Mary & Mac Private School

Lucille Barton Graves was born at Waxahachie on April 17, 1917, and earned her degree at Butler College in Tyler before the family moved from Wichita Falls to Lubbock in 1952. Her 1961 admission to Texas Tech followed talks between local NAACP leaders and the administration, and she worked there toward a master's degree. She was a founding member of Greater New Light Baptist Church and of Lubbock's Delta Sigma Theta chapter, led Scout troops and a 4-H club at the school and served on the Small Business Administration advisory board. She died on February 13, 1993.

What the plaque says

Mary & Mac Private School In 1954, Lucille Graves established Mary & Mac Private School as a preschool for African-American students. Named for a version of the hand-clapping song "Mary Mack," emphasizing aspirations for the students to become contributing members of society, the institution offered an alternative to local public schools in a time when private schools for African Americans were rare. Teachers received permission from the Rev. A.L. Dunn to hold their first classes in the auditorium of New Hope Baptist Church, before soon moving to two small frame houses on the 1300 block of East 24th Street. Lucille Graves taught classes along with her husband, Caesar; other family members later joined as faculty, as Graves expanded school services. To meet the needs of the growing school, Caesar Graves and the Mary & Mac Parent-Teacher Association began to raise funds for a new building, and in 1961, the school moved to a newly constructed structure at 902 East 28th Street. Here, Mary & Mac began offering junior high and high school courses. The faculty often worked multiple positions to meet the expanding activities offered at the school. At its peak, Mary & Mac Private School served a student population of approximately 120 students. Mary & Mac closed in 1993, shortly after Lucille Graves passed away. Besides her work with the school, Graves was noted for being the first African American accepted into Texas Tech; she later earned a doctorate from the Inter-Baptist Theological Center of Houston. Today, Dr. Graves is remembered for her activism and for Mary & Mac Private School, whose graduates have made significant contributions locally, regionally and throughout the nation. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• American Windmill Museum — 0.9 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Buddy Holly Center — 1.2 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 3.7 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 5.2 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Mount Gilead Baptist Church — 0.3 mi
• Willie Lusk Jr. — 0.4 mi
• Lubbock's First Cotton Gin — 0.9 mi
• Paul Whitfield Horn — 1.1 mi