Site of Booker T. Washington High School
Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Records indicate that by 1886, when Cora Robinson was chosen as a teacher, Wichita County operated at least one school for African American students in the Wichita Falls area. Other early teachers included A.L. Hedrick and M.E. Hunter, and students attended classes at different times in facilities on Mill, Park and Sullivan streets. Walter Downing and C.C. Trimble served as principals for many years, but it was during the princaipalship of H.D. Robinson that a three-story brick school building was constructed at this site. In 1921, former Wichita Falls mayor Jim Marlow sold eight acres in this section of town to create a new African American business and social center. The community chose this site for the Booker T. Washinton School, named for the noted educator and author. The school became a neighborhood focal point, and businesses developed around it that further placed it at the center of Wichita Falls' African American community. In 1922, A.E. Holland became the school's principal. He served until 1946, and under his leadership the school became a Class A accredited campus, and additional facilities, including a cafeteria and lighted football field, were constructed. The acclaimed C.E. Jackson served as principal from 1946 to 1963, during which time the district added a gym and an adjacent elementary school, also named for Washington. The high school moved to a site on Harding Street in 1963, and the district integrated in 1969, razing the former Washington High School building in 1971. Since that time, the community has continued using other buildings on the campus, including the cafeteria, which now serves as a center for the school's proud alumni. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
African American education in Wichita Falls reaches back to at least 1886, when Cora Robinson was hired to teach, but it found a lasting home after 1921, when eight acres were set aside to create a Black business and social district. There the community built Booker T. Washington School, named for the famed educator, and under principals like A.E. Holland and C.E. Jackson it became an accredited campus at the heart of Black community life. The high school moved in 1963, the district integrated in 1969, and the original building was razed in 1971—yet the alumni still gather in a surviving campus building.
Why it matters
Booker T. Washington High School was the anchor of a segregated community's economic and civic life, and its story—from Jim Crow schooling to integration—maps the long arc of African American education in America.
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Related people
- · Cora Robinson
- · A.E. Holland
- · C.E. Jackson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Midwestern University Desegregation
Wichita Falls, TX
Beginning in 1948, African American graduates of Booker T. Washington High School repeatedly sought admission to Hardin Junior College, part of Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, only to be turned away — even honor students accepted by mail were rejected in person. With NAACP encouragement, Willie Faye Battle and fellow applicants pressed the issue into federal court in Battle, et al. v. Wichita Falls Junior College District. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the first Black students enrolled that summer.
Dr. Colonel Bertram (C. B.) Fuller
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Born in Terrell in 1920, Dr. C.B. Fuller earned his medical degree in 1947 from Meharry Medical College — the South's first medical school for African Americans — and opened a practice in Wichita Falls' east side in 1948. He won admitting privileges at the city-county hospital, where a converted broom closet served as his nursery, and in 1955 became the first African American physician admitted to the Texas Medical Association. He later served on a federal judge's biracial schools committee and was elected to lead the hospital's medical staff.
Dr. Anne Elizabeth Davis Roark
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When Wichita Falls' 1918 oil boom swelled its African American community, Dr. Anne Elizabeth Davis Roark answered the need for professional care, practicing podiatry downtown for nearly six decades after opening her first office in 1923. Remarkably for the Jim Crow era, her practice served white patrons even as she and her husband built Black institutions on the east side — a hotel and coffee shop that doubled as a poll-tax station and waitress-training site, and the Isis Theater that hosted Black artists and welcomed Black servicemen barred from facilities at Sheppard Air Force Base.
Charlye Ola Farris
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