African American History

San Antonio, TX

Envisioned in the 1870s as a spiritual home for Texas's newly freed Black citizens, St. Philip's became the first Episcopal church for African Americans in the Diocese of West Texas when it was established in 1895. Housed at first in a former German Methodist church in the La Villita district, the congregation launched a vocational school in 1898 that grew into St. Philip's College. It remained the diocese's only predominantly African American parish until the 1960s.

Orange, TX

Six months after emancipation reached Texas in 1865, Black Methodists organized a mission conference on Christmas Day, and by 1868 its Orange mission was holding worship services. Formally named Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in 1873, the congregation built a frame church, hosted classes for African American schoolchildren, and grew steadily through the twentieth century. Its members became community leaders — ministers, educators, civil rights activists, an NAACP vice president, and the first Black and first female mayor of Orange.

Houston, TX

Sam Hopkins, born in Leon County in 1912, learned guitar from his brothers and from Texas blues pioneers before making Houston's Third Ward his home in the 1940s. Playing the clubs and street corners around Dowling Street, he was 'discovered' in 1946, picked up the nickname 'Lightnin',' and cut his first hit, 'Katy Mae.' Recording for early Houston labels like Gold Star, he became one of the most prolific bluesmen who ever lived, and the 1960s folk revival carried him from neighborhood dance parties all the way to Carnegie Hall.

Huntsville, TX

Born in Huntsville in 1864 to enslaved parents, Samuel W. Houston earned degrees from Hampton, Atlanta University, and Howard before returning home to build schools for African American children in an era when the state funneled only Black-paid taxes toward their education. Around 1906 he opened classes in the rented Galilee Methodist Church, and the Sam Houston Industrial and Training School grew to serve hundreds of students statewide with vocational and academic programs. Merged into the Huntsville school system by 1930, it became Sam Houston High School and endured until integration in 1968.

Crockett, TX

A Georgia native and Civil War veteran, Samuel Fisher Tenney (1840-1926) graduated from the University of Georgia and a South Carolina seminary before settling in Crockett in 1870. For 54 years he served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, while also helping build educational facilities for Black residents and starting a mission in 1880 for the Alabama-Coushatta Indians in Polk County. His long ministry left a deep mark on the region.

San Felipe, TX

Founded in 1824 as the capital of Stephen F. Austin's original Anglo-American colony, San Felipe de Austin set aside this ground for its dead in its very first Mexican charter, chosen by Austin and the Baron de Bastrop. The cemetery grew into a fenced Anglo section of some 370 graves alongside a separate African American section of roughly 200, at least three belonging to former slaves. Many of the colony's earliest pioneers and leaders lie here, in soil that predates Texas statehood.

San Marcos, TX

Instruction for Black children in San Marcos, Texas, may have begun as early as 1847, but the community's first public school for them was founded in 1877 with fifty pupils, and in 1918 it moved to this 7.3-acre site. Rising out of Reconstruction and growing through the era of segregation, the school became a foundation for a community determined to educate its children, and many of its graduates went on to higher education. It stands as a testament to Black Texans building opportunity within and against the constraints of a segregated system.

San Marcos, TX

Rooted in an 1834 Mexican land grant, this burial ground took shape in the decades after the Civil War, when a portion was purchased in 1868 by freedman Peter Roberts and, in 1876, a cemetery association bought ten acres to formalize the grounds. Local tradition holds that enslaved people were laid here even earlier, and over the following decades the cemetery grew to more than twenty acres. Those interred include pioneer settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam.

San Marcos, TX

In 1893 five trustees of the newly formed San Marcos and Blanco Cemetery Association bought more than ten acres to serve the African American communities of Nance's Mill and Mountain City, together known as the Blanco community. Burials had already begun by 1886, when Emma Hamilton was laid to rest, and the site—long called the San Marcos Colored Cemetery—holds more than 300 marked graves alongside many unmarked ones, including teachers, farmers, and ministers. Also used as a paupers' ground, the still-active cemetery had its historic name restored in 1996.

Athens, TX

In 1856 Joseph Stirman donated five acres for a church and school open to all "regardless of race, sex, or religion," seeding the Sand Flat community; two of those acres became the resting place of its African American families. Men like Henry Givens, brought to the county enslaved in 1855, gained their freedom and by 1867 stood on the county's Black voter rolls, going on to farm, teach, and lead. The cemetery holds their descendants alongside veterans of both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, tended still by the families who remain.

Bryan, TX

In 1929 Father Frank Urbanovsky—affectionately called Padre Panchito—arrived in Bryan and began traveling the countryside to minister to Mexican and Mexican American families working the farms, railroads, and service jobs along the Brazos. Recognizing their need for a parish of their own, he organized worshipers and, with the help of the Santo Nombre Society and the Guadalupanas, dedicated the first church for the area's Hispanic Catholic community in 1940. The parish grew steadily, dedicating a new Santa Teresa church in 1979 and continuing bilingual ministry ever since.

Rusk, TX

Several families from the Edgefield District of South Carolina settled here in 1848, drawn by a landscape that reminded them of home, and founded the Edgefield community and Sardis Baptist Church. The cemetery's marked burials begin with Rebecca Bolton Neal in 1873, and among those interred is Peter Berry — a veteran of the Seminole War and Confederate service, and a great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Unmarked graves are believed to hold early settlers and enslaved people.

Hutto vicinity, TX

The Saul family put down roots along Brushy Creek around 1850, and in 1862 Charles Saul acquired the 640-acre tract that became both ranch and resting place. His 1870 death opened the family burial ground, which holds twenty-three marked graves through 1918 and, by tradition, a number of unmarked graves of enslaved people. The land has stayed in Saul hands for well over a century.

McKinney, TX

Scott Cemetery began in the 1850s on the land of pioneer James Preston Scott, whose two-year-old granddaughter, Mary C. Taylor, was the first person buried here. Among its more than 200 graves — at least 30 of them unmarked — are two enslaved people, Jake and Rhoda, laid to rest in the northwest corner. Scott himself, who died while serving in the Texas Legislature, was buried here in 1858, and the ground still serves the surrounding rural communities.

New York, NY

Scott Joplin, the 'King of Ragtime,' lived at this Harlem address in 1917, the final year of his life. A composer and pianist of extraordinary gifts, he gave America enduring rags like 'The Entertainer' and 'Maple Leaf Rag' and poured his ambitions into the opera 'Treemonisha.' His syncopated music captured the energy of turn-of-the-century America and laid groundwork for jazz.

Texarkana, TX

Scott Joplin was born near this spot in Texarkana around 1868, the son of a formerly enslaved fiddler and a banjo-playing mother, and got his early schooling and music lessons here before leaving home at fourteen. Wandering through the Midwest's saloons, he became one of the creators of ragtime, a syncopated new music blending Black and white traditions. His 1899 "Maple Leaf Rag" turned ragtime into a national craze, and he composed more than thirty piano rags and the folk opera "Treemonisha" before dying in 1917 — decades before a 1970s revival crowned him a genius.

Louisville, KY

Formally organized on September 29, 1844, this Louisville congregation—now Green Street Baptist Church—was founded during slavery under a protection committee appointed by the white First Baptist Church, as law and custom then required of Black worshipers. Elder George Wells served as its first pastor. Beyond worship, the church functioned as a school, a social center, and a training ground in self-organization; it moved to Green Street in 1848, took its present name in 1860, and relocated to East Gray Street in 1930.

Pleasanton, TX

In 1891 a small group of African American residents of Pleasanton gathered to organize a Baptist congregation, first named Saint James under founding pastor Reverend James Ellis, and soon bought a half-acre on East Adams Street for a church. The congregation weathered a discouraging setback when its first building was demolished in 1950 and the new one delayed, but a determined core held on, worshiping at a mission church until the new facility was dedicated in 1953 under the name Second Baptist. Today it remains a center of faith, scholarship, and community service.

San Antonio, TX

In 1879, the Rev. Charles Augustis and eleven other formerly enslaved men founded this San Antonio congregation, seeking a fellowship where they could worship as equals despite the lingering weight of slavery. Known first as Macedonia Baptist Church, the congregation baptized members in the nearby San Antonio River and raised an ornate Gothic sanctuary in 1910. Over more than a century it grew into a center of evangelism, education, and community service.

Seguin, TX

When the Civil War ended, freedmen in Seguin sought places to worship and to school their children. On November 16, 1865, the Rev. Leonard Ilsley—a Maine native who stayed to aid the freedmen and helped organize churches across the county—gathered a small group to found the Second Baptist Church of Seguin. Under the Rev. Hiram Wilson, once enslaved himself, the congregation bought its present site in 1874 and built both a sanctuary and a school; members included Buffalo Soldiers and educator William Ball, who helped organize the Abraham Lincoln School.

Waco, TX

On December 7, 1879, twenty-one members of New Hope Baptist Church organized this congregation to serve Black residents in southern Waco during the closing days of Reconstruction, an era when many African Americans were leaving the former slave states in search of new lives. First worshiping in a one-room building on Canal Street, the church weathered financial hardship and a 1922 fire that destroyed its sanctuary. Through every setback it kept growing, sustaining outreach and missionary work as an anchor of the community for more than a century.

Brackettville, TX

Established on the Fort Clark reservation in 1872, this cemetery holds the graves of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts and their families. Descendants of Seminoles and formerly enslaved people who had come from Florida around 1850 and lived in Mexico and Texas, these scouts served under Lieutenant John L. Bullis and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in the frontier campaigns of the 1870s, and four of them earned the Medal of Honor.

Brackettville, TX

For decades the descendants of Africans who had fled slavery for Spanish Florida — where they joined the Seminole people and forged the distinct Black Seminole community — carried their hard-won freedom across the continent. After removal to Indian Territory and a sojourn in Mexico, one group crossed back into Texas in 1870 to serve the U.S. Army as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts. They made their home at 'the camp' on Fort Clark, building jacal houses and digging irrigation ditches along Las Moras Creek while scouting the border country until their disbandment in 1914.

Del Rio, TX

From 1870 to 1881, roughly a hundred Seminole-Negro Scouts served the U.S. Army along the Texas border at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio. Mostly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with Florida Seminoles before removal to Indian Territory, they were prized for extraordinary tracking skill, courage, and endurance on the trail. Under Lieutenant John L. Bullis they fought for eight years without losing a single scout, and four earned the Medal of Honor.

Charleston, SC

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987) was a Charleston-born teacher who became one of the most important architects of the civil rights movement, though she rarely stood at its podiums. Barred for decades from teaching in Charleston's own public schools because she was Black, she poured her energy into the Citizenship Schools, teaching adults across the South to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests that blocked them from voting. In 1978 the South Carolina legislature honored her by naming this Charleston expressway for her, a rare official tribute to a living Black woman in the state that had once shut her out of its classrooms.

Kirvin, TX

The largest of three slave graveyards said to have been established in this part of Freestone County in the early 1850s, this cemetery was named for G. A. Sessions, a prominent local citizen and delegate to Texas's 1875 Constitutional Convention, who donated the land. Its oldest burial is believed to be that of Anderson Carter, who died in the 1850s. Closely tied to the nearby Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church, it holds the graves of many enslaved people and their descendants.

Texas City, TX

During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people founded a community on land that Judge William J. Jones platted for sale to freedmen near the Gulf Coast. Many had been brought to the area by cattlemen, and after the war some stayed on as cowboys for the Butler Ranch while building their own settlement, a church and a school by 1871. Proud of owning land and their freedom, residents called the place "Our Settlement"; it prospered into the early 1900s with an unusually high literacy rate before industry, integration and incorporation into Texas City gradually dispersed it.

Temple, TX

Established in the 1860s along the MKT rail line near Temple, this burial ground has gone by many names but is remembered today as Seven Star Cemetery — a reference to the North Star and the constellation traditions said to have guided people escaping slavery toward freedom. Though fewer than 100 of its roughly 500 graves keep their original markers, those buried here include formerly enslaved people and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The local Juneteenth Association tends the site.

Port Lavaca, TX

William Henry Barnes enlisted in the Union Army in early 1864, joining the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. That September he was wounded storming the Confederate works at the Battle of New Market Heights in Virginia—valor that earned him the Medal of Honor. Promoted to sergeant and posted to the Texas border, he died of consumption in 1866 and was ultimately reinterred in the San Antonio National Cemetery.

Paris, TX

This shaded grove near a creek crossing began as a resting place in 1844 for a dying young traveler who asked to be buried in the beautiful spot, and it soon became ground for camp meetings led by traveling frontier preachers. A local family deeded the land in the 1840s, and a Methodist church grew directly from those open-air revivals. An adjoining African American burial ground, its earliest marked grave from 1875, tells of the Black community that lived and worshiped alongside.

Burkeville, TX

Jim and Winnie Shankle, both born into slavery, became the first Black landowners and community leaders in Newton County after emancipation—but their story begins with an act of extraordinary devotion. Separated when Winnie and her children were sold to a Texan, Jim escaped his Mississippi owner and traveled 400 miles by night, swimming rivers, to find her. Freed and reunited, the couple and their allies eventually amassed over 4,000 acres, anchoring a thriving Black community of farms, churches, mills, and even McBride College (1883–1909).

Raleigh, NC

Founded in 1865 by Baptist missionary Henry Martin Tupper in the first months after emancipation, Shaw University became one of the earliest historically Black colleges in the South. Chartered in 1875, it was named for benefactor Elijah Shaw of Massachusetts and went on to educate generations of Black ministers, teachers, doctors, and leaders. It pioneered coeducation and professional training for African Americans.

Irving, TX

African Americans first came to this area before 1845 as people enslaved by white settlers, and after the Civil War many freedpeople remained and built a large community here. In 1879 Minnie Shelton bought 80 acres including this site, and the Shelton family set aside land for a cemetery; the earliest marked grave, from 1895, belongs to 23-year-old Smith King. Though later landowners restricted access and only a dozen legible stones survived a 1970s survey, more than 200 people are believed to be buried here.

Waco, TX

Born into slavery in Alabama around 1829 and brought to Texas in 1854, Sheppard "Shep" Mullens emerged after Emancipation as a Waco community leader — acquiring land, registering voters, and serving as a delegate to the 1868-69 Constitutional Convention. In 1870 he won a seat in the 12th Texas Legislature, among the first African Americans ever to serve there, representing McLennan, Limestone, and Falls counties. He died in office in 1871 and was buried in Waco's First Street Cemetery; the state placed this marker in his honor in 2023.

Longview, TX

Organized in 1870 in the Judson community with help from Reverend Daniel Sherman, this congregation of freedpeople first shared a building with a Methodist congregation until each could build its own sanctuary. Its earliest home stood on Freedmen's Ridge near Omega, a settlement formed by emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Through fire, relocation, and a highway that forced it to rebuild, the church has remained a spiritual anchor for more than a century.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Opened in 1909 and later renamed Connie Mack Stadium, this North Philadelphia ballpark was among the country's first steel-and-concrete major league parks and a pioneer of night baseball. It was home to the Athletics and, later, the Phillies, hosting five A's World Series titles and three Negro League World Series. Long after the crowds moved on, the storied grounds were razed in 1976.

Galveston, TX

One of Galveston's oldest congregations, Shiloh African Methodist Episcopal Church acquired this site in 1870 through a Black leadership determined to build despite modest means, paying off its debts within seven years. Hurricanes in 1894 and the catastrophic 1900 Galveston storm destroyed its buildings, yet the members rebuilt each time, raising the present sanctuary in 1923.

White Oak, TX

Founded in 1871, Shiloh Baptist Church grew from the efforts of a formerly enslaved man, Butcher Christian, who donated the land, and the church organizer Rev. John Baptist. Its first sanctuary was a log building, and for a time an adjacent school taught African American children in the Reconstruction-era community. When oil was later discovered on church land, the revenue funded a new sanctuary in 1936, and the congregation endures today.

Plano, TX

Organized in 1884 as the Mt. Zion Colored Baptist Church under the Rev. Z.T. Stuart, this congregation was founded by a small group of charter members in the decades after emancipation, when Black communities across Texas built their own churches as centers of faith and self-determination. Its first sanctuary was a modest structure lit by coal-oil lamps and warmed by a wood stove; the present building dates to 1964. Across four buildings on the same site, the church has served its community through worship, education, and outreach.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Shiloh Cemetery took root in 1853 with the burial of Maranda Gilbreath, and four years later settler Josiah Johnson formally set the land aside as a public burial ground for a young East Texas community. Among its graves lie pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans, along with many unmarked burials thought to be those of enslaved people. Its Fourth of July cleaning tradition, begun in 1876, turned upkeep of the dead into an annual civic ritual, and the ground sits beside Trammel's Trace, one of the region's oldest wagon roads.

Winchester, TX

First known as Winchester Colored Cemetery, Shiloh has served the town's Black community since 1890, when residents bought the 3.6-acre plot during a local boom. Segregation shaped even the dead: it abuts the white public cemetery, and after its original access road was fenced off following World War II, visitors could reach it only by a dirt drive. Renamed Shiloh in the 1980s for the churches that used it, the cemetery holds ex-slaves, church founders, and decorated veterans — including men honored for valor at Iwo Jima and in Korea.

Winchester, TX

Shiloh grew from the brush-arbor prayer meetings of freed slaves in 1867 into one of the founding congregations of organized Black Baptist life in Texas. Formally organized in 1872, it helped form the La Grange Baptist District Association in 1874 and planted daughter churches, while worshiping for a century alongside its sister Methodist congregation and hosting the Cokesbury school. Rebuilt after an 1916 fire and remodeled in 1983, Shiloh is the last surviving institution carrying forward Winchester's Black community history.

Matagorda County, TX

In 1866, only a year after Emancipation, formerly enslaved men and women near Caney Creek founded Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church—one of the first institutions Black Texans built for themselves in freedom. The Reverend Dennis Grey bought and donated the land, and the first building served as both church and a school of roughly a hundred pupils, with an 1856 bell later hung in its belfry. Through storms, rebuildings, and the terror of Hurricane Carla in 1961, when it sheltered neighbors, the church has anchored its community for well over a century.

Madisonville, TX

Organized in 1885 by the Rev. N. C. McCloud, Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church grew from a congregation of freedpeople worshipping in a Black schoolhouse into a cornerstone of Madisonville's African American community. The members built their first sanctuary here in 1902, added classrooms around 1940, and dedicated a new sanctuary and called their first full-time pastor in 1950. Its steady expansion mirrors the slow, hard-won building of Black institutional life across the post-Emancipation South.

Kirvin, TX

In the early 1850s, enslaved people in this part of Freestone County worshipped under a brush arbor at informal services. After emancipation the congregation formally organized as Freedmen in 1866, electing Boney Moffett their first elder, and a school inspired by the church followed about a year later. Shiloh became the "mother church" of a wider Primitive Baptist association and still serves its community today.

Shiner, TX

In February 1898 four trustees of the Shiner Colored Cemetery Association bought 1.2 acres to establish a burial ground for the town's African American citizens, set beside the city cemetery. Newspaper accounts recorded burials here and noted that Black children then made up a fifth of Shiner's students. By the 1940s the plots were full and the low-lying, often-neglected ground drained poorly, so in 1947 remains and gravestones were moved to a new site, Blue Bonnet Hill Memory Garden—though not every grave was relocated, and several unmarked burials remain.

Giddings, TX

Founded in 1875, a decade after emancipation, Shorter Chapel was among the first Black congregations in Giddings, a Central Texas town on the Houston & Texas Central Railway. It took its name from a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in America, and one of its founders personally supplied the lumber for the first sanctuary. Storms and time have carried away earlier buildings, but the congregation still gathers on the same ground in its third church.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

When engineer Joseph Tarsia opened Sigma Sound Studios in 1968, he gave a home to what became known worldwide as "The Sound of Philadelphia." Working with producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, the studio's lush, string-swept records by The O'Jays, the Stylistics, and others helped define soul music in the 1970s. Its reputation for sonic craft grew so large that artists like David Bowie and Stevie Wonder made pilgrimages to record within its walls.

Reagan, TX

Silvia King was already a married mother in Morocco when slave traders kidnapped her, carried her to France, and forced her through the Middle Passage to New Orleans. Sold at auction and marched hundreds of miles to a Texas cotton plantation near La Grange, she was placed in a forced marriage and made to cook and weave for her enslaver. In 1937 the WPA's Federal Writers' Project recorded her extensive oral history in Marlin, capturing rare firsthand testimony of slavery and acts of resistance such as the ring shout—she died that same year, reportedly at the astonishing age of 133.

Austin, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday School class organized in 1880 to serve Black residents of far-eastern Austin, taking the name Simpson Mission in honor of Bishop Matthew Simpson — a Methodist leader, abolitionist, and famed orator. Early worship met in a community schoolhouse and then a frame sanctuary before the congregation moved to this site in 1922. For well over a century its missions, service projects, and revivals have shaped Austin's Black community.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2011

Sister Rosetta Tharpe rose to fame in the 1930s and 1940s as one of gospel music's first true crossover stars, electrifying audiences with a guitar style and stage presence far ahead of her time. Blending sacred song with the swing and showmanship of secular music, she shared stages with jazz titans like Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Benny Goodman across America and Europe. Her home once stood here in Philadelphia, a city long central to Black musical life.

Bartlett, TX

When Bartlett built a new brick schoolhouse in 1909, its old frame building was moved to this site to become the town's first school for African American children. Rebuilt after fires and patched together from recycled and relocated lumber, the unaccredited school struggled with distance and poverty until educators Gentry "Prof" Powell, Sr. and his wife arrived from Prairie View A&M in 1946. Within a year attendance had doubled past 160 and the school won accreditation as a full 12-grade system.

Odessa, TX

As oil-boom Odessa grew through the early 20th century, its African American children were long confined to a single one-room school opened in 1932, where Ella Sayles taught the first class of eight. Demand steadily outstripped the cramped quarters until, in 1948, a proper campus for Blackshear High School opened on this site, named for the pioneering Texas Black educator Edward Lavoisier Blackshear. When the district integrated in 1966 the building became a middle school, and it later served as a magnet elementary.

Athens, TX

In the years just after emancipation, Athens' Black families built their own path to learning, opening the town's first public school for African Americans in 1876–77 with classes in a Baptist church and later a two-room schoolhouse. Educator Richard C. Fisher, who joined the faculty in 1914 and became principal, renamed it Blackshear to honor a Prairie View professor, and after his death in 1934 the school carried his own name. Fisher High School served the community until 1966, when integration closed its doors.

Wichita Falls, TX

African American education in Wichita Falls reaches back to at least 1886, when Cora Robinson was hired to teach, but it found a lasting home after 1921, when eight acres were set aside to create a Black business and social district. There the community built Booker T. Washington School, named for the famed educator, and under principals like A.E. Holland and C.E. Jackson it became an accredited campus at the heart of Black community life. The high school moved in 1963, the district integrated in 1969, and the original building was razed in 1971—yet the alumni still gather in a surviving campus building.

Bonham, TX

Beginning in a single room in the early 1890s, Bonham's school for Black children grew into an institution that by 1920 offered eleven grades under the name Booker T. Washington. In 1928 a new complex rose here on ten acres, funded in part by the Rosenwald Foundation, whose partnership with African American communities built thousands of schools across the segregated South. It anchored Bonham's Black community until integration closed it in 1966.

Bartlett, TX

By the late 1940s Bartlett's African American school had outgrown its buildings, so trustees bought surplus structures from Camp Swift and, with a 1948 bond, raised a new U-shaped schoolhouse on the former site of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Under principal Gentry "Prof" Powell, Sr., the accredited high school flourished, drawing students from surrounding towns and winning district and state championships before it was renamed for Booker T. Washington in 1957. When Bartlett's schools integrated in 1965, its dedicated teachers carried on at Bartlett High School.

Honey Grove, TX

Honey Grove's first school for African American children opened in 1882 with twenty students and a single teacher, named for early superintendent F. M. Bralley. It grew steadily, split into separate schools and rejoined, and in 1959 was renamed for its long-serving principal, John W. Pendleton. When the town's schools integrated in 1965–66, the Bralley-Pendleton buildings were sold and torn down.

Halletsville, TX

German and Czech immigrants settling here in the 1860s and 1870s grew cotton and named their community Breslau for the Prussian city, building a school on land Fritz Ladewig donated in 1872. Henry Weller later gave an acre for a separate school for the area's African American residents, and by 1900 Breslau boasted stores, churches, a blacksmith, and a dance hall. Both schools eventually closed with consolidation, the African American school in 1955 and the main Breslau School in 1963.

Lovelady, TX

In the segregated schools of early-20th-century East Texas, Black families in Houston County built their own path to learning. Two schools for African American children, Center Hill and Smith Grove, merged in 1925 to form the Center Grove School, and a whole community took its name from the campus. By mid-century it was sending most of its graduates to college, powered by strong sports, vocational, music, and science programs, and it served the area until desegregation finally closed it in 1969.