West Side School for Mexican Americans
Beeville, Bee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the years before Texas became an independent republic, Hispanic and Irish settlers established ranches and farms in this area. Their children received education at home or in community schools. Bee County organized in 1858 and in 1860 Maryville (Beeville) became the county seat. Beeville citizens incorporated in 1893 to form a school district, opening a new school the next year; St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church founded St. Mary's Academy in 1898. Outside the city, ranchers, who with their employees represented a majority of the area's Hispanic population, established schools on their property, and rural communities continued maintaining small schools. The Beeville school district built the A.C. Jones High School in 1911. At that same time, the district built the West Side School for the city's growing Mexican American population. The two-room frame building served students until 1932, when a brick schoolhouse was erected one block west at this site, facing Jackson Street. Mexican American students integrated into Jones High School in 1938, and lower grades integrated by the mid-1940s. During that era, two organizations, the American G.I. Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens, began challenging inequality toward Mexican Americans. Their cases before Texas courts in the 1940s and 1950s barred segregation of Mexican American students. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education did the same for African American students, who in Beeville attended the Lott-Canada School for many years. Since integration, the school district has continued to utilize the West Side, or Jackson, school building. The former school is remembered for its strong curriculum, educators and students, who succeeded despite segregated conditions. (2005)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As Beeville's Mexican American population grew, the school district in 1911 opened the segregated West Side School, moving it to a brick building at this site on Jackson Street in 1932. Mexican American students began integrating into A.C. Jones High School in 1938, a process aided in the 1940s and 1950s by the American G.I. Forum and LULAC, whose Texas court cases barred the segregation of Mexican American children — a parallel to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling for African American students. The building is remembered for the strong education students achieved despite unequal conditions.
Why it matters
The school stands at the heart of the Mexican American civil-rights struggle against school segregation, a fight that reshaped education law across Texas and the nation.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Brown v. Board of Education
- · LULAC and American G.I. Forum desegregation cases
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Lott Canada School
Beeville, TX
Black education in Bee County began in 1876 in Stephen Canada's store, then a small frame schoolhouse, chartered by the county as "Colored Community School Twelve." A larger frame school followed on North Burke Street, where principal J.R. Lockett matched the offerings of the town's white schools until fire destroyed it in 1929. With help from the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Fund, a brick school with four classrooms and an auditorium opened in 1931, named for carpenters Mose Lott and Allen Canada — serving until integration closed it in 1964.
William Rubio Carbajal
Goliad, TX
In segregated 1930s Goliad, Mexican American children were confined to a cramped one-room school that ended at seventh grade, while the high school admitted only white students. Backed by his principal Frank Wallace and the newly formed Goliad chapter of LULAC, the Carbajal family carried their fight to the Texas Board of Education, which finally ordered the school to admit William. After three days waiting on the schoolhouse steps he was let in, and in 1935 he became the first Mexican American to graduate from Goliad High School.
American Legion Post 818
Beeville, TX
This American Legion post honors Charles H. Lytle, Beeville's first African American serviceman killed in World War II, who died when the USS Ommaney Bay went down near the Philippines in 1945. Chartered in 1946 for Black veterans in the Jim Crow era, the post became a vital community hub — hosting the segregated proms that African American graduates were barred from attending at the local white high school.
William E. Madderra Home
Beeville, TX
For thirty-four years William Eldridge Madderra ran Beeville's schools, shaping the town's earliest public education so thoroughly that a school building was named for him. In 1907 he bought this late-Victorian house, built three years earlier, and lived here with his wife Donna until his death in 1936. Its three-sided bay and period detailing mark it as a fixture of the town's growing years.