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.
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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.
Lincoln High School
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In the depths of the Jim Crow era, Dallas needed a modern high school for its Black students, whose only option had been the overcrowded Booker T. Washington campus miles away. Backed partly by a New Deal Public Works Administration grant, Lincoln High School opened in January 1939 with 1,255 students and a striking Moderne building whose glass-brick tower became a neighborhood landmark. Under founding principal Tueria Dell Marshall, enrollment surged past 3,000, and the school produced more than 200 educators among its distinguished alumni.
Lake Highlands Elementary School
Dallas, TX
Lake Highlands Elementary opened in 1955 amid the postwar suburban boom that swelled the Richardson School District, its six rooms soon doubled to keep up with growth. The marker frankly records the era's segregation: before 1955 local Black children attended the separate Little Egypt School, and Richardson's schools stayed segregated until 1965, the same year a new campus for African-American students rose in Hamilton Park. Lake Highlands also became a mid-century innovator, among the first schools in the nation to teach by television in 1960.
Bear Creek Community
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Settled in the 1850s within the old Robertson's Colony, this stretch of North Texas prairie became something new after the Civil War, when freedmen moved in and reunited families that slavery had torn apart. Jim Green, the first Black landowner here, bought his acreage in 1878, and neighbors soon followed, organizing the Shady Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and a Freedom School on land Green donated. For generations the Bear Creek community farmed, worshipped, and taught its children here, until the sprawl of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex and its airport all but erased the settlement.