The Hill
Arlington, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
A roughly five-block area of Arlington known as "The Hill" was the only addition specifically set aside for the city's African American residents. In the 1890s, the community began developing on land that once belonged to Martin V. and Rebecca A. Thomas. Also during this time, several churches organized in the emerging community. The Church of God in Christ, Mt. Olive Baptist Church and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, now known as Armstrong Chapel AME, became leading institutions in the neighborhood. Mt. Olive, in particular, became a center for spiritual life while also hosting many community and social events. In 1907, Arlington resident Edward F. Wilkerson subdivided land known as the Wilkerson Addition that became the core of The Hill. Growth occurred in the following years as a vibrant community emerged including grocery stores, clubs and restaurants opening by the 1920s. Other important institutions included a school, which the county first established for Arlington's African American children in the 1890s. The last segregated school in The Hill, named for Booker T. Washington, was built in 1953 and closed as integration took place in the 1960s. Another vital part of the neighborhood was this park, which the city opened in the mid-1950s and named for George Stevens, principal of Booker T. Washington School. Although The Hill was originally a rural community, it became more densely populated and urban as the city grew out to meet it by the 1930s. From the mid-1940s through the 1960s, The Hill began to decline as job opportunities and social changes led residents to other areas. Today, The Hill has become an ethnically diverse community. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
"The Hill" was the only part of Arlington set aside for its African American residents, emerging in the 1890s on former Thomas family land and taking shape after Edward F. Wilkerson subdivided his addition in 1907. Churches like Mt. Olive Baptist and Armstrong Chapel AME anchored spiritual and social life, while grocery stores, clubs, restaurants, and a county school for Black children built a vibrant community. The last segregated school, named for Booker T. Washington and built in 1953, closed with integration in the 1960s, and the nearby park was named for principal George Stevens.
Why it matters
The Hill preserves the story of a self-sustaining African American community forged under segregation, and its schools and churches trace the long arc from Jim Crow to integration in a growing Texas city.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1890s, Arlington was a growing town in North Texas, and like every Southern community of its era it was shaped by the hard architecture of segregation. In the decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and customs walled off Black Americans from white society — in schools, businesses, and where they were permitted to live. Out of those constraints, African American communities built worlds of their own: self-sustaining neighborhoods with their own churches, schools, and businesses.
"The Hill" was Arlington's version of that story — a roughly five-block area that was the only addition specifically set aside for the city's African American residents. It began to take shape in the 1890s on land that had once belonged to Martin V. and Rebecca A. Thomas. On that ground, a community started to root itself, gathering the institutions it would need to thrive in a society that offered it little from the outside.
This was the pattern across the South and beyond: denied full participation in the wider town, Black residents created their own centers of faith, learning, and commerce. The Hill's emergence in the Gilded Age and its growth into the modern era mirror that broader national arc.
People & events
Faith came first. In the community's early years, several congregations organized — the Church of God in Christ, Mt. Olive Baptist Church, and the African Methodist Episcopal church now known as Armstrong Chapel AME — and they became the neighborhood's leading institutions. Mt. Olive in particular grew into a center of spiritual life that doubled as a hub for community and social events, the kind of place where a neighborhood's whole life could gather under one roof.
The Hill's physical core was shaped in 1907, when Arlington resident Edward F. Wilkerson subdivided land into what became known as the Wilkerson Addition. Around that core, a vibrant community grew: by the 1920s, grocery stores, clubs, and restaurants had opened, giving The Hill the texture of a full and living neighborhood. Education mattered deeply here — the county had first established a school for Arlington's African American children back in the 1890s, and the last segregated school in The Hill, built in 1953, was named for Booker T. Washington, the era's most prominent Black educator.
When integration came in the 1960s, that school closed. Nearby stood a park the city had opened in the mid-1950s and named for George Stevens, principal of the Booker T. Washington School — an honor tying the neighborhood's green space directly to one of its own educators. Together, the churches, the school, and the park map the institutions on which a community was built.
Its place in the American story
The Hill preserves the story of a self-sustaining African American community forged under segregation — one small, vivid example of a pattern that shaped countless American towns. Denied entry to the wider society, Black Americans built parallel institutions of remarkable strength: churches that anchored the spirit, schools that lifted the young, and businesses that kept dollars and dignity within the neighborhood.
Its timeline traces the long arc of that experience. The naming of a school for Booker T. Washington in 1953, and its closing as integration arrived in the 1960s, marks the very hinge of twentieth-century American history — the passage from the Jim Crow order to the promise of civil rights. Places like The Hill lived that transition not as an abstraction but as the reordering of daily life.
That this community rose, thrived, declined, and endured — becoming today an ethnically diverse neighborhood — is itself an American story. It holds both the injustice that made such enclaves necessary and the resilience and creativity of the people who made them flourish. To remember The Hill is to honor that resilience.
If you visit
This park is the natural place to begin, because it carries a name worth knowing: George Stevens, principal of the Booker T. Washington School. When you walk the grounds the city opened here in the mid-1950s, you are on space that a segregated community claimed as its own — a place of recreation and gathering named for one of its educators.
Let your imagination repopulate the surrounding blocks. Within this roughly five-block area once stood the churches that anchored the neighborhood's spirit — Mt. Olive Baptist, Armstrong Chapel AME, the Church of God in Christ — along with the grocery stores, clubs, and restaurants that gave it life by the 1920s. Some of those congregations trace their roots to the community's earliest days, a living thread connecting the present to the 1890s.
Come with a reflective frame of mind. The Hill's story includes both the injustice of segregation and the extraordinary community that people built in spite of it. If you are exploring the history of the Dallas–Fort Worth area, this stop rewards a slower, more thoughtful visit — a chance to stand where a whole community sustained itself, and to carry its memory forward.
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
- · Edward F. Wilkerson
- · Booker T. Washington
- · George Stevens
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Booker T. Washington School
Arlington, TX
Rooted in Arlington's first Black school of the 1890s, this institution educated generations of African American children in the neighborhood known as The Hill, with the Church of God in Christ lending classroom space as needed. Teachers George Stevens and Gloria Echols lived among their students, and Stevens served as principal for decades; graduates continued on to I.M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth. A modern facility opened in 1954, named for educator Booker T. Washington, until Arlington's 1965 desegregation closed the school.
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