African American History

Marshall, TX

For years, schooling for Marshall's Black children happened wherever space allowed — in homes, churches, and lodge halls. In 1894 Professor H. B. Pemberton, Sr., persuaded city officials to back a real school and arranged a loan, repaid by the Black community itself, to build "Central School" on this site. It grew to include a high school by 1906, and after Central High moved in 1925 the campus continued as Hillside School until it closed in 1941.

Mexia, TX

Public schooling for African American children in Mexia began in 1883, and after fire destroyed the first building, this site received a two-story brick schoolhouse in 1915. It was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the celebrated Black poet and author from Ohio, and held ten classrooms and an auditorium under principal T. K. Price. A larger school replaced it in 1948 and served until integration in 1968, after which the buildings were eventually demolished—leaving the site as a landmark of the community's educational history.

Calvert, TX

Dr. Ben F. Hammond arrived from Alabama in 1853 and built a plantation nearby, and when he granted right-of-way to the Houston & Texas Central Railroad in 1869 a depot, post office, and a few stores sprang up to ship planters' goods. As the railroad's fortunes faded, the town withered and had vanished by 1950. Many area residents today descend from the people whom Hammond and neighboring planters gave land to at Emancipation in 1865.

Athens, TX

After the Civil War, Armstead Barker brought his family to this area and other African American families followed, forming the settlement of Gum Creek. By the mid-1880s their children were learning through the eighth grade in a one-room frame schoolhouse, attending only from October through March so they could work the fields. Shared for decades with Wade's Chapel A.M.E. Church, the school closed in 1939 and its building later burned, but it stands in memory as a foundation of local Black education.

Elkhart, TX

In the rural communities around Elkhart, African American families long made do with scattered one-room schools and shortened terms that bent to the planting and harvest seasons. In the 1930s Hattie Jamerson pressed neighbors to build a proper high school, and teacher John Henry Sims helped win a site from the Elkhart district. Residents tore down the old schoolhouses and reused the lumber, opening Henry High School in 1938; it served the area until 1963, and its alumni still gather to honor the effort.

Woodville, TX

Woodville's African American families long educated their children in churches and Masonic halls until educator Henry T. Scott, a Prairie View graduate, arrived as a teacher in 1910 and led the drive for a proper public school. The six-room school named for him opened on Elm Street in 1934, and under principal John K. Canada it grew from fewer than 100 students to more than 500, prompting a new campus in 1961. The school closed in the late 1960s with integration, and its main building burned in 1980, but an alumni association keeps its memory alive.

Bay City, TX

Bay City's African-American community opened a school in the 1890s and by 1905 had grown it into a two-story frame building named for Booker T. Washington and folded into the local district. Its guiding figure was A. G. Hilliard, son of formerly enslaved Georgians who prized education; trained at the Oakland Normal School and Prairie View, he taught and led the school for decades until it was renamed in his honor after his death in 1936. A new campus by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick opened here in 1948 and served as Hilliard High until integration in 1967.

Independence, TX

This town-square site traces the arc of public education in a small Texas community, from private schools in the 1830s through the arrival of tax-supported public schooling in the 1870s. Following the county court's 1870 order, precincts were split into separate districts for white and Black students, a stark record of the segregated schooling that shaped the post-Civil War South. A schoolhouse rose here in 1889, burned in 1939, was rebuilt, and finally closed in 1953 after the Gilmer-Aiken Law reshaped Texas school districts.

Jasper, TX

Formal public schooling for African American students near Jasper began in 1875 at Cold Springs and moved to a Jasper campus in 1924, the same year James Hoff Rowe arrived as administrator. A graduate of Prairie View and Hampton Institute who had served as a dean at Prairie View, Rowe led the school to expanding scope and stature until his death in 1943. Renamed in his honor, the school served the community until integration closed it in 1968.

Palestine, TX

Palestine's first high school for African American students opened in 1891 in a mission church, moving to this site in 1895 as Lincoln High School, with its first class graduating in 1896. Rebuilt in brick after a 1922 fire, the growing school became a cultural anchor for the Black community. It served as a junior high after 1953 and closed in 1965 when the city's schools integrated, remaining a community center until a 1996 fire led to its demolition.

Georgetown, TX

Georgetown's first school for African American children began early in the 20th century as “The Colored School,” teaching grades one through eight. Principal S. C. Marshall pushed the board to add high school classes in 1913, and the growing school — later renamed for him and then for George Washington Carver — became the community's educational heart. In 1962 the parents of seventeen Carver students sued to force integration, a fight that carried to the Fifth Circuit and ended with the school's closing as Georgetown desegregated by 1967.

Palestine, TX

After James B. McKnight ran a saddlery and farrier shop on this Palestine block in the late 1800s, the property passed in 1910 to the Farmers and Citizens Bank, founded by African American businessmen in 1906. For the next 35 years the block—known as McKnight Plaza and fondly called "on the square"—thrived as the commercial heart of Palestine's Black community, packed with the offices of doctors, dentists, druggists, cafés, barbers, and a funeral home. Its social life centered on the Missouri Pacific Colored Booster Club, which sponsored dances and events until the building was razed in 1945.

Granger, TX

Czech-speaking Moravian immigrants poured into central Texas in the mid-1800s, among them Pavel Machu, who left the Vsetín Valley and by 1884 had donated three acres for a school he named for his homeland. Moravia School served the farming settlement and its church gatherings until 1945; its schoolhouse was later moved to Granger to Crispus Attucks High School, standing until that African American school integrated in 1964.

Euless, TX

In 1870 the formerly enslaved couple Robert and Dilsie Johnson received forty acres here as a wedding gift, and around them grew Mosier Valley, one of Texas's oldest freedmen's communities. The residents organized a school in 1883, built a schoolhouse about 1924, and replaced it with a brick building in 1953; its students were integrated in 1969. The site honors the freed people who built a lasting community from the ground up.

Palestine, TX

Founded in 1900 by Black members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) under the Rev. A. J. Hurdle, this convention set out to build a college for its people, and by 1904 a building association of women within the group had raised enough to buy forty-nine acres near Palestine. The Northeast Texas Christian Theological and Industrial College opened with seven students in 1912, its students studying in the classroom and farming the college's own land. When fire destroyed the main building around 1920 the school closed, and its remaining structures were later razed, leaving no visible trace.

Austin, TX

Austin's first high school for Black students opened in 1884 as Robertson Hill School and, through several moves and renamings, became L. C. Anderson High School, honoring a longtime principal. Kealing Junior High, the city's first junior high for Black students, opened on this site in 1930, named for educator Hightower Theodore Kealing, and later merged with the Anderson buildings. The schools here closed in 1971 under court-ordered desegregation, and the old buildings were later razed or lost to fire.

Palestine, TX

During World War II the railroad town of Palestine sat more than a hundred miles from any base, yet trainloads of soldiers rolled through daily. In June 1942 local residents — led by Zula Hanks and staffed by scores of women — opened a service club in the O'Neil Hotel offering refreshments, music, dancing, and letter-writing, and carried sandwiches out to troops who could not leave the trains. The group also helped fund a separate Negro Service Club for the African American soldiers who often rode farther down the line.

San Antonio, TX

As the Civil War ended, the federal Freedmen's Bureau set out to educate newly freed people across the South, and in the late 1860s it built San Antonio's first free public school for Black students here—a two-story stone building on Rincon Street. Uniquely among Texas Bureau schools, it drew support from local government, and the City took over its operation in 1871, folding it into what became the San Antonio ISD. Renamed for Frederick Douglass in 1904, the school carried the heritage of a large part of the city's population.

Prosper, TX

Named for the white rock escarpment beneath it, Rock Hill took shape by 1854 when John Moore became its first postmaster, and by 1900 it boasted schools, churches, doctors, mills, and shops for a population of 115. When the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad bypassed the town in 1902, most residents and businesses relocated to Prosper within months. A lingering African American Baptist church and a Black school outlasted the rest, and the last store was razed in 1973.

Rusk, TX

By 1884 Rusk's public schools were split by race, with the segregated No. 2 school for African American children meeting in a small frame house built here around 1895. In 1939 a larger school rose southeast of downtown, later named for its long-serving principal G. W. Bradford, and it educated Black students until Rusk integrated in the 1960s. Despite meager resources, the school sent many graduates into respected professions.

Austin, TX

Samuel Huston College grew from a school for African American youth founded by Rev. George O. Richardson in Dallas in 1876, which moved to Austin in 1878 and, with support from the Freedmen's Aid Society, acquired a campus on East 12th Street. Renamed in 1887 for an Iowa benefactor, it weathered repeated closures before reopening in 1900 and becoming a senior college in 1926. In 1952 it merged with Tillotson College to form Huston-Tillotson, which continues today.

White Oak, TX

Soon after the Civil War, the newly freed African Americans of the Shiloh community built a one-room school for their children, later holding classes in the Shiloh Baptist Church. With help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, they raised a new two-room schoolhouse in 1920, replaced by a brick building in the 1930s. The school served the community until desegregation closed it in 1966; its graduates went on to contribute across Texas and the nation.

Denison, TX

Before 1886, churches and private schools carried the burden of educating Denison's African American children; that year Anderson Public High School opened, and in 1927 the district built a new school at this site named for educator Augustus H. Terrell. Under principals like William Wims and teachers who set high standards, Terrell School became a source of community pride — its maroon-and-white Dragons winning state football championships in the 1940s. In 1946 elementary teacher Sammye Taylor Savage successfully sued for salary equalization across the district, and Terrell's last class graduated in 1967 as integration closed the school.

Omaha, NE

This site marks the location of a so-called hanging tree tied to Omaha's racial violence of the early twentieth century, a period when the city, like much of America, was torn by mob violence and lynching. The 1919 unrest in Omaha was among the many episodes of the nation's "Red Summer," when racial tensions erupted in cities across the country. The tree is long gone, but the place remains a somber reminder of that history.

Sulphur Springs, TX

During the turbulent Reconstruction years after the Civil War, a gang of outlaws in this area terrorized and murdered Black residents and harassed other citizens. In August 1868, Captain T. M. Tolman led Federal troops here to restore order, moved the county seat to Sulphur Springs, and, after an arson attack, built a fortified stockade that served as quarters, hospital, and jail. The troops withdrew and the post was abandoned in 1870.

Walker County, TX

John Richard Thomas left Alabama for Texas in 1854 and carved a 1,060-acre plantation along the Trinity River, raising cotton, corn, and molasses. He built wharves here so steamboats could carry his crops to market, and Thomas' Landing became a busy port of call. The Civil War and Thomas's death in 1863 broke the enterprise, and when the railroad reached Walker County in 1872 the riverboats fell silent; today only the cemetery marks the spot.

Kamay, TX

Valley View School grew out of two 1897 country schools that merged in 1918, just as the 1918 discovery of the Kemp-Munger-Allen oil field and new irrigation lakes flooded rural Wichita County with families. Enrollment swelled to nearly 600 by the late 1930s, and the district built and rebuilt to keep pace. As farm mechanization and the oil industry's decline thinned the population, the district consolidated with Iowa Park in 1970 and its buildings were eventually dismantled.

Forest, TX

Wildhurst was one of many East Texas sawmill towns, founded by the Chronister Lumber Company in 1895 with sawmills, mill ponds, drying kilns, a commissary, and a logging tram. At its peak in 1918 it cut 75,000 board feet of yellow pine a day, and by the 1920s some 400 people lived there—records show about three-quarters of the workforce was African American, housed in segregated sections with their own schools and churches. Labor shortages during World War II and dwindling timber ended operations by December 1944.

Round Rock, TX

In a corner of Old Round Rock Cemetery, near the grave of outlaw Sam Bass, half an acre was set aside for the burial of enslaved people and, later, freedmen. Enclosed by cedar posts and barbed wire, the graves are marked at head and foot with limestone rocks, some hand-grooved with names and dates. The earliest known grave of a freed slave dates to 1880, and although dozens of freedmen rest here, no former slaves were interred after the turn of the century.

Louisville, KY

By the 1850s Kentucky was shipping thousands of enslaved people each year down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Deep South plantations. Traders operating near the Ohio kept people shackled in pens between sales, and even in a slaveholding society these dealers were often shunned as social outcasts. On this site the speculator Matthew Garrison ran one of four Louisville slave markets that an abolitionist minister said sold men, women, and children "like sheep," until the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865.

Louisville, KY

Kentucky's 1792 constitution wrote enslavement into the new state's founding, and by 1830 Black Kentuckians made up nearly a quarter of the population. Though the U.S. banned the African slave trade in 1808 and Kentucky's 1833 Nonimportation Act briefly halted the interstate resale of enslaved people, that law's 1849 repeal reopened Louisville's slave markets. On this ground the Arterburn brothers held people in iron-barred pens before marching them, chained, to riverboats bound south.

Taylor, TX

David McCurdy Sloan and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Easley, came to Texas from South Carolina and raised this house in 1854, hauling finished lumber all the way from Houston while the rest was hand-hewn in the nearby river bottom by enslaved workers. It stands as one of the older surviving homesteads of Williamson County's Anglo settlement generation. The house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Houston, TX

One of the oldest Black Methodist churches in Houston, this congregation began in 1880 at an open-air meeting under a tent, led by the Rev. Ed Roscoe. The next year trustees Wash Breed, Robert Swiley, and Dick Thomas bought the property on Sloan Street—later Sydnor—giving the church its first name. Fire destroyed the original sanctuary in 1912, but the congregation rebuilt and, active in community programs, became a lasting force in the surrounding neighborhood.

Lewisville, TX

This area was known as Holford's Prairie for the pioneer Halford brothers who claimed 640 acres through the Peters Colony, and Basdeal Lewis platted nearby Lewisville in 1853. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith bought farmland here in 1859, and after their 20-year-old son died in 1862 the family began a burial ground that in 1881 became a community cemetery. Its 400-plus graves carry the surnames of Denton County's pioneer families, and oral tradition holds that some unmarked graves are those of people once enslaved by the Fox family—a poignant record of the era's harsh realities.

Fort Davis, TX

In 1873, a former Buffalo Soldier of the 24th U.S. Infantry named Archie Smith claimed 160 acres near Dolores Mountain in the Trans-Pecos country and raised an adobe home with native oak beams. Its vaulted room served as a family chapel open to neighbors of every denomination before the town's first Catholic church was built. Later owners, the Carltons, preserved and eventually restored the structure, which survives as the oldest home still lived in at Fort Davis.

Azle, TX

In 1886, Fort Worth businessman and philanthropist J. J. Jarvis — a benefactor of the area's Black institutions — deeded this ground to Charles Young and Allen Prince as a burial place for Azle's Black community, though several graves already lay here. Over time it passed to descendants of the pioneer Smith and Frazier families and still serves as an active cemetery. This quiet plot preserves the memory of African American settlers on the Tarrant County frontier.

Louisville, KY

Smoketown took shape after slavery ended in 1865, when thousands of African Americans moved to Louisville seeking work and freedom. Its tightly packed streets of shotgun houses let landowners profit from dense settlement, while residents labored in the city's tobacco warehouses and founded one of Louisville's first African American public schools in 1874. It remains the only post–Civil War neighborhood in the city settled chiefly by Black residents.

Nordheim, TX

When German farmers settled the Nordheim area in the 1890s, they relied on Mexican American and African American laborers who, under segregation, were barred from white cemeteries. In 1906 land was purchased for their burials, and the Sociedad Cementerio Union Mexicana was formally established in 1907, growing to more than 500 graves. Early burials include infants lost to flu epidemics and eighteen of the twenty-seven people killed by an F4 tornado in 1930; veterans of four wars rest here, while the adjoining African American cemetery survives with only seventeen visible stones and no records.

Corpus Christi, TX

Born enslaved in Petersburg, Virginia, Solomon Coles learned to read from a sheriff who broke the law to teach him, then worked his way through college as the first Black student at Connecticut's Guilford Institute, earning degrees at Lincoln University and Yale. He came to Texas in 1877 and, believing education essential for Black children, left the ministry to teach and lead the Corpus Christi school for Black students who then attended only two months a year. A high school built in 1925 was named in his honor, later becoming Solomon M. Coles Elementary School.

Dallas, TX

Laid out in the 1910s after Temple Emanu-El relocated here in 1913, the South Boulevard–Park Row district grew into one of Dallas's finest early suburbs, home to prominent members of the city's Jewish community and lined with houses by leading architects in Prairie, Mission Revival, and Classical styles. After World War II, as earlier residents moved to newer suburbs, the neighborhood became a center of Dallas's Black professional and civic leadership — educators, lawyers, doctors, and clergy. Its handsome homes carried two distinct chapters of the city's social history.

Palestine, TX

In 1893 the Rev. Richard Henry Boyd—a formerly enslaved Mississippian known as the "Cowboy Preacher"—organized South Union Baptist Church in Palestine with 31 charter members. Boyd founded churches across Texas while pursuing a larger vision: creating Christian literature for the nation's African American churches, work that eventually drew him to Nashville as a religious publisher. The Palestine congregation grew from a two-room building into a larger 1948 sanctuary and long opened its doors to community and educational groups, its rolls reflecting the railroad workers and civic leaders of Black Palestine.

Huntsville, TX

Southeast of Sam Houston State University once stood the Flat, a thriving African American neighborhood cleared when the university expanded in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1920, four community leaders bought five acres to establish this cemetery, first called Pine Grove, which holds some 200 graves of veterans, businessmen, and civic leaders. When the neighborhood vanished, the burial ground endured as the last tangible link to it, cared for by descendants who reorganized its association in 1998.

Milam, TX

Widowed Rebecca Hopkins Speights arrived in Sabine County in 1842 with five children and eventually some 250 acres, part of which became a cemetery upon her burial in 1857. The ground was tied to prominent early Texans — revolution veteran and first county judge Mathew Arnold Parker, and legislator and merchant Joshua M. Hopkins Speights. Of its fifty-one marked graves, more than half are Speights, and an unknown number of unmarked graves hold enslaved members of the family's household.

Weatherford, TX

Settlement of this stretch of Parker County began in 1854 when the T.J. Shaw family arrived from Tennessee and built a log cabin on Spring Creek, giving the growing community its name. Later settlers, including families who brought enslaved people with them, donated land for a school, churches, and a cemetery, and Methodist, Baptist, and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations took root. Spring Creek Cemetery holds area pioneers, unmarked graves, burials of enslaved families, and a veteran of both the Texas Revolution and the Civil War.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1951

Quakers have gathered on this ground since 1686, only a few years after William Penn founded his colony as a haven for the Society of Friends. The stone meetinghouse standing today dates to 1851, but the congregation's roots reach back into the earliest decades of Pennsylvania. In 1832 the community added a school and library here, and generations earlier a young Benjamin West—who would become one of America's first internationally celebrated painters—worshipped with this Meeting as a boy.

Rockdale, TX

Members founded Springfield Missionary Baptist Church in 1872 under the guidance of the Rev. Riley Williams, and the congregation still gathers on the same land where it first met. Established just after the town of Rockdale and only years after emancipation, the church became a center for worship, social gatherings, and outreach in the African American community. It has long emphasized local programs and mission work.

Kirbyville, TX

In June 1865, only weeks after word of emancipation reached East Texas, freedpeople near Kirbyville gathered to found Springhill Missionary Baptist Church with the aid of a sympathetic white minister, Parson Bean. They raised a log cabin that doubled as church and school, elected their own Black pastor and secretary, and by the late 1860s had purchased their own land for worship, a cemetery, and education. New sanctuaries in 1942 and 1970 marked a congregation that endured for generations.

Beaumont, TX

In 1944, at the height of the Jim Crow era, African American brothers Dr. Edward D. Sprott, Jr. and Dr. Curtis B. Sprott opened this Beaumont hospital so that Black patients turned away from segregated facilities could receive real medical care. A third brother, Dr. Maxie Sprott, joined in 1955, and the small brick building offered everything from X-rays and obstetrics to nurse training. As legal segregation in healthcare receded, the need for such institutions faded, and by 1969 the site had become Dr. Maxie Sprott's private practice — yet it has served the community's health ever since.

Raleigh, NC

Founded by Sarah Hunter, St. Agnes Hospital operated the first nursing school in North Carolina for African Americans from 1896 to 1961. In a segregated era that barred Black students from most training, it opened a professional path in medicine and gave Black communities skilled caregivers of their own. Its graduates served across the South for more than six decades.

Fort Worth, TX

Fifteen men and women organized St. Andrews in 1888, growing a Fort Worth congregation that repeatedly lent its buildings for public schooling — including classes for an early Black public school. In 1950 the church acquired the 1904 James E. Flanders-designed Missouri Avenue building, and longtime pastor the Rev. Leonard L. Haynes became the first African American on the Tarrant County Junior College board as it integrated in the 1960s.

Raleigh, NC

Founded in 1867 by the Episcopal Church as a normal school for freedmen, St. Augustine's opened just two years after emancipation to train Black teachers in a South rebuilding after the Civil War. It grew steadily and became a four-year college in 1928. The school stands among the historically Black institutions that gave newly free people a path to literacy and leadership.

Baytown, TX

Emily Brown, a midwife born into slavery in 1845, inherited this land from her employer and in 1881 deeded an acre to the trustees of the local Methodist Episcopal church—among them her husband, Thompson Brown. The congregation renamed the church St. Emily in honor of her service to both Black and white communities of West Chambers County. For decades it stood as the only African American church in the Old River community, serving as both house of worship and schoolhouse.

Denton, TX

St. Emmanuel began as the Second Baptist Church of Quakertown, the thriving African American community that stood in Denton from the mid-1880s until 1922. That year the city held a bond election to buy out the entire neighborhood and turn it into a park, forcing residents from their homes; the church's pastor, the Rev. J.A. Ayers, spoke out against the removal and reportedly fled town under threat. The congregation relocated to Lakey Street in 1923 and carried on its mission and community work.

Marble Falls, TX

St. Frederick Baptist Church has anchored the African American community of Marble Falls for more than 120 years, founded in 1893 in the home of Dicey Yett Johnson, who had been born into slavery near Spicewood. From her house the congregation moved into a former lodge building, then followed the community's shift across town in 1907, rebuilding again in 1955 and 1978. Since 1985 the church has also run an outreach center feeding the needy and homebound of the Marble Falls area.

Erie, PA · est. 1994

Founded in 1874, St. James became Erie's oldest African American congregation, and notably five of its first six members were women. Beginning at 3rd and German Streets before moving to East 11th, the church grew into a center of both worship and community life. For generations it answered the spiritual and social needs of Erie's Black families.

Waco, TX

St. James Methodist Church was organized in 1874 by Father Anderson Brack, its first worship held in a riverside house that doubled as a school for Waco's Black community. Over the following half-century the congregation built a succession of sanctuaries, completing this modified Gothic Revival building — with decorative brickwork, pointed-arch windows, and octagonal towers — in 1924. For more than a century it has anchored missionary work, service, and Christian education in the city.

Huntsville, TX

Organized just after the Civil War to serve the newly freed people of Huntsville, this congregation—known as the Freedmen's Church—first worshiped in 1868 in a shared Union Church building on land donated by French merchant John Courtade. Its first trustees included Joshua Houston, the formerly enslaved man tied to Sam Houston's household, and the structure long doubled as a schoolhouse for Black children. Under the Rev. Lee, the first Black presiding elder, the church flourished, building a new belfried sanctuary in 1894.

Frankfort, KY

African Americans in Frankfort established this African Methodist Episcopal congregation in 1839, decades before emancipation, worshipping in a building on Lewis Street that a white woman, Mrs. Triplett, gave along with the ground to her servants Benjamin Dunmore and Benjamin Hunley. The congregation took the name "St. John" in 1881 under the Rev. D. S. Bentley, and the present church was built in 1893.

Corpus Christi, TX

After the devastating 1875 hurricane destroyed the coastal town of Indianola, Black survivors resettled in Corpus Christi and organized this Baptist congregation. Meeting first in a barn, they built a sanctuary in 1876 and moved and rebuilt over the decades as membership grew, at one point broadcasting their Glee Club quartet on local radio. In 1958 they bought this site and completed a new sanctuary here in 1969.

Missouri City, TX

In 1869, freedpeople from the former DeWalt Plantation gathered under the Rev. Dave King to found St. John Baptist Church—one of the first institutions the newly emancipated could truly call their own. Over the decades the congregation moved and rebuilt more than once, even repositioning and enlarging its building with materials salvaged from a neighboring school, and rebuilt again after a 2006 arson fire. Through it all the church has hosted Juneteenth celebrations and unbroken services for the surrounding community.