DUANE
Duane's take
Here's the story as the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some schools just teach kids. And then there are schools that carry a whole community on their shoulders for over a hundred years — and friend, this is one of those.
We're talkin' about Blackshear Elementary School in Austin, Travis County, and its roots go back to 1891. That's when the doors first opened, right here in the community that folks knew then as Gregory Town, with one clear and honest purpose: to provide free public education to African-American children. That was the promise.
And that school kept it. In those early years it went by a few different names — School No. 3, Gregory Town School, Gregory School — like it was still figurin' out who it was gonna be. But in 1936, the school finally got a name worthy of the story it was already livin'.
They named it for Edward L. Blackshear, born in 1862 and gone by 1919. Now Blackshear was a 19th-century teacher and a principal — the kind of man who shapes a school's very bones — and in 1895 he left Austin to go head up Prairie View College.
That's the kind of legacy that earns you a building named after you forty years on. Meanwhile, the school itself kept growin'. The student population climbed, and so did what the school offered.
In 1934 they established a school library — which, if you've ever handed a child a book that cracked open their whole world, you know that's no small thing. Programs expanded, facilities grew, and Blackshear just kept on. Today it serves a diverse population all the way from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade.
More than a century of children walked through those doors. And that, right there, is why the marker calls it an important part of Austin's educational history. It earned that.
What the marker says
Opened in 1891 to provide free public education to African-American children in the community then known as Gregory Town, Blackshear Elementary School was known in earlier years as School no. 3, Gregory Town School and Gregory School. In 1936, it was named for Edward L. Blackshear (1862-1919), a 19th-century teacher and principal who left Austin in 1895 to become head of Prairie View College. Programs and facilities for Blackshear students, including the establishment of a school library in 1934, expanded as the number of students increased. Now serving an ethnically diverse population in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade classes, Blackshear is an important part of Austin's educational history. (2001)