Historical Marker
Rice University
Houston, Harris County · Texas
Erected 2011
The plaque's 1960 renaming leaves out who could enroll. The 1891 charter limited the institute to white students and required that it charge no tuition. On September 26, 1962, the board voted to desegregate and charge tuition, and in 1963 asked the courts to amend the charter. Alumni John Coffee and Val Billups sued to block it. In 1964 Judge William M. Holland ruled for Rice, and the challenge ended at the Texas Supreme Court in 1967. Raymond Johnson, admitted to graduate study in mathematics, was the first Black student, and the first Black undergraduates enrolled in September 1965.
What the plaque says
Rice University William Marsh Rice (1816-1900) came to Texas in 1838 and through extensive entrepreneurship became one of the state's wealthiest men. Rice envisioned a polytechnic school as his philanthropic legacy. The State of Texas chartered the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art on May 19, 1891. Rice delayed the project by stipulating that it open after his death. When he died under suspicious circumstances, investigations and legal struggles jeopardized the school's future. After his estate was settled, development began for the first university in Houston. Trustees had a multi-million dollar endowment but little experience in education. The first president, Dr. Edgar Odell Lovett of Princeton University, spent months visiting experts around the world. His experiences helped him broaden Rice's vision to a university uniting teaching and research. In 1909, the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson developed the campus plan, combining classically-inspired architecture with Mediterranean influences. On Sep. 23, 1912, classes opened with 59 young men and women and four buildings. Rice was a charter athletic member of the Southwest Conference (1914) and quickly achieved academic accreditation, with the first class graduating in 1916. Two world wars and the Great Depression slowed growth. In 1945, trustees broadened the curriculum and initiated a substantial building program. Renamed Rice University in 1960, the school has hosted presidential visits, including John F. Kennedy's in 1962 when he urged the nation's space program to explore the moon by the end of the decade. Rice boasts many distinguished alumni and faculty, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize recipients. In 2012 Rice University embarked on its second century of producing "leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor." 175 Years of Texas Independence * 1836-2011
Where it stands
29.71926, -95.39654 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 0.6 miThe oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
- The Menil Collection — 1.3 miJohn 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.
- Rothko Chapel — 1.3 miAn 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.
- Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.6 miA 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.