C.E. Byrd High School

Edward F. Neild's Tudor and Jacobean building opened in 1925 for white students only; from 1917 to 1950 the city's Black high school students went to Central High. Arthur Burton became Byrd's first African American graduate in 1967. A 1968 freedom-of-choice plan was later ruled not to have desegregated the schools, 1969 zoning forced many students to switch, and in 1970 Valencia High merged into Byrd amid protests, with police at the doors. Many families left for private schools and enrollment fell sharply until Byrd remade itself as a math and science magnet.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• R. W. Norton Art Gallery — 1.5 mi
  A free art museum and 40 acres of azalea gardens in Shreveport, founded in 1946 on Rodessa oil money, with Remington and Russell, an Audubon folio and no photography allowed.
• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 1.9 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.3 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.
• Spring Street Museum — 2.3 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.

More markers nearby

• Josh Logan Home — 0.5 mi
• Huey P. Long House — 0.6 mi
• World's First Shriners Hospital — 0.6 mi
• Centenary College of Louisiana — 0.8 mi