Dr. Benjamin Jesse Covington and the Covington House

Covington's treatment for influenza, which he considered a form of yellow fever, was successful enough to be used by United States medical officers. He helped reorganize the Lone Star State Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association and served ten years as its secretary-treasurer. Over his career he took fifty-one refresher courses at Prairie View, Tuskegee, Flint-Goodridge in New Orleans and the Mayo Clinic. He played violin with the Antioch Baptist choir and taught himself piano, mandolin and cornet, and in World War II Roosevelt and Truman both cited him for his Selective Service work.

What the plaque says

Dr. Benjamin Jesse Covington and the Covington House Dr. Benjamin Jesse Covington (c. 1871-1961), his wife Jennie Belle Murphy (1881-1966), and the stately home they built here in 1911 represented a level of achievement, dignity, and civic service matched by few African Americans in Houston during the first half of the 20th century. Born and reared on a farm in Falls County, Texas, Dr. Covington exhibited surgical skills on farm animals at an early age. He later attended Hearne Academy and Meharry Medical College to become a surgeon. After graduating in 1900 he began his medical practice in Wharton, Texas. He married Gonzales native Jennie Belle Murphy in 1902, and in 1903 they moved to Houston where Dr. Covington practiced medicine for 58 years. Dr. Covington, president of the Lone Star Medical Association in 1920, co-founded the Houston Negro Hospital in 1925. Mrs. Covington co-founded the Blue Triangle Branch, Y. W. C. A., and served as chair of the Texas State Commission on Race Relations. The Covingtons were active members of Antioch Baptist Church. During a period when local hotels were segregated, the Covingtons' home (razed in 1978) served as Houston's unofficial guest quarters for many prominent African American visitors including Booker T. Washington and eminent artists Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 0.4 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.1 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.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.5 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 2.1 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

• San Jacinto High School — 1.0 mi
• The Houston Light Guard — 1.1 mi
• Daughters of the Republic of Texas — 1.1 mi
• Site of Old Houston Academy — 1.1 mi