R. O'Hara Lanier School

The namesake had a national career before Houston. Raphael O'Hara Lanier, born in Winston-Salem in 1900, studied at Lincoln University, Stanford and New York University, held a Rosenwald fellowship at Harvard, and served as acting president of Hampton Institute in 1943 and 1944. He then served as United States minister to Liberia, the first such appointment offered to a Black man since 1893. On July 2, 1948, he became the first president of Texas State University for Negroes, and he left the post in June 1955. He died in New York in 1962.

What the plaque says

R. O'Hara Lanier School In 1947, the various African American communities of the recently organized Brazosport Independent School District were consolidated. At Velasco, children from Freeport, Jones Creek, Clute and Evergreen gathered together in one building. For additional space, an army barrack was brought to the site. The school was named after Dr. Raphael O'Hara Lanier, first President of Texas State University for Negroes and United States Minister to Liberia. Formed under Principal N.N. Tarver, the school accommodated grades one through twelve and had eight instructors who taught around 200 students. By 1950, the school boasted programs such as choir, band, homemaking, industrial arts, P.E., basketball, football and track. Typing was added to the curriculum in 1956. In 1948, a veterans' training program was set up in the school which provided employment training for African American veterans returning to the community after WWII. In 1951, the school became a center for adult education. The Community Achievement Club for Adult Education was organized under instructor Minnie F. Hall, which taught adults reading, writing and homemaking. The school hosted various youth associations and clubs such as the Boys and Girls Scouting Programs, and 4-H Club. In 1958, a new high school facility was dedicated which included a kitchen, cafeteria, auditorium, woodshop and gymnasium. In 1960, the Lanier Wildcats won the state 1-A football championship, a testament to the school's strong sports program. Although still operating efficiently, the school was closed at the end of the 1964-65 school year when the district integrated. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 7.2 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 18 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Galveston Island State Park — 29 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.

More markers nearby

• Site of Town of Old Velasco — 0.7 mi
• Velasco Methodist Church — 0.7 mi
• Colonel Robert M. Coleman — 1.1 mi
• Four Miles Southeast to the Original Town of Velasco — 1.2 mi