Thomas Johnson School
Hemphill, Sabine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Hemphill School in Sabine County was established between 1929 and 1930. Smaller schools existed in the area since the end of the Civil War for African Americans, but by the 1930s the Hemphill school was one of the few African American schools in the county. This school was originally one of thousands of schools for African Americans that were partially funded by the Rosenwald Fund. Established in 1917, the Rosenwald Fund was a collaboration between Julius Rosenwald, President of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and noted African American educator Booker T. Washington to fund African American schools in rural areas throughout the south. By 1949, the school received new facilities and became renamed the Hemphill Colored School. That year school principal Russell Sage Simmons created a school annual called “The Hawk”, which documented student names, plans and history. The publication also featured pages on a Veterans School that was added to the campus site as part of a nationwide program to provide technical training for returning veterans of WWII. Robert T. Cannon taught technical skills while Mrs. V.M. Jones taught reading, writing and math. In the mid-1950s, a new school and gymnasium were built. By 1959, the school became known as the Thomas Johnson School. In 1966, the Thomas Johnson School integrated into the Hemphill Independent School District. The school continued to be used as an elementary school, but eventually all students were moved to schools closer to the city. The Rosenwald School served as a major foundation for African American education in the community since the early 20th century.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built around 1930, this Hemphill school was one of thousands across the rural South funded in part by the Rosenwald Fund, a partnership between Sears executive Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington to build schools for African American children. Over the decades it grew into the Hemphill Colored School and later the Thomas Johnson School, adding a program to train returning WWII veterans and publishing its own yearbook, 'The Hawk.' In 1966 it integrated into the local district, closing a long chapter as the cornerstone of Black education in the county.
Why it matters
Rosenwald schools were a landmark effort to expand educational opportunity for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, and surviving sites like this one mark where Black communities fought to educate their children against steep odds.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This school took shape in the Jim Crow South, in a rural Texas county where the promise of education for African American children was real but perpetually underfunded. Small schools for Black students had existed in the Sabine County area since the end of the Civil War, but they operated in a system designed to give them less — less money, fewer buildings, shorter terms. By the time the Hemphill school was established around 1929 to 1930, it stood as one of the few African American schools in the entire county.
That scarcity is the essential backdrop. Under segregation, the burden of building and sustaining schools often fell heavily on Black communities themselves, who taxed themselves twice in effect — once through public taxes that flowed mostly to white schools, and again through their own labor and donations to build what their children needed.
Into that gap stepped one of the most consequential philanthropic efforts of the era. This school began as one of thousands across the rural South built with support from the Rosenwald Fund, an effort that grew out of the collaboration between Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and the educator Booker T. Washington. Communities contributed land, labor, and cash; the fund provided matching money; and schoolhouses rose where there had been almost nothing.
People & events
The names attached to this place map the arc of its life. Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington stand at the origin — the businessman and the educator whose partnership seeded a school-building movement across the South, of which the fund formally established in 1917 was the institutional expression. This Hemphill school was one small node in that vast network, but for the children who walked through its doors it was everything.
The school grew and changed with its community. By 1949 it had new facilities and a new name, the Hemphill Colored School, and that same year its principal, Russell Sage Simmons, created a school annual called The Hawk — a yearbook that recorded students' names, their plans, and the school's own history. It is hard to overstate what a document like that meant: a community insisting, in print, that its children's lives were worth remembering.
The Hawk also documented a Veterans School added to the campus, part of a nationwide push to give returning World War II servicemen technical training — the postwar programs that helped a generation of veterans build new livelihoods. There, Robert T. Cannon taught technical skills while Mrs. V. M. Jones taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. New buildings and a gymnasium followed in the mid-1950s, and by 1959 the school was known as the Thomas Johnson School. In 1966 it integrated into the Hemphill Independent School District, and in time its students were moved to schools closer to town.
Its place in the American story
The Rosenwald schools were one of the most remarkable educational efforts in American history — a partnership that, over a few decades, helped build schools for hundreds of thousands of African American children across the rural South at a time when the public system was structured to shortchange them. To find one of these schools is to find a place where a national movement touched down in a single community and changed what was possible for its children.
The later chapters of this school's life trace the nation's slow turn toward equality. The 1966 integration into the local district came in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which held that separate schools were inherently unequal — a ruling whose implementation stretched across years and reached small counties like this one only gradually. This school's timeline is the national timeline, lived locally.
There is a bittersweet note in that closing chapter, common to Rosenwald schools everywhere. Integration was a hard-won victory, yet it often meant that beloved Black schools — sources of pride, leadership, and identity — were shuttered or absorbed. Remembering this site honors both the community that built it against long odds and the complicated cost of the progress that eventually followed.
If you visit
Approach this marker as a place of quiet significance rather than spectacle. Standing here, the thing to hold in mind is the effort this school represented — the way a community pooled what little it had, matched it against outside support, and produced a place where its children could learn in a society determined to make that hard.
Let the specifics ground you. Think of a principal in 1949 assembling a yearbook called The Hawk, deciding that these students deserved a record of their names and dreams. Think of returning veterans learning a trade in classrooms on this same campus, and of the steady progression of names — Hemphill Colored School, then Thomas Johnson School — each marking a stage in the community's story up to integration in 1966.
This is a stop that pairs naturally with the broader history of East Texas and of the South's Rosenwald school network; you can find these markers scattered across many states, each one a piece of the same larger story. Read the marker slowly, resist the urge to rush on, and carry away the understanding that some of the most important American history happened in modest buildings, built by people whose determination outran their resources.
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
- · Julius Rosenwald
- · Booker T. Washington
- · Russell Sage Simmons
Themes & tags
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