Central School

Central was the first public high school for Black students in Shreveport and, for a time, the only one. Opened in 1917, it took transfers from Peabody High School, which stopped at the lower grades, and many pupils came from rural areas and boarded with families in town. Founding principal R. E. Brown was reportedly the highest-paid teacher in North Louisiana. The high school closed in 1950 when pupils moved to the new Booker T. Washington High School; Lenton Malry, class of 1947, later sat in New Mexico's legislature.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 0.8 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.
• Spring Street Museum — 1.2 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.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 1.2 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 1.9 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.

More markers nearby

• Calanthean Temple — 0.7 mi
• Oakland Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• James Burton — 0.8 mi
• First Jewish Cemetery — 0.8 mi