Laurine Cecil Anderson

Anderson trained for the Methodist ministry and taught at Tuskegee with Booker T. Washington before coming to Texas in 1879 to help his brother E. H. Anderson at Prairie View Normal Institute. In 1882 he lobbied for university status for the school. When his brother died on October 9, 1885, he succeeded him as principal, and he worked to unite African American leaders in business, politics, religion and fraternal orders and to improve conditions for Black Texans through education. In Austin he also taught Latin until ill health forced him to resign in 1928.

What the plaque says

Laurine Cecil Anderson (1853-1938) Born the son of slave parents in Tennessee, Laurine Cecil Anderson attended public schools in Memphis and college at Fisk University in Nashville. He came to Texas in 1880 to accept a position as principal of a training school in Brenham. He married Lizzie Pollard in 1882, and they had four children. After her death, he married Fannie Pollard, and they had one child. In 1884 Governor Oran M. Roberts appointed Anderson principal of Prairie View Normal and Industrial College, now Prairie View A&M University. When the Colored Teachers State Association was formed in Prairie View in 1885, he was elected its first president and served until 1889. In 1896 Anderson resigned his position at Prairie View to become Principal of Austin's Robertson Hill High School, which was renamed E. H. Anderson High School in 1909 in honor of L. C. Anderson's brother, also an educator. The school was at the time the only high school for blacks in the city, and L. C. Anderson served as its principal for thirty-two years. L. C. Anderson died January 8, 1938, and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Two days after his death the Austin School Board voted unanimously to rename Anderson High School in his honor. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George Washington Carver Museum — steps away
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 0.4 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 1.1 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• Site of Old Anderson High School, Kealing Junior High School — steps away
• James L. Farmer, Jr. — steps away
• George Washington Carver Branch Library — 0.2 mi
• Blackshear Elementary School — 0.3 mi