Site of Blackshear/Fisher School

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm bringin' it to you. Athens, Texas, eighteen seventy-six, seventy-seven. The town's first public school for African Americans opens its doors, and where do you suppose they held class?

In a Baptist church. That was the beginning, humble as a whispered prayer, of what would grow into something worth remembering on a marker a hundred and some years later. The Athens Colored School, that's what they called it, meeting in pews before the town finally got around to building a proper two-room schoolhouse right here on this very site.

Two rooms. Not much to look at, maybe, but a school is not measured in rooms. It is measured in what happens inside them.

Then comes nineteen fourteen, and a man named Richard C. Fisher joins the faculty. Now, pay attention to that name, because this story is going to circle back to it in a way that would make your chest tighten just a little.

Fisher works his way up to principal, and somewhere along the way he decides the school deserves a grander name, a name that reaches back and honors someone who came before. He renames it Blackshear, after a former professor at Prairie View College. Just like that, a name gets lifted off a church roster in Athens and carried forward through time.

In nineteen twenty-four the school earns accreditation, which is no small thing, and the community keeps building. Nineteen thirty-two, a brand new school goes up right here on this same ground. Bigger, stronger, a testament to what the years of work had made possible.

And then, in nineteen thirty-four, Richard C. Fisher dies. The community does what you do when someone has given that much of themselves to a place.

They rename the school for him. Fisher High School. The man who once walked in as a teacher, who renamed a school to honor someone else, now has the school renamed in his honor.

There is a poetry in that, quiet and unhurried, the way the best Texas stories tend to be. Fisher High School stood and served until nineteen sixty-six, when the integration of schools in Athens brought its chapter to a close. The building may be gone, but the marker stands right here, making sure nobody drives past without knowing what this ground once held.

What the marker says

Athens' first public school for African Americans was established in 1876-77. Athens Colored School held classes in a Baptist church and later in a 2-room schoolhouse erected at this site. Richard C. Fisher, who joined the school's faculty in 1914 and who later became principal, renamed the school Blackshear to honor a former professor at Prairie View College. The school was accredited in 1924. A new school, built here in 1932, was renamed for Professor R. C. Fisher upon his death in 1934. Fisher High School closed in 1966 with the integration of schools in Athens.