Site of Marshall-Carver High School
Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first school for African American students in Georgetown was established in the early 20th century. Called "The Colored School," the institution served grades 1 through 8 and provided the only local educational opportunities for African Americans. The school's principal, Mr. S. C. Marshall, was an outspoken advocate of higher education. A scholar himself, he persuaded the school board to allow him to provide classes through the high school level. He named the new program "The Georgetown Colored High School," and the first student enrolled in 1913. A new high school building was erected in 1923 due to increasing enrollment. When Marshall left the school in 1930, it was renamed Marshall School in his honor. The name was changed to George Washington Carver in the 1940s. In 1962, the parents of seventeen Carver students who had been denied admission to Georgetown's white schools filed a lawsuit in U. S. District Court to force integration. The court ordered the Georgetown Independent School District to integrate one grade level per year beginning with the first grad.e Partial integration began in the fall of 1964. Convinced that gradual integration would not benefit their children, African American parents appealed the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court which upheld the lower court's verdict. Proponents of full and immediate integration engaged in a letter-writing campaign to the U. S. Attorney General, the U. S. Department of Health, education and Welfare, and the Federal Assistance Program urging another review of the case. In the fall of 1965, the Georgetown School Board agreed to a plan to complete integration of the school system by September 1967. The Carver School was permanently closed due to integration. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Georgetown's first school for African American children began early in the 20th century as “The Colored School,” teaching grades one through eight. Principal S. C. Marshall pushed the board to add high school classes in 1913, and the growing school — later renamed for him and then for George Washington Carver — became the community's educational heart. In 1962 the parents of seventeen Carver students sued to force integration, a fight that carried to the Fifth Circuit and ended with the school's closing as Georgetown desegregated by 1967.
Why it matters
Marshall-Carver embodies both the promise of Black education under segregation and the legal struggle to dismantle it in Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The site of Marshall-Carver High School sits at the intersection of two long American struggles: the effort of Black communities to educate their children, and the fight to end legal segregation. When Georgetown's first school for African American students opened in the early twentieth century — called, in the blunt language of the era, "The Colored School" — Texas and the South lived under Jim Crow, and separate was the law of the land.
Under that system, public resources for Black schools were chronically unequal, and in many towns the only schooling available to African American children ran through the eighth grade, if that. Georgetown was such a place: this one institution provided the only local educational opportunity for African Americans, and at first it stopped at grade eight.
The school's life spans the Progressive era, both World Wars, and the civil-rights decades that followed. Its final chapter — the courtroom battles of the 1960s — unfolded in the years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregated schooling unconstitutional, when communities across the South were being forced, slowly and often against fierce resistance, to make that ruling real.
People & events
At the heart of this story is one determined educator: Mr. S. C. Marshall, the school's principal and, in the inscription's words, an outspoken advocate of higher education. A scholar himself, he refused to accept that Black children in Georgetown should be capped at the eighth grade. He persuaded the school board to let him teach through the high-school level, named the new program "The Georgetown Colored High School," and enrolled its first student in 1913.
Demand proved him right. Enrollment grew enough that a new high-school building went up in 1923. When Marshall left in 1930, the community renamed the school in his honor — Marshall School — and in the 1940s it took the name of George Washington Carver, the celebrated Black scientist and educator. For decades it was the educational heart of Black Georgetown.
The final act was a fight for justice. In 1962 the parents of seventeen Carver students who had been denied admission to Georgetown's white schools sued in U.S. District Court to force integration. The court ordered the district to integrate one grade per year, beginning with the first, and partial integration began in the fall of 1964. Believing gradual change would not help their children, the parents appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which upheld the lower court. Undeterred, advocates of full and immediate integration launched a letter-writing campaign to the U.S. Attorney General, the federal education authorities, and others, pressing for another review. In the fall of 1965 the Georgetown School Board finally agreed to complete integration by September 1967 — and with that, the Carver School was permanently closed.
Its place in the American story
This single Georgetown campus holds, in miniature, the entire national story of Black education in the twentieth century. Its beginning — a principal wringing a high school out of a reluctant school board, one grade at a time — mirrors what happened in countless segregated communities, where Black educators and parents built opportunity that the state would not simply grant. The renaming for George Washington Carver linked this small Texas school to a figure who had become a national symbol of Black achievement.
Its ending belongs to the era of Brown v. Board of Education and its long, contested aftermath. The Georgetown parents' lawsuit, their refusal to accept token "grade-a-year" integration, their appeal to the Fifth Circuit, and their letter-writing campaign to federal officials all echo the strategy of the broader civil-rights movement: use the courts, then use federal pressure, and never mistake partial progress for justice.
There is a bitter irony that runs through desegregation history and is written plainly here: integration often meant the closing of the beloved Black school. Carver, the institution that had been the community's pride, was shut as its students were dispersed into the formerly white system. That paradox — victory and loss in the same act — played out in Black communities across the American South.
If you visit
Come to this Georgetown site knowing that you are reading a marker about a building that is no longer a school — that the very success of the struggle it commemorates is why the school was closed. That knowledge changes how you stand here. This is a place to think about what was won and what was lost in the same breath.
Let the sequence of names carry the story: "The Colored School," then the Georgetown Colored High School, then Marshall School for the principal who willed it into being, then George Washington Carver. Each name marks a chapter — a community naming and renaming the place it built and cherished.
Georgetown has a handsome, well-preserved historic square and a rich cluster of Texas Historical Commission markers, and this one deserves a deliberate stop among them. It rounds out the town's story, insisting that the history worth remembering here includes not only its courthouse and founders but the seventeen families who went to federal court so their children could learn alongside everyone else's.
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
- · S. C. Marshall
Themes & tags
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