Site of Lincoln High School
Palestine, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1891, the first high school for African American students in Palestine opened in the mission church on San Jacinto Street. Four years later, the school moved to this site and became known as Lincoln High School. The first class graduated from Lincoln in 1896. Originally a four-room building, the schoolhouse was expanded over time to accommodate increasing enrollment. In 1922, the Lincoln school building burned, and classes were held in several churches until the new, six-room brick structure was completed in 1923. As rural districts consolidated with Palestine, enrollment at Lincoln continued to increase, and the school became an important cultural center for the African American community. In 1952, the school board approved construction of a new high school to be named in honor of Alonzo Marion Story, Lincoln's principal from 1925 to 1949. The building that had formerly housed the high school reopened as Lincoln Junior High in the fall of 1953. Serving grades five through eight, it later housed grades two through eight before closing in 1965 when the Palestine schools integrated. After 1965, the Lincoln school building remained in use as an important social center and as headquarters for the Anderson County Community Council. A 1996 fire resulted in its demolition, but this site remains a significant part of the educational and community heritage of Palestine and Anderson County. (2002)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Palestine's first high school for African American students opened in 1891 in a mission church, moving to this site in 1895 as Lincoln High School, with its first class graduating in 1896. Rebuilt in brick after a 1922 fire, the growing school became a cultural anchor for the Black community. It served as a junior high after 1953 and closed in 1965 when the city's schools integrated, remaining a community center until a 1996 fire led to its demolition.
Why it matters
Lincoln's arc from segregated schoolhouse to integration marks the long struggle for Black education and equal citizenship in the American South.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Palestine in the 1890s was a town on the move. The railroad had made it one of the busier places in East Texas, bringing jobs, newcomers and a growing sense that the town was going somewhere. A good number of those newcomers and longtime residents were African American families, many only a generation removed from slavery, and they wanted the one thing that promised the most to their children: education.
They wanted it in a state that kept Black and white students strictly apart. Texas required separate schools, and across the South the schools set aside for Black children usually got less money, worse buildings and fewer grades. In many towns a Black student who wanted a high school education had nowhere local to get one.
That is the backdrop for 1891, when Palestine's Black community opened its first high school in a mission church on San Jacinto Street. Holding classes in a church was common, and it says a lot. Before public money arrived, and often after it did, Black churches gave education a roof, a meeting place and a congregation that cared whether it lasted.
The nation was moving in the opposite direction. In 1896, the year Lincoln graduated its first class, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave legal blessing to separate but equal. For the next six decades Lincoln's students and teachers worked inside that system, building something real under rules designed to hold them back.
People & events
The school's story is one of people refusing to let setbacks end it. Four years after the first classes in the mission church, the high school moved to this site and took the name Lincoln, a name that many Black schools across the country chose in honor of the president tied to emancipation. In 1896 the first graduates walked across Lincoln's stage. For their families, that diploma marked an achievement many of their parents and grandparents had been legally barred from even trying for.
The first schoolhouse had just four rooms, and it kept growing as more students came. Then in 1922 the building burned. The community didn't let classes stop. Students were spread among several churches until a new six-room brick school opened in 1923, and once again the churches carried the school through a crisis.
From 1925 to 1949 the principal was Alonzo Marion Story. A quarter century is a long time to lead a school, and over those years Lincoln became much more than a place for lessons. As rural districts consolidated with Palestine, more students arrived, and the school grew into a cultural center for the whole Black community, the place for gatherings, performances and pride. In 1952 the school board approved a new high school and named it for him. That is about as clear a sign of a principal's standing as any town can give.
The old building kept serving. It reopened as Lincoln Junior High in the fall of 1953, first for grades five through eight and later for grades two through eight. It closed in 1965 when Palestine's schools integrated. Even then it found new work as a social center and as headquarters of the Anderson County Community Council. In 1996 another fire led to its demolition, and that ended more than a century of service on this ground.
Its place in the American story
Lincoln's timeline lines up almost exactly with the long fight over Black education in the United States. It opened in the years when segregation was becoming law across the South. It graduated its first class the same year the Supreme Court approved separate but equal. Its building closed in the mid-1960s, the period when school integration finally began to happen across much of the South, more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 declared segregated schools unconstitutional.
The slow pace is part of the story. Brown did not integrate schools overnight. In many Southern communities, real change came only in the following years, with federal civil rights law and pressure behind it. Palestine's 1965 integration is one local example of that drawn-out national process.
What happened inside the walls matters just as much. Schools like Lincoln were often underfunded, but they were not empty places. They trained generations of teachers, ministers, tradespeople and leaders, and they were run by educators who held their communities to high standards. Integration brought legal equality, but it often closed the Black schools that had anchored a neighborhood's identity. Lincoln's second life as a community center shows how much people wanted to keep that anchor.
When you remember Lincoln, you are remembering how a whole people built education for themselves, often with their own hands and their own church buildings, and kept it alive until the law finally caught up.
If you visit
The schoolhouse itself is gone. Fire took it in 1996, and what you will find is the site and the Texas Historical Commission marker. That makes this a stop for imagination more than architecture. Stand here and picture a four-room schoolhouse, then a brick building full of students, then evenings when the whole community gathered under its roof.
Take a moment to think about the journey the marker describes: from a mission church on San Jacinto Street, to this spot, through a fire, a rebuilding and integration. Few marker sites cover so much American history in one place.
Palestine works well as a base for exploring East Texas. Its railroad heritage and historic downtown give a good sense of the town Lincoln's students grew up in. If you are traveling with kids, this is a natural place to talk about what it meant to fight for a chance to go to school, and why a community might name a new building after a beloved principal.
As at any marker in a residential setting, be respectful of the neighborhood. Park legally and take your time with the words on the plaque.
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
- · Alonzo Marion Story
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Timothy Stephen Smith
Palestine, TX
Born in 1902 to a father who had escaped slavery, Timothy Stephen Smith earned a degree from Prairie View A&M and taught school for forty-two years. Convinced that Anderson County's voting boundaries diluted Black political strength, he and others sued in 1973; Judge William Wayne Justice agreed, striking down a "racially motivated gerrymander" and forcing a switch to single-member districts. Similar success against the City of Palestine soon followed, opening the way for the county's first Black officeholders.
N. A. Banks Elementary School
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Established in 1912, Banks Elementary was the first school for African-American children living south of the I&GN tracks in Palestine's South End. It honored Nathaniel A. Banks, the Lincoln High principal who ran a summer 'normal school' that trained Black teachers from ten surrounding counties for state certification. Several of its teachers stayed more than 35 years each, and after desegregation closed the school in 1965 the building served five more years as a federal Head Start center.
South Union Missionary Baptist Church
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In 1893 the Rev. Richard Henry Boyd—a formerly enslaved Mississippian known as the "Cowboy Preacher"—organized South Union Baptist Church in Palestine with 31 charter members. Boyd founded churches across Texas while pursuing a larger vision: creating Christian literature for the nation's African American churches, work that eventually drew him to Nashville as a religious publisher. The Palestine congregation grew from a two-room building into a larger 1948 sanctuary and long opened its doors to community and educational groups, its rolls reflecting the railroad workers and civic leaders of Black Palestine.
Frederick Douglass Elementary School
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