Site of Blackshear High School

Blackshear was born into slavery in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1862; because his mother worked as a maid in the Pollard house, he learned to read with the family's White children. After Tabor College in Iowa he came to Texas in 1882, regained his health putting up telegraph poles, and by 1892 supervised all of Austin's Black schools. In 1896 he became the third principal of Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College, where he won larger appropriations. He backed Thomas H. Ball against James E. Ferguson in 1914, and in 1915 the board removed him. He died in 1919.

What the plaque says

Site of Blackshear High School In early 1890, Inez Rathbun earned money teaching area students at the Ector County Courthouse. About the same time, Ector County organized a public school system. Over the next decades, the number of students in the area steadily increased. In 1921, the Texas Legislature officially established the Ector County Independent School District (ECISD). Both Anglos and Mexican-American students attended the same school. In 1932, the district established the first African American school in a one-room structure at the corner of South Muskingum and Myrtle streets. Ella Sayles served as the first teacher for the initial class of eight students. As the school grew, the district added a second classroom and utilized space at a nearby church. Although the district added three more rooms in the 1940s, by the 1947-48 school year, increased population caused the students to attend classes in shifts. In the fall of 1948, a campus for Blackshear High School opened at this site. Named for the noted Texas black educator Edward Lavoisier Blackshear, the school provided expanded facilities for African American students in the upper grade levels. Upon integration of all the district schools in 1966, the campus was converted for use as Blackshear Middle School. In 1983, it became a magnet elementary school. Its link to early education in the community and to its namesake educator remain significant today. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.6 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 9.5 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 18 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• St. Joseph Catholic Church — 0.3 mi
• Ector County Newspapers — 0.8 mi
• Site of The Dawson Saloon — 0.8 mi
• Odessa Telephone Exchange — 0.9 mi