African American History

Sykesville, MD

Across the decades when Maryland's public schools were racially segregated, Black communities were served by separate "colored" schoolhouses — often small, locally built and locally sustained buildings that became the heart of African American education and community life. A schoolhouse like this one near Sykesville would have taught generations of children in one or a few rooms, typically on limited public funding and outsized community effort. Such buildings stood as proof of Black families' determination to secure learning for their children under Jim Crow.

Austin, TX

This 1952 building was designed by John S. Chase, the first licensed African American architect in Texas, and originally housed the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas. Founded in 1884, the association won a series of civil rights gains for Black students and teachers in a segregated state. Its flat-roofed, industrial-influenced modern design served the organization until it dissolved in 1966.

West Columbia, TX

This is one of the few surviving Rosenwald schools in Texas, built through the partnership of Sears president Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington to fund schools for African American children across the South. Opened in East Columbia in 1921 with grants matched by local and Black community contributions, it replaced a school that had shared space with a church. Under its first teacher, Mrs. P.A. Franklin, it taught grades one through seven until closing in 1949.

Washington, DC

From 1857 to 1959, this Washington, D.C. ground held the Columbian Harmony Cemetery, one of the capital's important burial places for African American citizens during an era when segregation extended even to the grave. Founded by a Black mutual-aid society, it became the resting place of many distinguished members of the city's Black community across more than a century. In 1959 the cemetery was closed and its occupants reinterred at the new National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland, as the land was redeveloped.

Dew, TX

William Scott Compton, an Alabama attorney, banker, judge, and state senator, purchased more than 3,000 acres in the Avant Prairie settlement in 1852 and built a log home, barns, and quarters for the people he enslaved. The cemetery began in 1855 with the burial of his eldest daughter and holds two sons who served as Confederate veterans, along with descendant George Walton White, a Texas legislator and Baptist minister. Family descendants formed an association in 1983 to maintain the well-preserved grounds.

Robbins, TX

For nearly a century, schooling anchored the rural community of Concord in Leon County. From a two-story frame schoolhouse of the early 1880s, the district grew to a brick building in 1920 and a 1927 structure with an auditorium serving the whole community; older buildings were handed down for the primary grades and, tellingly, for a segregated African American school. Consolidations swept in neighboring districts through the 1920s and '30s, peaking above 400 students, and by the 1950s Black schools of the area were gathered at Concord under the Carver name before the district merged into Leon ISD in 1960.

Rusk, TX

Built in 1862 by John L. Whitescarver and William H. and Benjamin F. Campbell, this East Texas works was meant to manufacture rifles for the Confederacy. Unable to obtain the materials and tooling for rifles, the operators instead produced Colt-model pistols. The inscription notes that a number of enslaved or free Black workers were employed at the factory.

Sulphur Springs, TX

As Union armies pressed into the Deep South, thousands of Confederate families fled to the relative safety of Texas, where only a few coastal towns ever came under fire. Among them was the Louisiana family of Mrs. Amanda Stone, rescued after a road accident by Hopkins County neighbors who shared what little they had — even their last stewing hen. The marker recalls a broader exodus, noting Gen. Stand Watie's family in the Indian Territory and Gen. Kirby Smith's relatives, and the poverty, grief, and dependence on enslaved labor that the refugees carried with them.

Round Top, TX

African American residents of Fayette County founded Connersville Primitive Baptist Church in the mid-1880s on land where Thomas Cooper let the Black community build. The adjoining cemetery holds many of the enslaved and their descendants, with a tradition that burials here predate emancipation; its stones — the earliest dated 1904, one for a woman said to have lived a century — bear epitaphs like "In the back woods we lay." The relocated sanctuary now serves as a museum honoring the county's African American pioneers.

Conroe, TX

This burial ground holds generations of early African American Conroe, active from 1892 to 1966 and most heavily used in the first decades of the 20th century. Left overgrown for years, restoration efforts identified 47 headstones — including those of infants only days old — while surveys suggest more than 150 unmarked graves. Among those buried here is Sergeant Luther James Dorsey of the 10th Cavalry, perhaps the first Buffalo Soldier's grave found in Montgomery County.

Temple, TX

Opened in May 1953, the Cora Anderson Negro Hospital gave Temple's growing African American community access to modern medical care just two blocks from Scott & White, which had previously been denied to them. Governed by an advisory board with equal Black and white membership and supported by donors including trustee Lyndon B. Johnson, the hospital was named for its largest individual donor, Cora Woods Campbell Anderson. It served until December 1963, when Scott & White integrated its facilities, and the building continues today as a public health clinic.

Temple, TX

Corinth Missionary Baptist Church traces to Temple Chapel Baptist Church, organized around 1881 as one of the area's earliest African American congregations, formed as Black laborers migrated to the new railroad town of Temple. After a 1908 fire, members regrouped under the Corinth name in 1913 and built anew in 1916. Across the twentieth century the church became a hub for youth programs, civil rights education, and scholarships.

Stephenville, TX

Born in Dallas in 1875, Cornelia Tyler trained at Prairie View Normal School and Hearne Academy before becoming the principal and sole teacher of Stephenville's school for African American children, where she taught for nearly twenty years. She married Civil War veteran John Graves and continued teaching in Amarillo after the couple moved for his health. In 1951 a Stephenville elementary school was named Cornelia Graves in her honor.

Corpus Christi, TX

When Corpus Christi's deepwater port opened in 1926, dock workers formed two racially segregated locals of the International Longshoremen's Association—white Local 1224 and African American Local 1225—who agreed to work opposite ends of each ship. Both built union halls and anchored their communities with scholarships, picnics, and church support, even as they bargained, struck, and endured lockouts. In 1975 a federal appeals court ruled the segregated locals violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in 1983 they merged into one.

Teague, TX

The Wills family settled here in 1845, and Dr. James S. Wills is credited with founding the Cotton Gin community in 1848, donating land for a public cemetery divided — as the era demanded — into Anglo and African American sections. The oldest legible stone dates to 1854, but the ground holds a deeper record of frontier Texas: a veteran of the War of 1812, at least 67 Civil War soldiers, and veterans of later conflicts lie here among the settlers and the enslaved people who worked the land.

Pilot Point, TX

Founded in 1863 as the Colored Missionary Baptist Church, this congregation gave African Americans near the Cooke–Denton county line a spiritual home in the very year of the Emancipation Proclamation. Early worshippers gathered under a brush arbor before raising a chapel in 1874 and settling in Pilot Point by 1882. Over the decades the church expanded its mission well beyond Sunday services, launching adult literacy classes in 1939 and hosting regional conventions.

Geneva, TX

County Line Baptist Church grew out of the Freedmen's community of Weeks Quarters soon after the Civil War, first meeting in homes before Rev. M. McBerry led members in building a frame sanctuary in 1868 that doubled as a schoolhouse. Named for its site near the Sabine–San Augustine county line, the congregation relocated to Hankla beside the County Line Cemetery in 1885 and moved again to this location in 1944. It still draws worshipers from across both counties.

Edom, TX

This congregation traces its roots to some of the earliest efforts by area African American families to build a place of worship, linked by tradition to an 1851 church. Formally founded in 1872 on land donated by Will Manley, with the Rev. L. M. Rabb as first pastor, it replaced two wooden buildings with a brick sanctuary in 1967. Beyond worship it has long offered food, medicine, and educational scholarships.

Covington, TX

Covington Cemetery grew alongside the plantations of brothers James and Philip Gathings, who moved from Mississippi in the early 1850s with their families and enslaved workers and amassed thousands of acres on the Blackland Prairie. James platted the town of Covington and, with his brother, donated land for a church and the Gathings Male and Female College. The earliest marked grave is a son-in-law killed at the Battle of Yellow Bayou in 1864, whose body James had brought home for reburial.

Canton, TX

Robert K. Gibbs and his family settled this Van Zandt County land in the early 1850s, and the earliest documented grave — an infant Gibbs daughter — dates to 1853. When Robert Daniel Cox acquired the property in 1880, he opened the small family plot as a community cemetery, which grew through later land additions. Some of the unmarked graves are believed to hold enslaved people, and five generations of the Cox family rest here.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2001

Opened in 1943 in Pittsburgh's Hill District, the Crawford Grill #2 became a beating heart of Black social and musical life, where giants like Art Blakey, Mary Lou Williams, and John Coltrane played to a racially mixed and international crowd. First owned by William 'Gus' Greenlee and later by Joseph Robinson, it was the second of three clubs bearing the Crawford name. In an era of segregation, its stage and dance floor drew people across the color line.

Crawford, TX

Schooling in the Crawford area began in the 1870s at Old Crawford, or Tonk Crossing, where teachers like John H. Gouldy and Dr. J.B. Cranfill taught in a one-room house that doubled as church and meeting hall. When the town moved to follow the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe railroad in the 1880s, a schoolhouse was among its first buildings, and the merging of a free school with private Crawford College in 1886 laid the foundation for the public district formed in 1894. Over the decades rural schools consolidated in, a separate school served African-American children until integration in 1965, and long-serving superintendents gave the district lasting stability.

Crowell, TX

Crowell's schools grew up alongside the town itself, which took root on the West Texas plains in 1891 when Foard County commissioners carved the area into nine school districts. Early settlers pooled resources—Benjamin R. Blankenship helped fund the first schoolhouse—and rebuilt after fire destroyed the original in 1897, earning state accreditation and holding the first graduation by 1908. Depression-era federal programs like the Public Works and Civil Works Administrations helped raise new buildings in the 1930s, and the district produced standout figures like football star Dick Todd, who set state scoring records before playing for Texas A&M and the Washington Redskins.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Crystal Bird Fauset lived here when, in 1938, she won a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and became the first Black woman elected to any state legislature in the United States. A gifted organizer and speaker, she later advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt on race relations within the wartime Office of Civilian Defense. Her career opened doors in electoral politics that had long been barred to Black women.

Cuney, TX

This community began in 1870 when Andrew "Andy" Bragg and Nelson Sneed, former slaves turned farmers, settled here and were joined by other freedmen landowners and tradesmen. Promoted after 1916 by banker H. L. Price as a commercial and agricultural center for Black Texans, the town was renamed Cuney to honor the prominent leader Norris Wright Cuney and grew quickly with churches, stores, gins, sawmills, and a rail station. Falling farm prices after World War I sent residents elsewhere, leaving Cuney a quiet reminder of its founders' ambitions.

Sugar Grove Township, PA · est. 2019

From her home in the hills of Warren County, Cynthia Catlin Miller turned a family tradition of abolitionism into organized action, founding the Female Assisting Society and the Ladies' Fugitive Aid Society. The Miller Mansion sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad, and her groups supplied them with food and clothing. In 1854 she and her son Franklin hosted Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists at the Sugar Grove Convention.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Born in 1732 of White, Black, and Native American ancestry, Cyrus Bustill bought his own freedom and baked bread for Revolutionary War troops during the struggle for American independence. He became a founder of the Free African Society, one of the earliest Black mutual-aid organizations in the nation, and later opened a school for Black children near this site. His life spanned enslavement, revolution, and the first stirrings of organized Black community building in Philadelphia.

Loraine, TX

Born to enslaved parents in Victoria County in 1860, Daniel Webster Wallace became a cowboy at fifteen, driving cattle from Mexico to Kansas. Riding for rancher Clay Mann—whose "80" brand gave him his lifelong nickname—he took Mann's advice, bought land, and even returned to school past the age of twenty-five. He built his own ranch in 1891 and prospered on cattle, crops, and oil, and his devotion to education saw a school named in his honor.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1983

Daisy Lampkin was one of the most formidable organizers of the twentieth-century Black freedom struggle, working from this Pittsburgh home. As the NAACP's National Field Secretary from 1935 to 1947, she was a fundraising and membership powerhouse who helped build the association into a mass movement, while also leading the Lucy Stone Civic League and helping charter the National Council of Negro Women. She was equally a force in Black journalism as a vice president of the influential Pittsburgh Courier.

Houston, TX

Damascus Missionary Baptist Church was born in 1866, in the raw aftermath of the Civil War, when the National Baptist Convention sent the Rev. I. S. Campbell to organize African American churches across Texas. Founded to serve freedpeople in Houston's West End and Chaneyville neighborhoods, it met first in a member's home before building a series of sanctuaries, each rebuilt after storms flattened them in 1900 and 1915. Through generations of missionary, educational, and civic outreach, the congregation has served its community for more than a century and a half.

Goldsboro, NC

Dan Bullock was just a teenager from Goldsboro who lied about his age to join the Marines, and at fifteen he became the youngest American killed in the Vietnam War. A Private First Class, he died in combat in 1969, and his grave lies a short distance from this marker. His story is one of astonishing youth, sacrifice, and a childhood cut brutally short by war.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1991

Born free in Charleston at a time when education for Black Americans was often outlawed, Daniel Alexander Payne became one of the 19th century's most influential Black religious leaders. While studying at Gettysburg's Lutheran Seminary in 1837 he also taught here at the college, and he went on to be elected a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1852 and to lead Wilberforce University, one of the first colleges owned and run by African Americans.

University Park, TX

When Frances Sims Daniel brought her family to the young farmlands of Dallas County in 1849, she could not have known that the orchard beside her home would become one of the county's earliest burying grounds. The cemetery began in 1850 with the grave of a man the family called "Old Frank," enslaved by the household for decades, and grew to hold Daniel kin, the people they enslaved, and descendants who served in four American wars. An 1851 headstone for young Isabella Harwood is thought to be among the oldest surviving in the county.

Hollidaysburg, PA · est. 1989

Daniel Hale Williams spent his boyhood in Hollidaysburg before rising to the front rank of American medicine. In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago—one of the nation's first interracial hospitals and a training ground for Black nurses and doctors barred from white institutions. Two years later he performed one of the earliest successful operations on the human heart, and he went on to lead Freedmen's Hospital in Washington and help charter the American College of Surgeons.

South Middleton Township, PA · est. 2002

For more than a decade beginning in 1835, Daniel Kaufman risked ruin to help enslaved people fleeing north through Cumberland County. His barn and the dense woods nearby sheltered fugitives to whom he gave food and transport. In 1852 a Maryland slaveholder won a widely watched lawsuit against him, and Kaufman was fined the enormous sum of $4,000 for his defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law. He also founded the village of Boiling Springs.

Cuero, TX

Founded in 1892 as a one-room wooden schoolhouse, Cuero Colored High School was the town's first school for Black children, drawing pupils from farm families who could attend only when field work allowed. Principal Eugene Daule guided Black education in DeWitt County for four decades, stretching meager, unequal resources as far as they would go; the school was renamed in his honor in 1937. Under later leaders it built a celebrated band and a broad curriculum before closing in 1965 when Cuero's schools finally integrated.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

David Bustill Bowser, a self-taught Black artist, lived and worked here in 19th-century Philadelphia. He began painting signs, banners, and emblems—the everyday commercial art of the era—before turning to portraiture. Among his subjects were Abraham Lincoln, whom he painted several times, and the abolitionist John Brown, linking his brush to the great antislavery cause of his age.

Longview, TX

Born in Virginia in 1869, David Sutton Meredith settled in Longview in 1895 and was elected sheriff of Gregg County in 1916. He served through the volatile summer of 1919, when he helped keep racial violence from erupting into full-scale riot during Longview's chapter of the nationwide "Red Summer." After leaving office he remained an influential figure, helping organize two of the city's national banks.

Bethany, PA · est. 1947

In this house in Bethany, David Wilmot was born on January 20, 1814. A Pennsylvania congressman, he gave his name to the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, a proposal to bar slavery from any territory won in the Mexican War. Though it never became law, the Proviso set off one of the fiercest debates in American politics, hardening the sectional divide over slavery's westward spread in the years before the Civil War.

Owensboro, KY

In 1864, several hundred enslaved African American men in Daviess County left bondage to enlist in the Union army, a choice that promised eventual freedom for themselves and their families. They served in the 100th, 109th, and 118th U.S. Colored Infantry and the 5th and 6th U.S. Colored Cavalry, fighting at Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox and across the western theater. In a Kentucky where pro-slavery Unionists bitterly opposed Black recruitment, enlisting was an act of extraordinary courage and risk.

New York, TX

In 1856, Davis Reynolds hauled his family — and several enslaved people — by wagon and on foot from Gordon County, Georgia, to Henderson County, Texas. Optimistic about its future, he named his settlement New York and donated land for the community's first cemetery, where his daughter's 1863 burial was the first marked grave. His hopes for a great city faded when the railroad bypassed New York in 1901, but the church, cemetery, and family store still endure.

Milton, KY

Delia Webster was a Northern-backed abolitionist who ran an Underground Railroad station on Kentucky land bought with funds from Northern supporters in 1854. Slaveholders repeatedly prosecuted her; she had already served time in the Kentucky penitentiary in 1844 for helping enslaved people escape near Lexington. Rather than abandon her work, she endured imprisonment and eventually fled across the river into free Indiana.

Rosevine, TX

Established before 1836, when Texas was still part of Mexico, this ground began as a burial place for enslaved people of the Sulphur Spring community. Among those interred are men and women who arrived enslaved in the 1830s and, after Emancipation in 1865, became prominent builders of the area's Black community — including sons who took the name Dennis. With more than 100 graves, it remains a place of pride tended by descendants who still live nearby.

Columbia, SC

On September 11, 1963, the University of South Carolina admitted its first Black students since the Reconstruction era, ending decades of state-enforced segregation at the flagship university. The moment came amid the broader Civil Rights Movement, when courts and activists were dismantling the Jim Crow color line across Southern education, often against fierce local resistance. Unlike the violent standoffs seen at some other Deep South campuses, the integration in Columbia proceeded without the mob confrontations that made national headlines elsewhere. It marked a quiet but decisive turning point for higher education in the state.

Austin, TX

Lions Club members opened Austin's first public golf course on leased Brackenridge land in 1924, and "Muny" grew into an 18-hole city facility. Though it sat beside the historically African American Clarksville community whose young men had helped build it, segregation barred Black residents from playing. That barrier fell in 1951 when two Black youths simply walked on and played a round; officials let them finish, ushering in de facto integration years before federal public-accommodation law — a change some scholars call the earliest desegregation of a public golf course in the South.

Meadville, PA

In September 1880, Elias Allen tried to enroll his two children at Meadville's South Ward schools and was turned away because of their race. He took his case to the Crawford County Court of Common Pleas, where Judge Pearson Church struck down the 1854 state law that had required separate schools for Black children. The legislature amended the law the next year, ending mandated school segregation across Pennsylvania as of July 4, 1881.

Austin, TX

For generations Texas ran a segregated school system, its "separate but equal" doctrine cemented by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling began a slow, uneven dismantling of that system; over the following decades districts integrated grade by grade or by "freedom of choice," and beloved African American schools such as Austin's L.C. Anderson High closed their doors.

Mandeville, LA

The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville dates to 1895, built by a mutual-aid society of the kind Black communities across the South formed to provide fellowship, insurance, and burial support. Its simple wooden hall became a stage for early jazz, hosting musicians in the music's formative decades. Now on the National Register, it stands as one of the oldest rural jazz halls in the country.

Mandeville, LA

The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville dates to 1895, built by a mutual-aid society of the kind Black communities across the South formed to provide fellowship, insurance, and burial support. Its simple wooden hall became a stage for early jazz, hosting musicians in the music's formative decades. Now on the National Register, it stands as one of the oldest rural jazz halls in the country.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2018

In 1965, years before the Stonewall uprising, activists staged one of the nation's first LGBT sit-ins at Dewey's, a Philadelphia restaurant that had refused to serve gay and gender-nonconforming customers. Directly inspired by the African American lunch-counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, the demonstrators occupied the counter until Dewey's backed down and dropped its discriminatory policy. It was a small, early, and largely forgotten victory in the long struggle for equal treatment.

Montgomery, AL · est. 1974

From this church near the Alabama Capitol, a young Dr. King led the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks's arrest. The boycott ended segregated buses and launched King to national prominence.

Gilmer, TX

For three decades, from 1900 to 1929, this was the only home in Texas for Black orphans, founded and led by W. L. Dickson, a Negro Baptist minister who served as its sole superintendent. Children stayed until age 21 unless adopted or indentured to families, and a children's choir toured to raise funds. In 1929 Dickson deeded the home—700 acres and 27 buildings—to the state, which renamed it the Gilmer State Orphanage for Negroes and ran it until 1943, when the roughly 180 children were moved to a state home in Austin.

Jasper, TX

Around 1850, an enslaved preacher known and loved as Rev. Richard "Uncle Dick" Seale gathered a congregation beneath the beech trees at this spot. In 1853 his enslaver, Joshua Seale—himself an American Revolution veteran and early settler—built the church a permanent home. That a Black minister led worship here in the antebellum South makes this ground quietly remarkable.

Jasper, TX

After Emancipation in 1865, formerly enslaved African Americans across the South built their own independent "freedom colonies" where they could own land and govern their own community life. The Dixie colony near Bevilport grew from the 1853 founding of Dixie Missionary Baptist Church — built jointly by planter Joshua Seale and the man he enslaved, Richard "Uncle Dick" Seale. After the war, Richard Seale became a community leader, establishing the Dixie School so the colony's children could be educated. The church, school, and nearby Indian Creek Cemetery anchored a life organized around faith, learning, and self-reliance.

Fairfield, TX

Fairfield's first public school for Black children opened in 1926 on a one-acre plot beside the First Baptist Church, whose sanctuary doubled as a classroom as enrollment grew. In 1934 the community petitioned to move the school to this site and soon added the high-school courses that let it become a full institution, renamed Dogan High School for Wiley College president Dr. Matthew Dogan, Sr. Under principals like Randolph Titus, who led the school from 1936 to 1968, Dogan built a proud record — its Wildcat basketball teams reached the state finals four times — and sent alumni into medicine, law, ministry, and education before integrating in 1968.

Waco, TX

Doris "Dorie" Miller grew up on a McLennan County farm and enlisted in a segregated U.S. Navy, serving aboard the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. When the attack came, the mess attendant carried his wounded captain to safety, then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to use. Admiral Chester Nimitz awarded him the Navy Cross, the first ever given to an African American; Miller was later killed in action in 1943, and a warship was named in his honor.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2019

On Pittsburgh's North Side in 1968, community activist Dorothy Mae Richardson refused to watch her neighborhood decline. She founded Neighborhood Housing Services, a pioneering model in which residents themselves—not distant officials—drove the work of rehabilitating homes and reinvesting in their community. Her approach proved so effective that it spread nationwide and led to the creation of NeighborWorks America.

Double Bayou, TX

In the piney woods and marshes of the African American community of Double Bayou, a humble one-room dance hall grew from cedar logs laid as a dance floor into a legendary home of Texas Blues. Rebuilt with its original materials after a 1941 storm, it drew crowds who came for Juneteenth and stayed for the music, becoming a stop on the Chitlin' Circuit—the network of venues where Black performers could play safely under segregation. Homegrown talent like Floyd "Pete" Mayes and his Texas Houserockers carried its sound into the decades that followed.

Fort Worth, TX

From the late 1800s through the 1920s, amid Jim Crow segregation, Douglass and McGar parks gave Fort Worth's African Americans rare recreational ground. In 1895 Black entrepreneur Thomas Mason and partners bought land in the Trinity River bottoms that became Douglass Park — named for Frederick Douglass — which hosted annual Juneteenth celebrations drawing thousands and served Black churches and the Prince Hall Masons. When crowds for Negro-league baseball outgrew it, games moved to the nearby ballpark renamed McGar Park; flooding and industrial development erased both by the late 1920s.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1891 and named for the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, this was the school for El Paso's African American community under a segregated system established in the 1880s. It opened as a grammar school and by 1896 offered high school classes, foreign languages, and music. As Black families prospered through work on the railroads, in smelting, and in retail, they moved to new neighborhoods and won a second Douglass School in 1920, which served until the city desegregated in 1956. Through Jim Crow's inequities — lower pay, inferior supplies — its dedicated teachers sent graduates on to careers as surgeons, engineers, and educators.