The History of Segregated Education at Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas

By 1886, three years after the founding of Marfa, Texas, the town had a hotel, general store, saloon, newspaper, multiple churches, and a schoolhouse. The small two-room adobe schoolhouse served Anglo students and students of Mexican descent. As Marfa grew, development sprawled north of the railroad tracks. In 1892 the Marfa Independent School District (MISD) built a new two-story brick school building on the north side of town, north of the railroad tracks, and only moved Anglo students to the new school. According to Paul Wright, who authored a study on the racial segregation of Marfa’s neighboring towns, Alpine and Fort Davis, the railroad tracks running through Alpine served as a “barrier that kept non-Anglos” from moving north. 

It remains unknown why school officials chose to keep students of Mexican descent at the original adobe schoolhouse, as no policy or law required their segregation from Anglo students. Nonetheless, MISD officials adopted a policy of segregation, one that prioritized and benefited Marfa’s Anglo students. The original adobe schoolhouse quickly came to be known as the “Mexican School.”

In 1909, the same year that the Texas legislature passed school reform to create new school districts, expand access to schools, and establish curriculum past the eighth grade, MISD officials voted to further segregate students of Mexican descent by purchasing five lots south of the railroad tracks for $150 to construct a new Mexican school. A former teacher described the new Mexican school, locally known as the Ward School, as being a “three-room, adobe-plastered house with a belfry, coal house, and two outside toilets.”

In 1922 Jesse Blackwell became the Ward School’s new principal. Born in December 1871 in Rusk County, Texas, Blackwell, at the age of fourteen, took responsibility for maintaining his family’s 500-acre farm. Nevertheless, he managed to attend college during the summertime and began teaching in 1890. Blackwell taught at several schools across Texas until his path led him to Marfa.

When he arrived at the Ward School, the school consisted of only a single building that served 120 students from the first to the eighth grade. During the course of twenty years, Blackwell transformed and expanded the school to accommodate the growing student population. During his tenure as principal, he established a Spanish-speaking interscholastic league for Mexican schools in the area, and he increased the school’s curriculum and academic standards. By 1947, when Blackwell retired, the Ward School expanded from a single schoolhouse to a five-acre, four-building campus, which served more than 600 students of Mexican descent. In 1940 MISD honored Blackwell for his dedication and accomplishments by renaming the Ward School to Blackwell Junior High School.

The Blackwell School’s student enrollment during Blackwell’s tenure reflects the larger trend of Mexican student enrollment in Texas during the twentieth century. From 1900 until 1928, the percentage of Mexican school-aged children enrolled in school grew from 17.3 percent to 49 percent. By 1942 the percentage of Mexican school-aged children reached 53 percent. However, a contributor to the growing number of Mexican children enrolled in school was the growing number of segregated Mexican schools. By the 1940s more than 120 school districts across Texas operated segregated schools for students of Mexican descent (see MEXICAN AMERICANS AND EDUCATION).

Despite the 1948 ruling of Delgado V. Bastrop Independent School District, which deemed segregated education of students of Mexican descent as unconstitutional, many school districts across Texas, including MISD, continued to operate segregated schools. In 1965, eleven years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, MISD closed the Blackwell School and relocated students of Mexican descent to the Anglo school. Following the closure of the Blackwell School, MISD sold off or demolished the vacant school buildings. In 1969 MISD sold five acres of the Blackwell campus to the Marfa Housing Authority to create affordable housing. By the 1970s the original 1909 schoolhouse and the 1927 band hall were the last two buildings on the once sprawling campus.

MISD retained ownership of the remaining Blackwell School buildings throughout the twentieth century and utilized them for various occupations such as a vocational school and community center. During the early 2000s MISD elected to either sell or demolish the last two Blackwell School structures due to their poor and deteriorating condition. Removing the remaining buildings would have erased the last physical reminder of segregated education in Marfa. However, Blackwell School alumni acted to ensure that their history and their stories of segregated education would not be erased.

In 2006 Blackwell School alumni formed a non-profit organization called the Blackwell School Alliance and signed a ninety-nine-year lease agreement with MISD the following year to preserve the remaining Blackwell School buildings. The Blackwell School Alliance gradually transformed the dilapidated buildings into a community museum, preserving the story of segregated education in Marfa and the achievements of Blackwell School alumni. During the next decade, Blackwell School alumni and community partners sought national recognition for the Blackwell School to raise awareness of the school, segregated education in Marfa, and Mexican segregated education across the Southwest.

In 2019 the Blackwell School Alliance successfully placed the Blackwell School on the National Register of Historic Places, and on October 17, 2022, President Joe Biden designated the Blackwell School as one of the newest National Park Service sites in the United States. On July 17, 2024, after the Blackwell School Alliance transferred ownership of the property to the National Park Service, the National Park Service officially established Blackwell School National Historic Site as the 430th unit of the National Park Service. As stated by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the Blackwell School would help to “tell a truer American story and ensure this important and painful chapter in our nation’s history is preserved and remembered for the generations to come.”