Site of Marshall-Carver High School

Southwestern University's Placing Memory project records the school's life. Pupils had football, basketball, baseball, track and tennis teams, a band, cheerleaders and a Miss Carver High homecoming, and named valedictorians. Alumna Paulette Taylor recalls one drinking fountain without cold water, one fire escape for 154 students and hand-me-down books and uniforms. The Texas Education Agency judged the building substandard. Community Impact says a Committee for Better Schools of Black and White citizens, including Southwestern professors, went to court after more than twenty Black students were refused at Georgetown High in 1962. The plaque credits parents.

What the plaque says

Site of Marshall-Carver High School The first school for African American students in Georgetown was established in the early 20th century. Called "The Colored School," the institution served grades 1 through 8 and provided the only local educational opportunities for African Americans. The school's principal, Mr. S. C. Marshall, was an outspoken advocate of higher education. A scholar himself, he persuaded the school board to allow him to provide classes through the high school level. He named the new program "The Georgetown Colored High School," and the first student enrolled in 1913. A new high school building was erected in 1923 due to increasing enrollment. When Marshall left the school in 1930, it was renamed Marshall School in his honor. The name was changed to George Washington Carver in the 1940s. In 1962, the parents of seventeen Carver students who had been denied admission to Georgetown's white schools filed a lawsuit in U. S. District Court to force integration. The court ordered the Georgetown Independent School District to integrate one grade level per year beginning with the first grad.e Partial integration began in the fall of 1964. Convinced that gradual integration would not benefit their children, African American parents appealed the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court which upheld the lower court's verdict. Proponents of full and immediate integration engaged in a letter-writing campaign to the U. S. Attorney General, the U. S. Department of Health, education and Welfare, and the Federal Assistance Program urging another review of the case. In the fall of 1965, the Georgetown School Board agreed to a plan to complete integration of the school system by September 1967. The Carver School was permanently closed due to integration. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Williamson County Courthouse — 0.4 mi
  The fifth Williamson County courthouse, a Beaux Arts building by C. H. Page, rises over a Georgetown square of more than 50 Victorian-era buildings.
• Inner Space Cavern — 2.4 mi
  A Georgetown cave found in 1963 when highway engineers drilled test holes, holding Pleistocene fossils and 72-degree rooms that visitors reach by an artificial tunnel.
• The Round Rock — 8.9 mi
  A table-shaped stone in Brushy Creek gave Round Rock its name in 1854; the Chisholm Trail crossed the creek near it, and Old Town stayed behind when the railroad pulled the town east.
• Mount Bonnell — 23 mi
  Austin's old lookout over the Colorado, named by an 1838 traveler, picnicked on by George and Libbie Custer, and reached by a 1939 flight of about 100 limestone steps.

More markers nearby

• Old Georgetown Cemetery — steps away
• Railroad Produce Warehouse — 0.3 mi
• Emzy Taylor — 0.4 mi
• Chief Justice John Edward Hickman — 0.4 mi