Charles W. Luckie School

The plaque names teacher Pauline Patten chiefly as a mother, and her daughter's career deserves its own telling. Thelma Patten was valedictorian of Houston's Colored High School in 1917, took her degrees at Howard University and began practicing obstetrics and gynecology in Houston in the early 1920s. Much of her work was in public clinics for poor Black women and children. In 1940 she became the first woman president of the Lone Star State Medical Association, and in 1955 the first Black woman admitted to the Harris County Medical Society.

What the plaque says

Charles W. Luckie School Charles W. Luckie was born into slavery on August 3, 1861. He studied at Atlanta University, graduating in 1883. Luckie then moved to Texas and was hired as the principal of Huntsville's first school to offer primary, normal and collegiate classes for black students. In 1888, he accepted a position at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University). During his 20 years with the college, he served in many positions, including professor of English, Latin and history, as well as bookkeeper, treasurer and vice principal. He also taught during the summers at various locations around the state. In 1893, he married Ida Bell Evans (1865-1919). Luckie died January 1, 1909 at age 47. A new six-room wood frame elementary school for black students in Houston's Third Ward was built at a cost of $5,700 and opened on April 5, 1909. The district's black principals met and unanimously proposed that it be named after Professor Luckie. On May 11, the school board agreed, thus Charles W. Luckie school became the first Houston school to be named for a Black Texas educator. Just two weeks later, Prairie View College named a new building containing classrooms and student residences as Luckie Hall. A two-room annex was added to the Luckie School in 1911. The main building burned in February 1918 and was replaced in September 1919 with a two-story eight-room brick building at a cost of $16,751. The staff included John Logan Blount, renowned Houston architect; Julius N. Dodson, the school's first principal; Jeremiah Johns, the school's last principal; Mabel Fairchild, teacher; and Pauline Patten, the mother of Thelma Patten Law, the first Black woman in Houston to practice medicine. A fire next to the school in June 1944 caused its closure. It has since been used as a Houston ISD administration building and a commercial property. (2022)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 1.3 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.8 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.0 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 3.0 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church — 0.7 mi
• Fourth Missionary Baptist Church — 0.8 mi
• Dora B. Lantrip Elementary School — 0.8 mi
• St. John Missionary Baptist Church — 0.9 mi