African American Education in Gonzales

The plaque names the school for George Edwards; the man himself was its principal. George W. Edwards Jr. finished the Gonzales Colored School in 1911, studied at Prairie View and Guadalupe College, and was hired in 1919, at 24, as the first principal of the new school for Black students. He led the South Texas Teachers Association from 1929 to 1931 and was active in the county NAACP. After twelve years the all-white school board asked him to resign, possibly over that activism. The faculty and community answered by renaming the school for him.

What the plaque says

African American Education in Gonzales Education for American Negro citizens of Gonzales began in the 1870s at the home of Myrtle Moses Mathis. More formalized instruction took place in the 1890s when the school occupied a 2-story community building. A brick schoolhouse was erected about 1914 on land donated by W.M. Fly and Josephine K. Peck. It was named George Edwards High School in 1922 and served 300 students and 8 teachers by 1940. Edwards High School was closed in 1964 as schools were desegregated in compliance with the federal Civil Rights Act. The school was sold in the 1970s. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 0.4 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Palmetto State Park — 10 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 17 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 25 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• The Immortal 32 — 0.4 mi
• Dr. George Washington Barnett — 0.5 mi
• Bennet Valentine — 0.5 mi
• Gonzales City Cemetery — 0.6 mi