Historical Marker
African American Education in College Station
College Station, Brazos County · Texas
Erected 1996
The plaque ends with the fire and the park, but the school's last years were about integration. Board members began discussing it in 1956 and chose to wait and see. After the NAACP asked for immediate integration in the early 1960s, the district adopted a stair-step plan, moving one elementary grade a year out of Lincoln and making attendance there voluntary. Grades one and two had moved by 1965. A fire on January 20, 1966 ended the school, which closed that spring. Former students formed their own association in 1982.
What the plaque says
African American Education in College Station Formal education for African Americans in Brazos County began as a result of the Public School Act of 1871. Classes were held in many small community and church-related schools, and by 1923 there were 127 African American students in the A&M Consolidated School District. Buildings accommodated only elementary school students until an agreement was reached to bus pupils to the Kemp High School in Bryan. The A&M School District paid the expenses. In the 1930s the number of African American students grew steadily. Rising costs of tuition and transportation prompted the A&M District to approve and build a high school in College Station. The A&M Consolidated Negro School opened in 1941. An athletic field was added in 1946 and the name of the school changed to Lincoln School. The building was expanded in 1948. A fire in 1966 destroyed one of three classroom buildings displacing 100 students. The burned facilities were not rebuilt. The City of College Station leased the land and the remaining five buildings in the late 1960s, and restored the site in 1972. The city bought the land in 1978 and dedicated the Lincoln Center in 1980. The former school is now the home of many community activities in College Station. (1996)
Where it stands
30.59925, -96.33076 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum — 1.4 miThe library of the forty-first president on the Texas A&M campus, opened in 1997, where George and Barbara Bush and their daughter Robin are buried in a family plot on the grounds.
- Independence and Old Baylor Park — 19 miA crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
- Navasota — 21 miA railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
- Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 22 miThe townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.