In 1921, the Black families of Hill Prairie, in Bastrop County, built a two-teacher schoolhouse. The Rosenwald Fund in Chicago sent $800—equivalent to $15,000 in today’s dollars. The county sent nothing. In total, the families raised $1,630 themselves, more than two-thirds of the cost, and deeded the finished building to the public school district that had put nothing into it.
The school house in Hill Prairie was one of 527 buildings in Texas that was built with support from the Rosenwald Fund, a Chicago philanthropy that paid part of the cost of a schoolhouse when a Black community raised the rest, for Black students. Between 1920 and 1932, Black Texans built 527 Rosenwald buildings in fifty-two counties: 464 schools with room for 57,330 children, 31 teachers’ homes, and 32 vocational shops. The money tells the story. Black Texans contributed $392,851; the Fund contributed $419,376. The people who the state refused to educate matched a Chicago philanthropist almost dollar for dollar.
The program had started in Alabama in 1912, when Julius Rosenwald, the philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck, let Booker T. Washington use a gift to build six rural schools in Alabama. The match was the idea from the beginning. Rosenwald would not give a school. He would help a community build one. By 1917, the Julius Rosenwald Fund existed to do that across the South, and in 1920 Texas joined.
Texas needed it. Its rural Black schools in those years ran short terms, with one teacher for all grades, in buildings that were often churches or nothing at all. The Fund’s conditions were the lever. A community had to run school for at least five months. A one-teacher school needed two acres. The building had to be deeded to public authorities, who then had to maintain it. A community that met those conditions forced its county to own a school it had not asked for.
Most of the 527 schools were raised in East Texas, where most Black Texans lived at the time. In Bowie County, 32 built; Smith County, 22; Rusk County, 22. But the ring of Black communities around Austin also built its share, and the Fund’s ledgers survive for each one. Travis County built five: Littig in 1927, Gravel Hill and Pflugerville in 1928, Comanche and Pilot in 1930. Bastrop County built Hopewell and Hill Prairie in 1921, Elgin in 1923, and St. Mary’s Colony in 1925. Caldwell County built a Lockhart school in 1923. Guadalupe County built Sweet Home outside Seguin. At Lockhart, the district paid $18,000 of a $22,000 building, the largest public share in the ring, and Black families still added $2,500 of their own.
The Black Texans who raised the money are the part of this history that has not been told. At Hopewell, in Cedar Creek, the land came from Martin and Sophia McDonald. Both had been enslaved as children. Martin was sold to Bastrop County at the age of 2. They married in 1874, bought 83 acres in 1876, and held 1,100 by 1906. They told other freedmen to buy land and send their children to school, and a community grew around them. Martin died in 1912. In January 1919, the family’s heirs deeded 1.5 acres for a church and a school. The school opened in 1921 with their daughter, Artelia McDonald Brown, as its first teacher. On school-closing night each spring, the children recited speeches from memory while the whole community ate together on the grounds.
At Lockhart, the first principal was R. A. Atkinson, who was also the agricultural instructor and the man who counted the Black scholastic population for the census. The school board minutes record him petitioning the board for improvements year after year. Most requests were deferred. When he asked for a janitor, the board had its secretary tell him that his students would be expected to sweep the building. He kept petitioning. In Kendleton, in Fort Bend County, Tellie Benjamin Mitchell had run the two-room Powell Point School since 1904. In 1923 he persuaded the Rosenwald Fund to build him a new one: six classrooms, an auditorium, and a library, finished in 1925. He ran Powell Point for 50 years and served a term as president of the Colored Teachers State Association.
Behind all of them stood a woman most Texans have never heard of. Mary Jane Sims was born in Round Rock in 1874, began teaching at 16 in a Bastrop County school, and taught at Prairie View, now Prairie View A&M, from 1900 to 1920. In the 1920s, she was the Jeanes supervising teacher for Williamson and Travis counties. The Jeanes teachers were Black educators, nearly all of them women, paid in part by a Philadelphia-based fund, whose job was to travel a county’s rural Black schools, visit each one, and report. Sims rode the Williamson and Travis circuit in the decade those schools were built. Texas had Jeanes teachers in seven counties in 1920 and 13 by 1923. She finished her degree at Samuel Huston College in 1927, taught at Gregory and Olive Street schools in Austin, became the district’s first Black supervisor of primary reading, and in 1946 opened the first nursery school for Black children in Austin at Greater Mount Zion Baptist Church. Austin named an elementary school for her in 1956.
What became of the buildings is the rest of the story. The Gilmer-Aikin Laws of 1949 rebuilt the state’s school finance system and tied state aid to enrollment, which pushed small rural districts to consolidate or close. After 1954 Bastrop County’s rural Black schools did not integrate. They closed, and the children were sent to town. Lockhart’s school closed in 1964 and its bell was sold. The Texas Historical Commission counts 39 Rosenwald buildings that are still standing in Texas and 21 that have been demolished—most of the rest are unaccounted for. Hopewell is standing. The family that gave the land has been restoring it since 2016, with a contractor, a youth job-training crew, and a cooperative’s grant. In 2023, House Bill 4752, which would have had the state restore the South Central Texas buildings as community learning centers, passed the House unanimously but died in a Senate committee.
The record settles one thing. People with no vote in the white primaries that decided Texas elections of the time, no seat on the boards that ran their schools, and no authority over public education, built 527 public buildings and made the state keep them. Nothing they used was given to them. The Jeanes teachers held a visit and made a report, and turned the visit into a meeting of parents and the report into a record the county could not bury. A family like the McDonalds held a deed, and turned an acre and a half into a school the district was bound to maintain. A community like Hill Prairie held its own cash, and raised the match before anyone in authority had said, “Yes.” The method was the same each time: start with what you already hold, run it, put it on the record, and ask last.
This fall, Huston-Tillotson University in East Austin, the successor to Samuel Huston College, where Mary Jane Sims took her degree in 1927, opens a semester-long symposium on the Jeanes teachers with Central Texas Interfaith, a broad-based organizing network. Its participants, students and community members, will each take one decision inside a routine they already hold and carry it the way the Jeanes teachers did: redesign it, run it, make it public, organize around it, and ask last. The Jeanes teachers would have recognized them.
The post Black Texans Built More Than 400 Schools When the State Would Not appeared first on The Texas Observer.
