Site of Old Anderson High School, Kealing Junior High School

Hightower T. Kealing, born in Waco in 1860, was among the first generation of Black Texans schooled under Reconstruction and graduated from Tabor College in Iowa in 1881. After teaching at Paul Quinn College he came to Austin in 1883 and taught and served as principal at the Robertson Hill school until 1888, organizing the Central Texas District Teachers Association and publishing a History of African Methodism in Texas in 1885. From 1896 to 1912 he edited the A.M.E. Church Review, where he spoke out against segregation. He died in 1918 as president of Western University in Quindaro, Kansas.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Anderson High School, Kealing Junior High School Robertson Hill School, the first high school for blacks in Austin, opened on the corner of Eleventh and San Marcos streets in 1884. In 1907 the school moved to the corner of Olive and Curve Streets and was renamed E. H. Anderson High School. In 1913 the school was moved to 1607 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was renamed in honor of former Principal L. C. Anderson in 1938. In 1953 the school relocated to 900 Thompson Street. Anderson High School opened in its fifth location, 8403 Mesa, in 1973. Kealing Junior High School was opened in 1930 on this site. Named for educator Hightower Theodore Kealing (1859-1918), it was the first junior high school for blacks in the city, and had an initial enrollment of 337. When reenrollment increased, the school expanded into the former Anderson High School in 1954. The two buildings, known as East Kealing and West Kealing, were joined in 1962. The school was closed in 1971 due to court-ordered desegregation. The original Kealing Junior High School building was razed in 1983, amd the old Anderson High School on this site burned in 1984. A new Kealing Junior High was built and opened in 1986. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George Washington Carver Museum — steps away
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 0.4 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 1.1 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• Laurine Cecil Anderson — steps away
• James L. Farmer, Jr. — steps away
• George Washington Carver Branch Library — steps away
• Blackshear Elementary School — 0.3 mi