Langston High School

Accounts of the school's end differ. The marker says the last class graduated in 1963 and the schools were fully integrated that fall, while another entry says federal courts ordered Johnson City to comply in 1965, that the school closed that year and that most students chose Science Hill High School. Most of the original 1893 building was replaced in the 1950s, and the site is now the city's school maintenance building on East Myrtle Avenue. Hezekiah Hankal and Principal William Wolfe are named among its founders.

What the plaque says

Langston High School This building housed Johnson City's first African-American public high school. Named for U.S. Congressman John Mercer Langston, an educator, lawyer, and the first African-American elected to public office in the United States (Ohio, 1856). Langston High School was established in 1893. "Enter to Learn. Depart to Serve" was the school's motto. In the spring of 1897, Langston graduated its first class. Due to court-ordered racial desegregation, its last class graduated in the spring of 1963. By the fall semester of the same year, Johnson City Schools were completely integrated.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 5.7 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 5.8 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 6.8 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 11 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.

More markers nearby

• Johnson City Sessions — 0.4 mi
• Johnson City Incorporated December 1, 1869 — 0.5 mi
• Dr. Hezekiah B. Hankal — 0.5 mi
• Colored Christian Church and Colored School — 0.5 mi