African American History

Greenville, TX

Established in Greenville's historic East Hill Community in the early 1900s, this was one of three schools for Black children during segregation, first known as the East Colored School. It was renamed for Frederick Douglass in 1928 when a new brick building rose, and it taught grades one through eight for the African American community. In 1930 Mary J. Morris became principal here—the first African American woman to hold that role in Greenville.

Austin, TX

This ground has been a home for African American athletics for more than a century—donated to Samuel Huston College in 1914 and used for baseball by the late 1920s, including the semi-pro Austin Black Senators of the Negro Leagues. As L.C. Anderson High's football field, it saw a 1942 state championship and the play of future Pro Football Hall of Famer Dick Night Train Lane. Relocated here in 1954, Downs Field was named for Rev. Karl Downs and remains the home field of Huston-Tillotson University.

Kerrville, TX

The Doyle School opened in 1909 when Kerrville's small African American community pooled $53 to move a discarded frame schoolhouse onto land donated by teacher Anna W. Doyle. Under revered principal B.T. "Prof" Wilson—who named the school for Doyle—it grew from a one-room building with no utilities into a campus with an auditorium, band, choir, and athletic teams. When Kerrville integrated in 1964, its Black students moved into the town's schools, and the building endures today as a community center.

Texarkana, TX

Ruby Lee Williams, born in Texarkana in 1900, married Jamaican-born dentist Austin Hervin Archibald Jones, a Howard University graduate, in 1928. A decade later Ruby designed this distinctive bungalow—crowned by a cubical tower and decorative brickwork—and had it built by African American craftsmen. The Jones home became a haven for touring Black entertainers barred from segregated hotels, welcoming guests such as Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington.

Wichita Falls, TX

When Wichita Falls' 1918 oil boom swelled its African American community, Dr. Anne Elizabeth Davis Roark answered the need for professional care, practicing podiatry downtown for nearly six decades after opening her first office in 1923. Remarkably for the Jim Crow era, her practice served white patrons even as she and her husband built Black institutions on the east side — a hotel and coffee shop that doubled as a poll-tax station and waitress-training site, and the Isis Theater that hosted Black artists and welcomed Black servicemen barred from facilities at Sheppard Air Force Base.

Houston, TX

Born on a Falls County farm around 1871, Benjamin Jesse Covington trained at Meharry Medical College and, with his wife Jennie Belle Murphy, moved to Houston in 1903, where he practiced medicine for 58 years and co-founded the Houston Negro Hospital. In an era of rigid segregation, the stately home the couple built in 1911 became the city's unofficial guest quarters for distinguished Black visitors—among them Booker T. Washington and singers Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. Both Covingtons led civic and medical organizations that served Houston's African American community.

Beaumont, TX

Arriving in Beaumont in 1918, the Rev. Dr. Charles F. L. N. Graham—born in British Guiana and educated across the American Midwest—devoted his ministry to the health, recreation, and dignity of the city's Black residents. He founded a church and a community center, and in the racially tense early 1940s helped launch the Beaumont Negro Goodwill Council to ease conflict. He became a U.S. citizen only in 1943, months before his death.

Wichita Falls, TX

Born in Terrell in 1920, Dr. C.B. Fuller earned his medical degree in 1947 from Meharry Medical College — the South's first medical school for African Americans — and opened a practice in Wichita Falls' east side in 1948. He won admitting privileges at the city-county hospital, where a converted broom closet served as his nursery, and in 1955 became the first African American physician admitted to the Texas Medical Association. He later served on a federal judge's biracial schools committee and was elected to lead the hospital's medical staff.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1922 by prominent Black contractor George Powell, this Craftsman house was the home of Dr. George Murry Munchus, the son of formerly enslaved Alabamans who became a physician in Fort Worth. Munchus founded and ran the city's Negro Community Hospital, providing care to a population excluded from segregated white institutions. The handsome two-story frame residence stands as testimony to Black professional and civic achievement in early-twentieth-century Texas.

Auburn, AL

This marker honors Dr. Harold A. Franklin, who in 1964 became the first African American student admitted to Auburn University, integrating the Alabama school at the height of the civil rights era. A native of nearby Talladega, Franklin pressed his admission through the courts and endured isolation on a campus that resisted his presence. He went on to a career as a scholar and educator, and Auburn later formally recognized the barrier he broke.

Taylor, TX

Born in 1893 and trained at Meharry Medical College after service in World War I, Dr. James Lee Dickey settled in Taylor as its only African American physician. He led the fight against a 1932-33 typhoid outbreak, pushed to improve the town's water supply, and opened a clinic that grew to serve the whole region. His advocacy reached well beyond medicine into school bonds, housing, recreation, and civil rights, earning him recognition as the community's Man of the Year in 1952.

Los Angeles, CA

On April 27, 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a gathering of students, faculty, staff, and alumni at UCLA, calling them to action in the civil rights struggle. His visit came at the height of the movement—just weeks after the Selma-to-Montgomery marches—and inspired UCLA students and alumni to join the cause. This site marks the spot where his words moved a university community to act.

Warrenton, NC

Born in 1927, Dr. L. Julian Haywood rose through some of the nation's most storied Black institutions of higher learning, earning his undergraduate degree at Virginia's Hampton Institute and his medical degree at Howard University College of Medicine—schools that trained generations of African American leaders during an era of rigid segregation. After service in the U.S. Navy, he joined the medical faculty of Loma Linda University in California and built a distinguished career in academic medicine that reached far from his North Carolina roots. This marker in Warrenton honors a hometown son whose life bridged the Jim Crow South of his youth and the integrated professional world he helped shape, until his death in 2020.

El Paso, TX

Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon, a physician who moved to El Paso in 1910, became a charter member of the local NAACP and a determined challenger of Texas's whites-only Democratic primaries. His lawsuits reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice, in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932), winning landmark rulings against racial exclusion from primary voting. Texas evaded the decisions for nearly two decades, but the precedent he set was affirmed in 1944—the year Nixon himself finally cast a primary ballot.

Dallas, TX

Born enslaved on the Caruth farm in 1862, Marcellus Clayton Cooper studied at Meharry Medical College in Nashville and in 1896 became the first licensed African American dentist in Texas. Returning to his native Dallas, he built a respected practice and poured himself into building Black economic institutions—helping found the Penny Savings Bank, serving the Negro Chamber of Commerce, and investing in the city's first Black-owned department store.

Houston, TX

This Houston monument honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who became the moral voice of the American civil rights movement. Born in Atlanta in 1929, King led the nonviolent campaigns—bus boycotts, marches, and freedom rides—that dismantled legal segregation before his assassination in 1968. His words and example transformed the nation's conscience.

Milwaukee, WI

This monument carries the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision of food, education, and dignity for all captured the moral heart of the civil rights movement. King led the nonviolent struggle against segregation from the 1950s until his assassination in 1968, and his words continued to shape American conscience long after. Milwaukee, itself a battleground for open-housing marches in the 1960s, has particular reason to honor his legacy.

Kendall, FL

This plaque honors the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), the Baptist minister who became the defining voice of the American civil rights movement. From the Montgomery bus boycott through the March on Washington and the campaigns that helped secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King preached nonviolent resistance to segregation and injustice until his assassination in Memphis in April 1968. Markers like this one, dedicated to his commitment to human rights, have been placed in communities across the country, including here in the Miami area.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

In the early 20th century, a small circle of Black students at Howard University founded Omega Psi Phi in 1911 — the first fraternity established at a historically Black college or university — and Dr. Oscar James Cooper was among them. He carried that founding energy home to Philadelphia, where he practiced medicine for half a century and helped launch the Pyramid Club, a hub of Black professional and cultural life. The house here served as both his residence and his medical office, anchoring him in the community he served.

Haltom City, TX

Trained at Louisville National Medical College in an era when few medical schools admitted Black students, Dr. Riley Andrew Ransom brought his skills to North Texas in the early 1900s. He opened the Booker T. Washington Sanitarium in Gainesville, then moved it to Fort Worth in 1918, serving as Chief Surgeon until it closed in 1949. For a Black community long shut out of segregated hospitals, his sanitarium was a lifeline of professional care.

Clymer, PA · est. 2007

Dr. Robert Mitchell of Indiana County was an outspoken abolitionist who, in September 1845, sheltered five people fleeing slavery on his property here. When bounty hunters raided, two escaped but three were dragged back into bondage—and Mitchell was tried, convicted, and financially ruined for violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. His case fed the national controversy that hardened into the harsher Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

New York, NY

This memorial honors Dr. Ronald E. McNair, a gifted physicist and NASA astronaut whose words about curiosity and perseverance are preserved here. Raised in the segregated South, McNair earned a doctorate in physics and became one of the first African Americans to fly in space. He was killed in 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, and communities across the country—including here in Brooklyn—named parks and schools in his memory.

Houston, TX

Dr. Thomas Franklin Freeman (1919–2020) was a philosophy professor, minister, and legendary debate coach who joined Texas Southern University in 1949 for what he thought would be a nine-month stay—and stayed more than seventy years. The TSU debate teams he built famously beat Harvard in 1956 and amassed thousands of trophies, while his mentorship touched figures including Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Jordan. TSU named its Honors College in his honor in 2009.

Corsicana, TX

Will Coleman (1882–1953) grew up tending livestock on a Navarro County ranch before his family moved to Corsicana in 1899. He trained in veterinary science in Montreal, earned his Texas license, and by 1925 had opened his own clinic—becoming one of the first Black veterinarians in the region. He raised twelve children with his wife Mattie at this site.

Abilene, TX

Dr. William H. Butler, Sr., born in 1875 in Palestine, Texas, earned his medical degree in 1910 from Nashville's Meharry Medical College — one of the few institutions then training African American physicians — and became the first Black doctor to practice in Abilene. Working out of his Craftsman bungalow, he served the community not only as a physician but as pharmacist and dentist, while he and his wife Beatrice raised a son who followed him into medicine. After Beatrice's death in 1968 the family home became a neighborhood day care, backed by eight local churches.

San Diego, CA

This San Diego sculpture, titled "Dream," honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. through five bronze hands that together spell a single word in American Sign Language. The design translates King's message of hope and idealism into a form that speaks across barriers, evoking the vision he made famous in his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.

New York, NY

Born in Washington and crowned in Harlem, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington spent nearly five decades turning the big band into a vehicle for serious American art. From the Cotton Club of the 1920s through concert halls the world over, his "Mood Indigo," "Take the A Train," and ambitious extended suites reshaped how the world heard jazz. Championed by the cabaret singer Bobby Short and paid for by thousands of fans, this memorial rose at the northeast corner of Central Park in 1997.

Livingston, TX

Formal education for Livingston's African American children began in a West Street building in the late 1800s, in a segregated system so under-resourced that a former white schoolhouse was once rolled across town on logs by mule teams to serve Black students. In 1936 the community opened Dunbar High School—named for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—the largest African American school in Polk County, with twelve grades and vocational training. Its Leopards won state football titles in 1953, 1954, and 1958, until the Freedom of Choice integration program led to Dunbar's closing in 1968; residents later saved the campus for continued public use.

Longview, TX

Raised on the eve of the Civil War, this ranch home was the work of Dr. J. N. Allison, a pioneer physician who hauled building materials all the way from Virginia and had its bricks fired on site from local clay by enslaved laborers. The house stood on land that would later prove to sit atop the vast East Texas oil field, with the nearby Lathrop Discovery Well extending that famous strike. It marks the layering of Old South settlement and 20th-century petroleum wealth on a single patch of Gregg County ground.

Jones Creek, TX

Carved from Stephen F. Austin's 1828 Mexican land grant, Durazno—Spanish for "peach"—passed on Austin's death in 1836 to his sister Emily Austin Bryan Perry and then to her son William Joel Bryan, who built it into a cotton and sugar plantation. Its grounds held a main house, offices, barns, and a number of slave cabins, and it stayed in the family until 1928. The plantation's wealth, like so much of the antebellum South, rested on the labor of the enslaved.

Abilene, TX

On January 21, 1963, Dyess Elementary became the first school in the Abilene Independent School District to integrate, enrolling 38 African American children — most from military families at Dyess Air Force Base who had been bused past this closer school to the segregated Woodson School. Texas had tried to stall desegregation with House Bill 65, but after the state attorney general declared it unconstitutional in 1962 and the Defense Department threatened to cut funding, the district's board voted unanimously to begin. Full integration of Abilene's schools followed step by step, completed only in 1970.

Duplin County, NC

For more than four decades E. E. Smith led the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville—today Fayetteville State University—shaping one of the South's key institutions for training Black teachers. He also served as U.S. minister to Liberia from 1888 to 1890, representing his country abroad. He was born about two and a half miles southeast of this marker.

Eagle Lake, TX

Before Eagle Lake had a school for Black children, they were taught at home, in churches, and even a blacksmith shop. In the late 1920s professor Eugene H. Henry—a Prairie View and Howard graduate and World War I veteran—rallied the community to seek a Rosenwald grant, the matching-fund program launched by Sears president Julius Rosenwald to build African-American schools across the segregated South. Parents, churches, and businesses raised money, and the school opened in 1930 as Colorado County's only Rosenwald school, becoming a hub of Black community life until integration in the 1960s.

Nacogdoches, TX

Opened in 1903 as the Nacogdoches Colored School and renamed in 1937 for longtime principal E. J. Campbell, this school served African American students from the town and surrounding countryside under Texas's 'separate but equal' segregation laws, which in practice left Black schools underfunded. Beginning under Campbell, students regularly visited Prairie View Normal School to glimpse the possibilities of higher education, and the results were remarkable: at one point more than two-thirds of graduates went on to college, many returning as certified teachers. The school served its community until Nacogdoches fully integrated in 1970.

Austin, TX

Built in 1872, this Italianate commercial building housed the thriving grocery of Edward H. Carrington, a formerly enslaved man who became a successful Austin merchant. After his death in 1917 his son-in-law Louis D. Lyons — a trustee of Samuel Huston College — carried on the business and turned the second floor into a hall that hosted many gatherings of the Black community.

Duquesne, PA · est. 2024

Born in Duquesne, Earl 'Fatha' Hines revolutionized the way the piano was played in jazz, developing a bold 'trumpet-style' approach that freed the instrument from a purely rhythmic role. In 1921 he became one of the first Black musicians to perform on American radio, and his big band went on to launch the careers of countless jazz greats. His orchestra served as an early incubator for the bebop revolution that reshaped American music.

Lexington, TX

The Methodist Episcopal Church South bought this cemetery site in 1850, though some burials predate it. Among those resting here are San Jacinto veterans — including Lexington's founder, Capt. James Shaw, and William Hawkins — Civil War soldiers, an early county judge's wife, and, in a set-apart section, enslaved people.

Richmond, TX

Deeded to Fort Bend County in 1838 by Richmond's founders, this square hosted a succession of courthouses, including a proud two-story Victorian building with a bell tower and clock completed in 1888. In 1889 the square was the scene of the bloody climax of the Jaybird-Woodpecker feud, a violent post-Civil War political struggle. After county offices moved in 1909, the square became a hub of recreation before a City Hall rose here in 1940.

Decatur, TX

Established in 1882, East Side Elementary was the only school for African American students in Wise County, a one-room frame building near Mrs. Missouri Brown's home that also served as a church. Students warmed themselves at a pot-bellied stove and made do with furnishings and textbooks discarded by Decatur's white schools; those who finished eighth grade had to travel 30 to 45 miles to Denton or Fort Worth to continue. The school operated until desegregation in 1965.

Glenwood, TX

After the Civil War, freedmen settled this Upshur County area as tenant cotton farmers and built the community institutions — school, church, and cemetery — that sustained them. The East Springfield Baptist congregation formed in the 1800s and received its property in 1923, its small membership matching the devotion of far larger churches. For over a century it offered worship, Sunday school, and socials that bound together neighboring freedmen's settlements.

Borger, TX

When the oil-boom city of Borger was still unincorporated in 1926, its citizens petitioned to create an independent school district, and with no tax base yet in place local businessmen paid the teachers' salaries themselves that first year. Among the five brick buildings erected in 1927 was East Ward, a five-classroom school for 200 pupils and today the only one of that original set still standing. Renamed James Bowie Elementary in 1957, it absorbed the students of the segregated Booker T. Washington School when it closed in 1965 and became fully integrated that fall, before serving as the district's administrative center.

Bay City, TX

Eastview Cemetery began in 1907 on 1.8 acres bought from D. P. Moore, with the first recorded burial in 1912, and grew by more than five acres in 1945. Known over the years as "The Burying Ground for Negroes" and the "Old Section," it sits beside the Anglo Cedarvale Cemetery and holds more than 780 graves, among them veterans of both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Tied to the area's African American churches and organizations, it is still tended by a cemetery association.

Austin, TX

The Ebenezer (Third) Baptist Church was organized in February 1875 in the home of Elisa Hawkins, part of the flowering of independent Black congregations across Texas in the years after emancipation. As the membership grew it moved from a simple frame building to a brick sanctuary with stained glass in 1885, a stucco tabernacle in 1915, and finally the Gothic limestone-and-brick complex built in the 1950s, whose tower still holds the bell from the first brick church. The congregation's steady expansion mirrors the deep roots of religious life in East Austin's Black community.

Wolfe City, TX

The first African Americans in northern Hunt County arrived enslaved in the 1840s, and after the Civil War a community grew around L. P. Wolfe's mill on Oyster Creek. In June 1889, Brother Harrison Loftin, himself formerly enslaved, gathered Black neighbors and members of the White Baptist church to found a congregation; among them were four African American women, one of whom proposed the name Ebenezer, "stone of help." Rev. A. C. Brown became its first pastor, and the church endured across generations, including the fifty-six-year ministry of Rev. John Williams.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett bridged the worlds of education and diplomacy in the Reconstruction era. For more than a decade he led Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, one of the nation's premier schools for Black students. In 1869 President Grant appointed him U.S. minister to Haiti—making Bassett the first African American to hold a diplomatic post, a barrier-breaking role he filled through 1877 before settling here for his final years.

Marshall, TX

Worship has taken place on this Marshall site since 1867, with the first church built the following year under the Rev. Elijah Blair. Through 42 pastors and successive buildings—the third completed in 1958—Ebenezer Methodist grew into a pillar of its community. It is honored as the home church of three bishops: Willis J. King, J. B. Scott, and E. W. Kelly.

Odessa, TX

The 1926 oil strike in Ector County flooded Odessa with workers and their children, and by the mid-1950s the school district needed a new high school on the city's south side. Opened in 1957 and named for Confederate general and Texas legislator Mathew Ector, the school served a student body that was predominantly Hispanic and African American. Its history became entangled in the long fight over desegregation, and rather than fully integrate, the district closed it as a high school after MALDEF's 1981 legal action.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Ed Bradley grew up in Philadelphia and got his start in broadcasting at WDAS radio not far from this spot before rising to the top of American journalism. He reported from the battlefields of Vietnam and Cambodia, became the first African American television correspondent to cover the White House, and spent 26 years as a fixture on CBS's 60 Minutes. Along the way he collected 19 Emmys, a Peabody, and a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Chattanooga, TN

In 1906 Ed Johnson, a Black man in Chattanooga, was convicted of a crime on deeply questionable evidence and sentenced to death. His attorneys, Styles Hutchins and Noah Parden — among the few Black lawyers of their era — pressed his appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered a stay; a mob defied that order and lynched Johnson, an outrage that led to United States v. Shipp, the only criminal trial ever conducted by the Supreme Court itself. This memorial honors both the man and the lawyers who risked everything for him.

San Marcos, TX

Jazz pioneer Eddie Durham was born in San Marcos in 1906 into a musical family and played trombone and guitar in bands across the Southwest before joining Kansas City's swing scene. Working with Bennie Moten and later Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, he helped shape the big-band sound and pioneered the single-string guitar style — recording what is often called the first amplified guitar in 1935. A gifted arranger, he had a hand in standards including 'In the Mood.'

Canton, TX

Born into slavery in 1850, Edmund Arnold Wynne came of age just as emancipation transformed the South. By 1869 his father had bought 100 acres, and Edmund followed, purchasing his own land and then selling parcels for a dollar to Black churches and schools across the Big Rock and Canton areas. Over a lifetime he helped former slaves and struggling families become self-sufficient, supported teachers, and lent his name to the Wynne community, one of the oldest African American communities in Texas.

Selma, AL · est. 1965

Some 600 marchers crossing the bridge toward Montgomery were attacked by police with clubs and tear gas. Televised nationwide, the violence galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Industry, TX

German settlers founded Industry in 1831, and within a decade Rev. Louis Ervendberg and Dr. Joseph Anton Fischer opened the town's first school, with residents even petitioning the Texas Congress in 1842 for a German 'Hermann's University' that was chartered but never built. Steeped in Germany's tradition of free education, the community helped drive Texas's public-school movement, later building both a new school and a separate Mary Bethune School for African American children before integration folded them into Bellville ISD.

Livingston, TX

Education took root in Livingston from the town's 1840s founding, when Moses Choate's land donation included a site for a school and the Masonic lodge financed a free academy in 1849. A graded school followed in 1888, growing into Livingston High School, whose first class graduated in 1908. The story also traces the town's separate Black schools—including Dunbar High—through the Freedom of Choice program that began integration in 1965 and full unification by 1968.

Austin, TX

Schooling in the community of Manchaca began with an 1870s subscription school in a one-room frame building on Onion Creek and a public school held in the 'Old Rock Church' by the early 1880s. The 1881 arrival of the International and Great Northern Railroad drew new settlers, and in 1883 a brick schoolhouse with a bell tower rose east of this site, later gaining a second story, cafeteria, and auditorium. As across the segregated South, separate schools served African American and Mexican American children until the district integrated in the 1960s and was ultimately absorbed by Austin ISD.

Raleigh, NC

Edward A. Johnson was a many-sided figure in turn-of-the-century Black America, working as a politician, businessman, philanthropist, author, and educator. He became the first Black author to publish a schoolbook in North Carolina, writing Black history into the classroom. His home stood on this site.

Austin, TX

Edward Clark—Texas lieutenant governor and, in 1861, its Confederate governor—bought this property in 1856, and this buff-brick building likely served as an outbuilding and possibly as quarters for the ten enslaved people he owned. Its plan matches typical slave quarters of the period, and despite 1930s alterations by owner Mamie Hatzfeld it survives as a rare pre-Civil War residential structure in Austin. The building was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2012.

Conshohocken, PA · est. 1976

Edward Hector served as a private in the Continental artillery and fought at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, one of the largest engagements of the Revolutionary War. He made his home in what is now Conshohocken. His marker honors him as a stand-in for the many Black soldiers whose service filled the Continental ranks but whose race went unrecorded in the muster rolls.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2024

Trumpeter Edward Lee 'Lee' Morgan came up through the demanding schools of the Dizzy Gillespie band and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, becoming one of the defining voices of hard bop. As a bandleader he recorded more than thirty albums, and his infectious 1963 tune 'The Sidewinder' crossed over into the pop charts and became a jazz standard. He played this very spot at the Aqua Lounge, one of the Philadelphia clubs that nurtured the postwar jazz scene.

Houston, TX

Edward Ruthven Taylor, born in 1845, came of age in a Houston cotton and education family and returned from schooling in New York to fight for the Confederacy, serving with Waul's Texas Legion at Vicksburg, where he was captured and fell ill. Back home he fell in love with Ann, a young woman his family had enslaved; unable to marry legally, the couple built a farm at Pierce Junction and raised a large family together. Ann died in 1909, and when oil was struck on the family land in 1921, the fortune passed to their children, who later donated the original homestead to the City of Houston.