James D. Burrus Elementary School

The school's namesake was a Tennessean. James Dallas Burrus, born in Rutherford County, Tennessee, in 1846, graduated in Fisk's first class in 1875 and became its first Black teacher. He studied mathematics at Dartmouth from 1877; the college then gave no degrees for graduate work, so in 1879 he received an honorary master's. Later a Nashville druggist, he saved with what Dartmouth's history project calls rigorous economy and left his whole estate, about $122,000, to Fisk. He died in Nashville on December 5, 1928, the year the Houston school opened.

What the plaque says

James D. Burrus Elementary School African American families began buying land and building homes in the Independence Heights community in 1908. During the formative years before incorporation, community leaders and pastors established Independence Heights School in a local church to serve students. A 1911 petition to Harris County Commissioners Court resulted in a two-room house being moved from Sunset Heights to E. 39th Street as the official city school. The first teacher, Oliphant Lockwood Hubbard, later served as principal and the mayor of Independence Heights. His wife, Ella Hubbard, was also a teacher and principal at the school. From its early years, the school hosted political and community meetings and served as an important cultural center. Olen Pullum (O.P.) DeWalt was a later principal who became a notable civil rights leader in Houston. O.P. DeWalt and C.F. Richardson were on the Colored Citizens Committee which in 1923 addressed the Houston School Board about inequalities, proposing bond allocation for a new school. It was completed on E. 33rd St. in 1928. Principal Percy H. Holden proposed naming the school for notable educator James Dallas Burrus (1846-1928), who was born into slavery, graduated from Fisk University and Dartmouth College, and was professor of mathematics at Fisk for 47 years. In its first year, James D. Burrus Elementary School served 185 students with five teachers. By the 1930s, enrollment reached more than 600 students with 13 teachers. The school became a junior high for many years. Through the process of desegregating Houston schools, the addition of new middle schools and rezoning, the Burrus campus returned to an elementary school. One of the city's oldest schools continues a proud legacy of progressive education and deep roots in the community. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 4.1 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 5.5 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 5.5 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 5.6 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.

More markers nearby

• Jackson's Barber Shop & Beauty Salon — steps away
• Houston Heights Woman's Club — 1.0 mi
• St. Andrew's Episcopal Church — 1.1 mi
• Daniel Denton Cooley — 1.1 mi