Solomon Coles (1844-1924) and Solomon Coles School

Coles knew the system he taught under. Born enslaved in Virginia, he became the first Black graduate of Guilford Institute in Connecticut in 1869, earned a degree at Lincoln University in 1872 and a divinity degree at Yale in 1875. In Corpus Christi he helped found the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas in 1883 and served as its president. Unhappy with discriminatory pay and a worsening racial climate, he left for San Antonio in 1894 and taught there for about twenty years. He retired to Oberlin, Ohio, where he died in 1924.

What the plaque says

Solomon Coles (1844-1924) and Solomon Coles School A former slave, Solomon Melvin Coles was born in Petersburg, Virginia. Before the Civil War, a sheriff disobeyed the law by teaching Coles to read. He worked his way through college beginning at Guilford Institute, Connecticut, as the first black student. He earned a bachelor's and a master's degree at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Divinity at Yale. He organized the Nazarene Congregational Church, First Black Congregationalist Church in Brooklyn, New York, before coming to Texas in 1877. Ordained in Goliad, Texas, he began preaching in Corpus Christi and teaching black students who only attended school two months of the year. In 1878, believing education essential to black children, Coles gave up the ministry to teach and serve as principal at the school in the 500 block of N. Carancahua. The school moved in 1893 to this site and was known as the Public Free School for Colored. The existing building was a converted broom factory. The following year Coles moved to San Antonio where he taught until his retirement in 1914. In 1925 this structure which served as a high school was built and named for Coles. In 1973 it became Solomon M. Coles Elementary School. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.6 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.9 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.1 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.3 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Old Bayview Cemetery — steps away
• Louis de Planque — steps away
• Anna Moore Schwein — steps away
• John Dix — steps away