Sunlight Girls Club
Port Lavaca, Calhoun County, Texas
Marker Inscription
When desegregation began in Calhoun County in 1955, many African American students made educational and cultural adjustments. The summer before the 1955-56 school year, long-time educator Naomi B. Chase took a group of students from the all black Alice O. Wilkins school on a picnic to Indianola at the La Salle Monument. With concern for students adjusting to the changes brought on by integration, Mrs. Chase founded the Sunlight Girls Club on January 19, 1960 in her garage. In 1966, the Calhoun County School District provided the Wilkins School cafeteria as the Sunlight Girls’ clubhouse, and the group obtained their charter. The objectives of the club were to bridge the gap of integration, to instill and promote finer womanhood, to instill principles of honesty, fair play, and justice, to develop good character through precepts and examples, to promote leadership, complete high school, strive for higher education, and to provide scholarships for furtherance of education. The first Sunlight Girls Club formed with fourteen girls, ages nine through sixteen. Regular attendance at school and church were mandatory, and music was an integral part of the organization. To promote growth and achievement, the girls were provided instruction in religious studies, music, typing, first aid, cooking, sewing, and ceramics. In 1964, to continue with the girls’ growth and exposure, Edna Brown organized a band with instruments donated by the community. Approximately 312 girls were members of the Sunlight Girls Club during its 40 years of existence. Both sponsors and directors helped open the doors that parents could only dream for their children.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As Calhoun County schools desegregated in 1955, educator Naomi B. Chase watched Black students from the all-Black Alice O. Wilkins School navigate wrenching change. In 1960 she founded the Sunlight Girls Club in her garage to guide them, teaching everything from music and typing to leadership and the value of finishing school. Over four decades some 312 girls passed through the club, which offered scholarships and, from 1964, even its own community-donated band.
Why it matters
The Sunlight Girls Club shows how Black women built their own institutions to shepherd children through the upheaval of integration, blending civil rights, education, and the making of confident young women.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The mid-1950s were a hinge point in American life. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and across the South communities began the long, uneven, often painful process of integration. Calhoun County began desegregating in 1955, and for the Black students who lived through it, the change was not an abstraction—it was a daily test of nerve and adjustment.
Before integration, Black education in towns like Port Lavaca centered on schools of their own, staffed by Black teachers who were often pillars of the community. The all-Black Alice O. Wilkins School was that kind of anchor. When desegregation arrived, students carried the weight of leaving a familiar, supportive world for one that did not always welcome them.
This was the era when the modern civil rights movement was gathering force nationally, but the deepest work often happened quietly, locally, and out of the headlines—in classrooms, churches, and, as here, in a teacher's own garage. The Sunlight Girls Club took shape in exactly that setting.
People & events
The story begins with a picnic. The summer before the 1955-56 school year, long-time educator Naomi B. Chase took a group of students from the Alice O. Wilkins School to Indianola, to the La Salle Monument—a small act of care by a teacher watching her students brace for enormous change.
That concern grew into something lasting. On January 19, 1960, Mrs. Chase founded the Sunlight Girls Club in her garage. It began with fourteen girls, ages nine through sixteen, and its aims were as ambitious as they were tender: to bridge the gap of integration, to build character and leadership, to insist that the girls finish high school and reach for higher education, and to provide scholarships to make that possible. Regular attendance at school and church was required, and music ran through everything.
The club grew into an institution. The girls were taught religious studies, music, typing, first aid, cooking, sewing, and ceramics. In 1964 Edna Brown organized a band with instruments donated by the community. In 1966 the Calhoun County School District gave the group the Wilkins School cafeteria as a clubhouse, and the club obtained its charter. Over its forty years, roughly 312 girls passed through—each one, in the marker's words, seeing doors opened that their parents could only dream of.
Its place in the American story
The Sunlight Girls Club tells a part of the civil rights story that the famous marches and courtroom victories can overshadow: the work of getting individual children safely through the upheaval those victories set in motion. Desegregation was ordered from the top down, but its human cost was absorbed child by child, and Black communities built their own supports to carry that weight.
It is also a story of Black women's leadership. Naomi Chase and Edna Brown were doing what Black women had long done in American life—creating and sustaining institutions that formal society would not provide, turning a garage and a school cafeteria into engines of uplift. Their emphasis on education, scholarships, and "finer womanhood" placed them squarely in a long tradition of Black women's clubs devoted to community advancement.
And its reach was real and countable: 312 girls over four decades, guided toward finishing school and pursuing more. That is how a movement becomes a future—not only through laws, but through mentors who make sure children walk through the doors the laws pry open.
If you visit
Stand near this marker and let the modest scale of the story sink in. This was not a grand campaign launched from a capital; it started in one woman's garage, with fourteen girls, and a teacher who refused to let her students face change alone. The ordinariness of the setting is exactly what makes it moving.
Think about the range of what these girls were taught—typing and first aid alongside music, leadership, and the flat expectation that they would finish school and keep going. Picture the community-donated band from 1964, instruments gathered up so the girls could play. This was a whole vision of young womanhood, assembled from what neighbors could give.
If you're touring the history of Port Lavaca and Calhoun County, let this stop reframe what you're seeing. Alongside the older markers to settlement and war, this one speaks to living memory and to the quiet architects of the civil rights era. It's a place to slow down and consider how much of history is built by people whose names never made the national papers.
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
- · Naomi B. Chase
- · Edna Brown
Themes & tags
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