This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.”
by Jeremy Lee Wolin
During the era of formal segregation, Black communities across the United States created thousands of schools to provide the education that white schools would not allow their students to receive. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the same school districts that previously upheld segregation closed the vast majority of these Black institutions. Mass firings left tens of thousands of Black educators without work and Black students without their strongest advocates. Yet while conducting research for my dissertation, I found a 1974 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report that told of two communities—in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Waco, Texas—that fought to keep two schools open. The parallels did not end there. Coincidentally, both schools were named after scientist George W. Carver.[1] More importantly, both had won.
The report revealed a hidden connection, a factor key to keeping Tulsa’s and Waco’s schools open while barely registering in local news at the time: a grant from the Model Cities Program. A federal urban planning program, Model Cities hardly intended to change the course of local school integration, but in Tulsa and Waco, advocates for fair education ensured that it did.
Tulsa’s Carver Junior High and Waco’s Carver High were among fifty-odd secondary schools named for George W. Carver pre-integration, mapped below. I followed each of their histories to understand the common practices of advocacy, investment, and care that connected them all, in order to understand the stakes of saving Tulsa’s and Waco’s Carvers. The threads that stretch across these schools reveal shared strands of resistance to American education’s recurrent inequality. The striking commonalities between the schools that received these grants and those that did not make the impact of reparative investment clear and the case for wider redistribution evident.
What’s in a name? From the 1920s to the 1940s, George W. Carver’s life story had made him an agricultural celebrity. Carver grew up in slavery, learned botany despite discrimination, and disseminated methods of crop rotation that repaired soils depleted by decades of cotton production. It is therefore unsurprising that so many secondary schools took Carver’s name prior to 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that separate education was unequal. These pre-Brown Carvers are a legacy of “the black tax,” the secondary payments that Black families made to erect their own schools when local government excluded them from those it built with their taxes. Some Carvers, including schools in Lockhart, Texas, and Appomattox, Virginia, also received sizable investments from the Rosenwald Fund, the philanthropic foundation which helped construct over 5,000 Black schools in the early twentieth century (mapped here by Ian Spangler). Naming a school after George W. Carver embodied the hope behind such investments.
Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Carver Junior High School (see featured image, at top) represented such hope in built form. Tulsa’s Black business community pushed for the school’s construction while rebuilding from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob killed hundreds of Black Tulsans and destroyed the thriving district of Greenwood.[2] Carver himself visited Tulsa to dedicate the school in 1929, a community event repeated at Carver schools in Decatur, Alabama, in 1935, in Fulton, Missouri, in 1937, and at a Carver elementary in Ways, Georgia, in 1940.[3] Tulsa’s new school, designed by local architect Lee Shumway, held six classrooms in a stately, one-story, Gothic revival, brick structure.[4] Three additions built over three decades represented a curriculum that ballooned to serve a population regrowing from devastation.[5]
The second Carver in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report, Waco, Texas’s George W. Carver High School, opened in 1956. It represented how, after Brown, the construction of segregated schools continued in the form of equalization schools. School districts built these new facilities for Black students in an attempt to circumvent integration. Carver schools in Lonoke, Arkansas (1957), Caddo Parrish, Louisiana (1957), Memphis, Tennessee (1957), Birmingham, Alabama (1959), Naples, Florida (1959), and Philadelphia, Mississippi (1963) opened during this period. In 1953, Waco’s La Vega School District did not offer a high school for its Black students. As a result of Brown, it decided not to increase the size of all-white La Vega High,but instead to build Carver. At its opening, Waco’s Carver High contained separate classroom and agricultural buildings, science labs, a library, and a five-hundred-seat auditorium.[6] While Tulsa’s Carver Junior High represented community investment in spite of segregation, Waco’s Carver High represented municipal investment in thwarting desegregation.
Yet when the La Vega School District closed Waco’s Carver High in September 1970, 150 former students walked out of newly desegregated La Vega High despite Carver’s discriminatory origins. They marched five miles to Carver, where they camped out to demand its reopening. The students decried the loss of their favorite teachers, a marching band that won a grand prize on a trip to Montreal’s Expo ’67, and, most of all, respect: the white high school’s teachers were antagonistic to their new students. When Tulsa Public Schools decided to close Tulsa’s Carver one year later, Tulsa’s Coalition for Quality Education launched the Carver Freedom School, a legacy of earlier Civil Rights Movement freedom schools. In the annex of a local church, they provided instruction to 250 students, defying the district’s decision to keep white schools open while closing Carver.
Waco and Tulsa’s protests decried the costs of unequal desegregation. As Vanessa Siddle Walker has shown, the resources that Black parents and educators poured into schools otherwise starved by segregated districts created institutions adept at teaching aspiration amid adversity.[7] Between 1954, when Brown ordered desegregation, and the early 1970s, when federal agencies and lower courts forced compliance, closing these institutions destroyed those investments. As Leslie Fenwick reveals, doing so laid off or demoted some 100,000 Black educators in favor of less-educated white colleagues, manufacturing an unemployment crisis beyond compare.[8] Many fought these firings, including twelve Carver High teachers in Sweeny, Texas, who unsuccessfully sued to get their jobs back.
These districts seldom made white schools welcoming. School officials forced students at Carver High Schools in both Baytown and Midland, Texas, into two schools both named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee.[9] Nor were Waco’s and Tulsa’s Black students alone in protest. In October 1970, the Tallahatchie County sheriff arrested, jailed, and kept over 100 students from school for protesting Charleston, Mississippi’s closure of its Allen Carver High School.
Model Cities grants were the financial connections that made Tulsa’s and Waco’s struggles end differently. From 1971 to 1973, the local Model Cities agencies of Tulsa and Waco directed $448,000 and $422,000 ($3.7 million and $3.3 million in 2024) respectively toward the reopening of their two Carvers.[10]
As the primary urban development program of the War on Poverty, Model Cities has a complex legacy.[11] The program, operating from 1966 to 1974, encouraged citizen participation to a far greater extent than urban renewal authorities had. In Tulsa, not only Black Tulsans but Carver alumni—including director Willard Vann and planners Betty Waldron and Jo Ann Thompson—filled the Model Cities agency.[12] Yet as Victor Luckerson has shown of Tulsa Model Cities’ inability to stop the Tulsa Urban Renewal Authority’s existing plan to demolish much of Greenwood, Model Cities often had limited power over other city departments.[13]Nationally, as much as Model Cities was a conduit for harmful federal policies, it also offered a generation of Civil Rights activists-turned-administrators the money to build and staff schools, clinics, libraries, daycares, youth centers, parks, and social service centers.[14] These administrators received their first action grants from Model Cities in 1969 and 1970, at the same time when many districts facing desegregation mandates were deciding which schools to close. Even if Tulsa Model Cities had limited power, the millions that the federal government gave directly to its staff, not to a pro-segregation school district nor a demolition-focused urban renewal agency, gave Carver an unprecedented chance at revival.
Renovating Tulsa’s Carver Junior High to reopen as an integrated middle school revealed the disparities between all-Black and all-white schools. With Model Cities money, the school got air conditioning. To create modern, open-style classrooms, walls came down and new lockers, shops, labs, and equipment went up. The budget purchased land for future expansion.[15] Not limited to physical improvements, Model Cities supported the development of a new magnet curriculum and then spent a summer convincing white families to use it.[16]Despite such difficulties, Q. T. Williams, Carver’s old principal, since rehired to lead the new school, called the integration a success until the end of his career.[17]
As Model Cities required funds beyond those which the Department of Housing and Urban Development provided, a network of federal administrators kept tabs on projects that drew support from the Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW); Labor; Commerce; Agriculture; Justice; the Office for Economic Opportunity; and state agencies. The report that told of Tulsa and Waco’s Carvers lay in the records of HEW Office of Education Model Cities Liaison Eric Dennard. Administrators like Dennard, corresponding largely with local administrators, and thus unknown to local residents, created administrative linkages that determined the fates of otherwise coincidental moments of activism.[18]
The linkages of the bureaucratic archive did not always capture local nuance. Dennard’s report lauded the outcome for Waco’s Carver High, just as it did Tulsa’s, though local records tell a different story. The Waco Model Cities agency—less representative of its Black constituents than Tulsa’s because of how the city defined its boundaries—settled on reopening Waco’s Carver not as a high school but as an “education center.” In this role, it would offer tutoring, extracurriculars, and sports. While an innovative compromise to federal administrators, the center did not fill the place of a high school for students nor educators.[19]
The renovation of Waco’s Carver Park Community Education Center became a record of an unfair deal. Visitors found a new but already faulty air conditioning system, missing lights, and a basketball court with a bad floor and broken backboard. Model Cities hired Waco’s old principal, Jesse J. Flewellyn, as center director, but regardless of how many teachers followed, the center’s tutoring programs offered informal jobs that paid on an hourly, rather than salaried basis, or relied on volunteers.[20] As Claire Dunning writes of the War on Poverty’s New Careers programs, such jobs seldom offered advancement.[21] Local historians have worked to preserve the history of Waco’s fight for fair desegregation. The education center does not even register in the story they tell.
While Waco’s Carver became an education center, many other Carvers reopened as pre-schools, elementary schools and special education centers in the years following Brown. That these valuable spaces each emerged through the sacrifice of a high school tempered their potentials.
Still, staying open was better than the alternative. In Louisiana, the Caddo Parrish School Board let its Carver fall to ruin and vandalism. Over time, urban legends emerged that the school was haunted.[22] Model Cities may not have preserved all that Waco’s Carver High School meant to its former students, but keeping the property occupied and in public stewardship meant that in the years following, it housed nonprofits and served as a sixth-grade school, a science and technology magnet, and today, a middle school. An electrical fire destroyed the building in 2021, but in fall 2023, Waco’s G. W. Carver Middle School reopened anew. A group of alumni are planning an art installation to honor their old school.
They have a lot of company. Commemorative work on Carvers has taken place in the form of foundations, museums, and exhibits in Gadsden, Alabama; Phoenix, Arizona; Bunnell, Crestview, and Delray Beach, Florida; Carrollton, Georgia; Cumberland, Maryland; Picayune and Tupelo, Mississippi; Kannapolis, North Carolina; Brownsville, Tennessee; Baytown, Texas; and in Appomattox and Rapidan, Virginia. In the form of memorials and markers in Houston, Navasota, and Sweeny, Texas. In inclusion on the National Registry of Historic Places in Augusta and Lonoke, Arkansas. In digital history projects in Rockville, Maryland and as part of a Louisiana-wide archive. In Midland, Texas, in song. And in ongoing fights in Marked Tree, Arkansas and Lockhart, Texas.
Alone, each of these Carvers testify to unequal sacrifices that dashed decades of Black community investment. In aggregate, they sketch out a national debt at the root of today’s segregated, unequal educational landscape. Model Cities grants were not repayment of the Black taxes and other investments that built up Black schools, but they kept a few of these efforts from going to waste. In doing so, they created a trail of financial and administrative connections that provide students, scholars, and activists with examples of the power of public investment, small installments on a debt that remains to be paid.
Jeremy Lee Wolin is a PhD candidate in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, focused on race, design, and the state. His dissertation follows the activists, architects, and administrators who struggled to meet the demands of the Civil Rights Movement through the Model Cities Program, the primary urban development program of the U.S. War on Poverty. The dissertation tracks how, amid competing policy priorities and meager funding, debates over a post-urban renewal architecture of “human renewal”—housing, daycares, youth centers, schools, libraries, social service centers, and infrastructure projects—defined citizenship’s limits at the moment of its expansion in the post-Civil Rights era.
Featured image (at top): Tulsa’s Carver Junior High School shortly after its opening. Photo by Beryl Ford, ca. 1930. Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library & Tulsa Historical Society
[1] Carver largely abbreviated his middle name. George W. Carver, George Washington Carver: In His Own Words, ed. Gary R. Kremer (Columbia: Univ of Missouri Press, 1991).
[2] Victor Luckerson, Built From The Fire : The Epic Story Of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street (New York: Random House, 2023); “Board of Education Hears Request for New Junior High School,” Tulsa Tribune, March 6, 1928.
[3] Deangelo McDaniel, “Decatur Historians Seek Marker at Former Carver School,” Montgomery Advertiser, 29 September 2019, https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2019/09/29/decatur-historians-seek-marker-former-carver-school/3811517002/.
[4] “How George W. Carver Negro Junior High Will Look,” Tulsa Tribune, 2 September 1928.
[5] “School Gets New Addition,” Tulsa World, 26 October 1950.
[6] “New La Vega School Plant Contract Let,” Waco Times-Herald, 3 February 1956.
[7] Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3.
[8] Leslie T. Fenwick, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2022).
[9] Russell Hamman, “Hamman’s Baytown History…GW Carver High School,” The Baytown Sun, 12 February 2019, https://baytownsun.com/opinion/columns/hamman-s-baytown-history-gw-carver-high-school/article_ac3adae0-2e7b-11e9-8b93-63717788d88e.html; Len Hayward, ‘Midlanders Remember History of Carver High Football with Pride’, Midland Reporter-Telegram, 30 August 2008, https://www.mrt.com/news/article/Midlanders-remember-history-of-Carver-High-7503559.php.
[10] “Carver Junior High School Rehabilitation Estimate,” n.d., Model Cities Program Records, Box 16, Folder 11, University of North Texas Special Collections; “Carver Center Provides For People of All Ages,” The Waco Times-Herald, 12 May 1972.
[11] Recent evaluations of Model Cities stress the distance between early intentions and actual implementation. Susanne Schindler, “Model Cities at Fifty: Afterlives,” Planning Perspectives 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2024), 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2023.2294745; June Manning Thomas, “Model Cities Revisited: Issues of Race and Empowerment,” in Urban Planning and the African American Community, ed. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1997), 144.
[12] June Tyhurst, “Carver Alumni Elated At Revamp of School,” Tulsa World, September 28, 1973.
[13] Luckerson, Built From The Fire, 294–96.
[14] For housing policies that favored landlords and Model Cities, see Morris Speller, “Broker Power: Real Estate Brokers in the St. Louis Model Cities Program, 1966–1975,” Planning Perspectives 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2024), 61, https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2023.2298451; for community policing and Model Cities, see Jeremy Lee Wolin, “Marshall Plan or Neocolonization? The Model Cities Program and Black Planning Criticism,” Planning Perspectives 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2024), 19; for how War on Poverty social programs sought to shape the behavior of Black youth, see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 32.
[15] “Carver Junior High School Rehabilitation Estimate,” n.d., Model Cities Program Records, Box 16, Folder 11, University of North Texas Special Collections.
[16]“TAAG Heads Carver Drive,” The Chronicle, October 1972, HEW Region VI Model Cities Program Records, Box 16, Folder 10, University of North Texas Special Collections.
[17] Tim Stanley, “Carver Co-Principal Embraced Desegregation,” Tulsa World, July 26, 2012, https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/carver-co-principal-embraced-desegregation/article_69ea0756-32c4-5d23-af53-5910d1758b9b.html.
[18] Thanks to Professor John Curry, these papers eventually entered into the University of North Texas Special Collections, where as the “Model Cities Program Records,” they were integral to this research. Roz Van Meter and Harold A. Haswell, Educational Components of Model Cities: A Report on Region VI (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Dallas Regional Office VI, 1974), 35.
[19] “Waco Model Cities Planned Variation Program,” 1972, Model Cities Program Records, Box 17, Folder 17, University of North Texas Special Collections.
[20] John Willingham, “Carver Complaints Studied by Officials,” Waco Times-Herald, June 9, 1972.
[21] Claire Dunning, “New Careers for the Poor: Human Services and the Post-Industrial City,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 4 (July 1, 2018): 669–90, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217726975.
[22] Devon Patton, “The Urban Legends of Ellerbe Road School,” KTBS, October 7, 2014.
