DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do it justice. Now, before we get to the building itself, you have to understand what it took just to put it up. The year is 1952, and the man holding the blueprints is John S.
Chase — born 1925, and at that moment, the first licensed African American architect in the entire state of Texas. The first. In a state this size, with this much history, this much building, this much ambition baked into every county and crossroads — he was the first.
Let that sit with you a moment while the road rolls by. Chase designed a one-story asymmetrical contemporary building — flat roof, metal casement windows, concrete masonry — and those industrial architectural influences weren't accidental. This was a deliberate, modern statement of permanence, planted in the ground for an organization that had been fighting for permanence since 1884.
That's when the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas was founded. Eighteen eighty-four. Decades before that building existed, these educators were already organizing, already pushing, already winning civil rights victories for African American students and teachers navigating a segregated Texas society that was not, to put it gently, inclined to make things easy.
The association chalked up a number of those victories over the years — the marker doesn't itemize them, but you don't rack up victories across that many decades of that kind of fight without leaving a mark on history. And then Chase's building gave them a home. A physical, concrete, flat-roofed home of their own, where that work could live.
The association used that building until 1966, when it dissolved. Eighty-two years of organizing, of teaching, of fighting — and a building that still stands as the record of it. John S.
Chase went on to live until 2012. He drew a lot of things in his lifetime. But this one — this asymmetrical, flat-roofed, purpose-built piece of Texas history — this one carries the weight of everything that association stood for.
And now you know why.
What the marker says
Built by John S. Chase (1925-2012), the first licensed African American architect in the state, this building originally housed the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas. Founded in 1884, the association achieved a number of civil rights victories for African American students and teachers in segregated Texas society. Built in 1952, the one-story asymmetrical contemporary edifice reflects industrial architectural influences through its flat roof, metal casement windows and concrete masonry. The building served the association until it dissolved in 1966. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2016