It has come to my attention that certain City of Austin officials wish to strip the word “Negro” from official designations and commemorations of the Montopolis Negro School. They prefer to refer to the school as the “Montopolis School” despite the fact that one of the most important things that makes the school historic is the fact that it is an important artifact of the history of segregation in Austin and Travis County. As my nomination of the school to the National Register of Historic Places makes clear, the school was never referred to as the “Montopolis School.” The by far most common names for the school were “Montopolis Negro School” or the “Montopolis School for Negro Children.” These names are reflected in historical records as well as oral tradition. So why is the city now so eager to remove the word “Negro” from what was the official title of the school?
It seems clear that there are two main reasons. The first has to do with controversy surrounding the word “Negro,” an archaic term of art that like “Colored” was supposedly superseded by (still problematic) terms such as “Afro-American” or “African-American” starting in the late 1960’s. My point isn’t to expound on the history of different terms black people have used to refer to themselves–enough about that has been written already–but to try to explain why entities such as the National Park Service, state historical societies, and municipalities such as Austin’s might have a problem with the word Negro. The presumption is that the word is offensive to black people (yes, I am deliberately not capitalizing the letter b…..) and that it is acceptable to purge racially inflammatory historical language from contemporary accounts. The problem is, of course, this: who gets to decide what is and isn’t considered to be racially offensive? Isn’t it better to keep racially hurtful language in historical documents and to use it as a teachable moment about how deeply embedded racism once was, especially during the so called “nadir of race relations?” Remember, we are not talking about monuments erected by the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy here, examples of which clearly belong in museums, not in public landscapes.
Who are these people who got all flustered about race relations language? For instance why was so much academic ink spilled about no longer using the word “slave” and using the term “enslaved African American” instead? How was the policing of language considered scholarly progress as opposed to the discovery of new historical data or the development of truly novel ways of interpreting the past that focus more on facts than feelings?
The second reason is I think related to the City of Austin’s culpability in condemning and destroying the St. Edward’s Missionary Baptist Church in 1988, its failure to live up to the terms of the original condemnation by actually building a road connecting Montopolis Drive with Grove Blvd. (through Country Club Creek, but that’s another story), and its 2015 effort to gentrify the Montopolis community by facilitating a sweetheart deal with the KEEP Investment Group (i.e. Austin Stowell), advocated for and overseen by Jerry Rusthoven, a highly placed public official within the city’s planning and development bureaucracy. The City of Austin does not come off looking good in the history of the Montopolis Negro School, something which my National Register nomination reflects. The city, therefore, has an incentive to minimize its racist actions at the church and at the school, and to also downplay the fact that its incompetent lawyering led to a payout of more than a million dollars in taxpayer dollars, all because certain butthurt city officials could not bring themselves to work with the Montopolis community to produce a negotiated policy outcome with broad popular support that could have popularized Stowell’s cynical lawsuit against the city. They instead placated Stowell and his predatory real estate investment concern, permitting him to keep a portion of the Negro School property on Kemp Street, where he promptly built a McMansion and sold it for nearly a million dollars. Doing so also compromised the integrity of the Montopolis Negro School property by reducing the original 1.82 acre lot donated by the church to Travis County in 1935 (deed restricted to be only used for school purposes) to about 1.65 acres.
But Austin has become a city where whitesplained black history has become normalized to an even greater degree. This is a city where an elementary school named in honor of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee in 1939 was cheekily referred to simply as “Lee Elementary” for decades, conveniently obscuring the neo-Confederate origins of the school’s dedication. When it became impossible to continue to keep the name during the Black Lives Matter era, the school’s name was rebranded in 2016 to–you guessed it–Lee Elementary, except the “Lee” in question was now Russell Lee, a mid twentieth century Austinite of note, but certainly not a general. One supposes that tricks such as this would have been more difficult to pull off if the school had been named for another noted friend of the black race, say, Adolf Hitler. Never underestimate white southern powers of self-deception and denial, especially among liberal whites and their black and brown pets.
I should add, in parenthesis, that in 2018 the city similarly renamed a street also named in honor of General Lee located along the south entrance to Zilker Park. In this case the new street name honored Azie Taylor Morton, an important black democratic party official who served as Treasurer of the United States during the Carter administration. It goes without saying that while these racially “progressive” actions were taking place, Austin’s race and class inequality continued to worsen, black historic preservation promises were broken, our political leaders openly continued to take orders from tech and real estate oligarchs, and mismanagement and corruption reached new heights. Taken as a whole, the consequence has become that the city has simply grown too unaffordable for too many people living here, while the “right” people are living higher on the hog than ever.
Sanitizing the truth about historical injustice is how one gets paid, whether at Rosewood Courts or at the Lions Municipal Golf Course. Anyone, of any color, tying the threads between historical acts of racism by prominent Austinites and (especially) how this relates to the cultural and historical erasure caused by gentrification and displacement in our own time is of course considered to be persona non grata. The role of the City of Austin, Travis County, or the Austin Public Schools, must remain camouflaged.
How bad was race based segregation in Austin? Here is a portion of my National Register nomination that deals with that subject.
A Concise History of Educational Segregation in Austin and Texas
As in other southern states, compulsory public education for all children, also known as the “free and common school” in Texas was a product of Reconstruction. Whereas the state’s 1866 constitution mandated that the public school fund could only be used for the education of white children, the 1869 Texas constitution established the office of a statewide Superintendent of Public Instruction and provided for the legislature to divide the state into school districts with school boards that were empowered to raise taxes to fund the schools. The constitution also explicitly stated, for the first time, that education was to be free for all inhabitants of the state between the ages of six and eighteen, regardless of sex or race.
The end of Reconstruction changed this. The “Redemption” constitution of 1876 abolished the office of state superintendent, established a board of education composed of the governor, comptroller, and secretary of state, eliminated compulsory attendance, and made no provision for school taxes. It also removed the provisions regarding the equal education of girls and set up the replacement system of education on a segregated basis.
African Americans deplored these changes. Between 1873 and 1893 at black state conventions, the African American community met to voice its concerns about the education system for black children. One of the most significant gatherings occurred in Austin in 1884 where the state Colored Teachers Association advocated for quality education for blacks and better working conditions for teachers. (McDaniel 2021).
Rural African American schools were usually organized with one or two teachers who taught grades one through eight in the same one-room schoolhouse. Many of the buildings declared as “schools” were actually not designed for educational purposes—8 percent were rented structures. In regard to school funding, white schools received 94.5 percent of funding compared to 6 percent for black schools in 1929.1
Both Travis County as well as Austin operated “separate but equal” public school systems from their inception. The Great Depression and natural disasters such as floods further heightened existing and inherent inequities endemic to segregation. When the Montopolis Negro School was sited at its present location in 1935, Travis County only did so reluctantly, at African American insistence, and with significant black financial and in-kind support from the parishioners of St. Edward’s Missionary Baptist Church.
Education was an animating demand of the Civil Rights Movement — including the NAACP’s legal struggle that resulted in the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate the schools, and SNCC’s Freedom Schools campaign. In opposition, states like South Carolina passed a law that one couldn’t be a teacher and a member of the NAACP or other civil rights groups. In September 1956, Virginia enacted 13 laws, known as the Stanley Plan, to maintain racial segregation by authorizing the use of public funds to provide tuition grants and tax credits to white students attending private schools. The plan also allowed the state to close public schools that were ordered to integrate, further facilitating the shift of white students to private institutions. The public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, were closed from 1959 to 1964. For these five years, white students were able to attend private, all-white “segregation academies,” hastily established and funded by state tuition grants and donations (Zinn Education Project 2025).2
The initial “all deliberate speed”3 response of the Austin public schools to the Brown mandate to desegregate was to offer transfers to individual students.4 These perfunctory changes were designed to continue the overall system of segregation while permitting Austin officials and politicians to claim that institutional “changes” had been undertaken in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling. The numbers did not support Austin’s claims of fundamental change; in the 1955-56 school year, the first year of Austin schools being desegregated, thirteen black high school students initially integrated white schools, and at least one white student chose to attend the historically black high school, Anderson. The district did not begin faculty integration until 1964, when three black teachers were moved from all-black schools to predominantly Mexican Johnston High School and Allan Junior High School (Raven 2023: 36).
In the spring of 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County held that so-called “freedom of choice” plans created to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court’s mandate in Brown II in 1955 did not adequately comply with a school board’s responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis.
It was around this time that Wilhelmina Delco was elected to the Austin school board. She was the first black person elected to public office in Austin, two days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. It was also in 1968 that the federal government officially informed the Austin school board and school officials that the district’s plan of offering transfers to individual students did not fulfill the desegregation called for in Brown v. Board of Education (Raven 2023: 15). Nevertheless most southern school systems, including Austin’s remained intransigent about desegregation.
As a result, in the fall of 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court ended whatever debate that might have remained by ruling in Alexander v. Holmes that “freedom of choice” desegregation plans were unconstitutional and ordered the immediate desegregation of public schools in the south.
The Supreme Court’s order was seen as a victory for desegregated educational equality, but it ultimately led to the implementation of (mostly) one-way busing of black elementary school children away from their segregated schools located in East Austin, and the closure of the iconic (yet segregated) Anderson High School and its re-opening in the predominantly white Northwest Hills neighborhood in northwest Austin. By the 1980’s busing was seen as both an educational and political failure.
1 As school systems evolved in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the state spent an average of $3.39 per student to educate black children, about a third less than for white students. Black teachers were paid significantly less than white teachers ($91.60 a month, compared with $121.03) (Hurd 2017:28).
2 Formal racial segregation was not just a southern phenomenon, it impacted nearly half of the states in the early 1950’s. In addition to the eleven former Confederate states, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, the southern third of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, much of Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and some communities in California kept African Americans out of white schools.
3 This phrase was used by the Supreme Court after it considered arguments by schools requesting relief concerning desegregation, in a case that would become known as “Brown II.” Southern school districts interpreted the ruling to mean that they could delay and drag out desegregation for years if not decades under a “freedom of choice” basis.
4 The policy was enacted on a year-to-year basis, beginning with grade 12 and working downward. It never meaningfully impacted the Montopolis Negro School due to low enrollment and other factors.
Source: Fred L. McGhee, Ph.D., D.D., CPHT, “The Montopolis Negro School” National Register of Historic Places Nomination, October 2025.
