Dyess Elementary School

After January 21, 1963, Woodson did not empty at once. Black families could choose, and some stayed: the 1963-64 year counted 370 students at Woodson High and 607 at Woodson Elementary. Pressure for the change had come from letters by Black parents on the base and a federal warning that $250,000 in aid could be withheld, and the state attorney general had just ruled House Bill 65 unconstitutional. Attendance then drained away. The board voted in 1967 to close Woodson High the next June, and by that September only 88 high school students remained.

What the plaque says

Dyess Elementary School On January 21, 1963, Dyess Elementary was the first school in the Abilene Independent School District to integrate all students. African American military families living on Dyess Air Force Base were previously forced to send their children to the segregated Woodson School, which was located further from the base than Dyess Elementary. Although the U.S. Supreme court ruled in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, the State of Texas passed House Bill 65 that prohibited the desegregation of schools without a local referendum. However, in December 1962, Texas Attorney General Will Wilson ruled that HB65 was unconstitutional. The Department of Defense also threatened to pull funding from Dyess Elementary if it was not integrated during the '62-'63 school year. Abilene Independent School District Board Members voted unanimously on January 14, 1963, to begin the integration of district schools. Dyess was chosen as the first school to integrate kindergarten through sixth grade. The board quickly approved new attendance zones to allow parents to choose between keeping their children at Woodson, or integrating them at Dyess. The following week, on January 21, 38 African American students began school at Dyess Elementary. The remaining AISD schools desegregated kindergarten through sixth grade in the fall of 1963, with the other grades integrating gradually. Complete integration of Abilene schools was achieved in 1970, 16 years after the U.S. Supreme court's initial ruling. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 5.5 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 9.0 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Abilene State Park — 13 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 17 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.

More markers nearby

• 12th Armored Division at Camp Barkeley — 1.4 mi
• Lt. Col. William E. Dyess — 1.8 mi
• Site of Western Cattle Trail — 3.5 mi
• Company I, 7th Texas Infantry — 3.8 mi