school in a one-room structure at the corner of South Muskingum and Myrtle streets. Ella Sayles served as the first teacher for the initial class of eight students. As the school grew, the district added a second classroom and utilized space at a nearby church. Although the district added three more rooms in the 1940s, by the 1947-48 school year, increased population caused the students to attend classes in shifts. In the fall of 1948, a campus for Blackshear High School opened at this site. Named for the noted Texas black educator Edward Lavoisier Blackshear, the school provided expanded facilities for African American students in the upper grade levels. Upon integration of all the district schools in 1966, the campus was converted for use as Blackshear Middle School. In 1983, it became a magnet elementary school. Its link to early education in the community and to its namesake educator remain significant today. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As oil-boom Odessa grew through the early 20th century, its African American children were long confined to a single one-room school opened in 1932, where Ella Sayles taught the first class of eight. Demand steadily outstripped the cramped quarters until, in 1948, a proper campus for Blackshear High School opened on this site, named for the pioneering Texas Black educator Edward Lavoisier Blackshear. When the district integrated in 1966 the building became a middle school, and it later served as a magnet elementary.
Why it matters
Blackshear's history traces the arc of segregated education and hard-won integration in West Texas, and honors the teachers who gave Black students opportunity within a separate and unequal system.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This site sits in Odessa, out on the flat, wind-scoured plains of West Texas, where the twentieth century arrived on a gusher of oil. When the region's great oil booms hit in the 1920s and after, sleepy ranching towns exploded almost overnight into busy, crowded places hungry for workers, houses, and schools.
But the opportunity of boomtown Texas was not shared equally. Across the South and much of the West, public life was governed by segregation, and schools were the sharpest example of it. African American children were educated separately — and, almost always, in buildings that were smaller, older, and more crowded than those provided for white students.
That is the world in which Ector County built its school system. The county organized public schooling in the early 1890s and the state formally chartered the Ector County Independent School District in 1921. For decades, the story of Black education here would be a story of making do with far too little.
People & events
The tale reaches back to 1890, when Inez Rathbun taught local children for pay in the county courthouse — schooling before there were proper schoolhouses. As Odessa grew, so did its schools, but its Black students waited a long time for one of their own.
That first school arrived in 1932: a single one-room building at South Muskingum and Myrtle streets, where Ella Sayles taught a class of just eight. Demand quickly outran the space. The district added a second classroom, then borrowed room in a nearby church, then built three more rooms in the 1940s. By the 1947–48 year, so many children were enrolled that they attended in shifts.
In the fall of 1948 a real campus finally opened on this site: Blackshear High School, offering the community's African American students expanded facilities in the upper grades. It carried the name of Edward Lavoisier Blackshear, a distinguished Texas Black educator. When Ector County integrated all its schools in 1966, the building became Blackshear Middle School, and in 1983 it was reborn as a magnet elementary — still serving children, still carrying the name.
Its place in the American story
Blackshear's history is a compact retelling of the national story of segregated education and the long road toward integration. All across America, communities of color built and sustained their own schools against steep odds, and those schools became anchors of pride, ambition, and leadership.
The pattern here — a lone one-room school, relentless overcrowding, hard-won new buildings, and finally integration — echoes what happened in countless towns. The 1966 desegregation of the district came in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling that separate schools were inherently unequal, and the civil rights movement that pressed the nation to make that promise real.
Naming the school for a noted Black educator was its own quiet act of significance: it told students that scholarship and achievement had a face and a lineage that looked like theirs. The building's continued life as a school honors the teachers who, within an unjust system, gave children a future.
If you visit
Come to this site thinking less about a single building and more about a lineage of them — a school that changed shape and purpose again and again while never leaving this patch of Odessa. The historical marker is your guide to a story you couldn't otherwise read off the walls.
Let the plain West Texas setting sink in: the big sky, the flat horizon, the oil country all around. Then imagine the earlier chapters the marker describes — a class of eight in a single room, then children attending in shifts because there simply wasn't space. Standing here, the arrival of a proper campus in 1948 lands as the victory it was.
If you're exploring the history of the American South and West, a stop like this fits naturally alongside other sites of African American education and civil rights. Read the marker slowly, note the names of the teachers who started it all, and carry the sense that this ground has been shaping young lives for the better part of a century.
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
- · Inez Rathbun
- · Ella Sayles
- · Edward Lavoisier Blackshear
Related events
- · Integration of Ector County schools (1966)
Themes & tags
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