Vanished Legacies And The Lost Culture Of I.M. Terrell High School In Segregated Fort Worth Texas

Abstract

From 1954 until 1973, the Fort Worth Independent School District worked to adhere to the ruling of Brown v. Board and entered several years of litigation brought about by the NAACP and attorney Clifford L. Davis. The process of this integration, beginning with the crisis over Fort Worth black students attempting to integrate into the Mansfield School System, and ending with the closing of several all-black schools, most notably the century-old school that was I.M. Terrell High School, was a very difficult process not unlike that of other schools across the nation. However, the Fort Worth School District, after seeing the events at Mansfield, and also at Little Rock, Arkansas, worked with the courts and the NAACP to integrate the district with limited controversy, or so they hoped. In the end, the unintended closing of I.M. Terrell High School amounted to a very significant and historic loss to the culture and communities of the black alumni and residents of Fort Worth. The Alumni association of I.M. Terrell, one of the largest in the nation, has worked to preserve the history and culture of a school that, although born in segregation and died of integration, and to some a symbol of America's racism during the era of Jim Crow, was in the memory of many of its former students equal to those white schools they integrate into.