THE MOMENTOUS 1865 end of slavery in Texas brought freedom for the roughly 200,000 people of African descent who had spent their lives in chattel bondage, but freedom did not ensure a future of equal opportunity, economic progress or a guarantee of full civil rights. For that, African Americans would have to struggle mightily for more than 100 more years—and in many ways such toil continues. The state’s southern concept of white superiority and insistence on maintaining its racial “order” extended into almost every facet of African American life, with the effect of numerous roadblocks and obstacles to any semblance of a full flowering of American citizenship rights.

One considerable impediment to progress for blacks was the opportunity for a full education. Texas’ segregated and dilapidated school system was poorly funded and haphazard at best, which prevented most African Texans from acquiring the very skills most needed to fight the conditions of a Jim Crow system—which was very often the aim of local white school districts. Black Texas leaders certainly understood the inadequacies of the system in which they were forced to live. Thus, during the late nineteenth century, black communities approached remedies with resolve, usually under the direction of African American church congregations. East Texas became a region blessed with a number of outstanding black higher education institutions, names familiar to modern ears such as Paul Quinn, Bishop, and Wiley Colleges. Mary Allen Junior College in Crockett is a name perhaps less familiar to today’s East Texan, but one that was every bit as vital as its more famous contemporaries.

WHAT BECAME Mary Allen Junior College in the 20th century began as the Crockett Presbyterian Church Colored School in 1871. In 1875, it became known as Moffatt Parochial School. Like many black schools, the local congregation bore the full costs of construction and curriculum materials, a substantial sacrifice for church members who primarily depended on the vagaries of sharecrop farms for their livelihood. Eventually, with the aid of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (Northern), and local Crockett businessmen, Rev. Samuel Fisher Tenney was able to build a boarding school for African American young women. The name of the new school became the Mary Allen Seminary, named after the wife of the secretary of the Presbyterian U.S.A’s Board of Missions for Freedmen.

With a newly constructed building on a 10-acre plot north of the city, the school began as a day and boarding school with classes at the primary, elementary and high-school levels, as well as a teacher-training institution for women only. The school became successful and, under the direction of Reverend J.B. Smith, began to expand; by 1890 it consisted of two multi-storied buildings and enrolled more than 200 students.

SMITH RESIGNED in 1910 and for the next decade Mary Allen Seminary began a decline in enrollment and funding. Clearly, the school needed a new direction. In 1924 Reverend Burt Randall Smith, the first black administrator, revitalized the institution. Reverend Smith brought in an all-black faculty, improved the school buildings and infrastructure, and began a more rigorous curriculum. The Texas State Department of Education granted the school accreditation as a high school in 1925, and in 1927 the first junior college class graduated. Eventually, the board eliminated the lower grades from the school and in 1933 it became Mary Allen Junior College and coeducational.

The new focus led the Presbyterian National Board of Missions to approve a proposal in 1942 to make Mary Allen a 4-year state college for black students, but World II and the Texas legislature’s indifference ended such dreams. In that year, the school closed but it did reopen in 1944 under the control of the Missionary Baptist Convention of Texas. Eventually, struggling to attract students and funding, the school closed in 1972.

African American students today have a plethora of educational options available, opportunities that their grandparents did not have just a few decades ago. But the dream of education as progress was always a part of the African American community and today’s students owe a tribute to the perseverance of institutions such as Mary Allen Junior College. Perhaps a drive to Crockett and a look (and maybe a little reverence) at the ruins of this once proud educational beacon will remind them of the sacrifice past generations made for such advancement.




The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu