Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Carver Junior High School represented such hope in built form. Tulsa’s Black business community pushed for the school’s construction while rebuilding from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob killed hundreds of Black Tulsans and destroyed the thriving district of Greenwood. Carver himself visited Tulsa to dedicate the school in 1929, a community event repeated at Carver schools in Decatur, Alabama, in 1935, in Fulton, Missouri, in 1937, and at a Carver elementary in Ways, Georgia, in 1940. Tulsa’s new school, designed by local architect Lee Shumway, held six classrooms in a stately, one-story, Gothic revival, brick structure. Three additions built over three decades represented a curriculum that ballooned to serve a population regrowing from devastation.
The second Carver in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report, Waco, Texas’s George W. Carver High School, opened in 1956. It represented how, after Brown, the construction of segregated schools continued in the form of equalization schools. School districts built these new facilities for Black students in an attempt to circumvent integration. Carver schools in Lonoke, Arkansas (1957), Caddo Parrish, Louisiana (1957), Memphis, Tennessee (1957), Birmingham, Alabama (1959), Naples, Florida (1959), and Philadelphia, Mississippi (1963) opened during this period. In 1953, Waco’s La Vega School District did not offer a high school for its Black students. As a result of Brown, it decided not to increase the size of all-white La Vega High, but instead to build Carver. At its opening, Waco’s Carver High contained separate classroom and agricultural buildings, science labs, a library, and a five-hundred-seat auditorium. While Tulsa’s Carver Junior High represented community investment in spite of segregation, Waco’s Carver High represented municipal investment in thwarting desegregation.
Yet when the La Vega School District closed Waco’s Carver High in September 1970, 150 former students walked out of newly desegregated La Vega High despite Carver’s discriminatory origins. They marched five miles to Carver, where they camped out to demand its reopening. The students decried the loss of their favorite teachers, a marching band that won a grand prize on a trip to Montreal’s Expo ’67, and, most of all, respect: the white high school’s teachers were antagonistic to their new students. When Tulsa Public Schools decided to close Tulsa’s Carver one year later, Tulsa’s Coalition for Quality Education launched the Carver Freedom School, a legacy of earlier Civil Rights Movement freedom schools. In the annex of a local church, they provided instruction to 250 students, defying the district’s decision to keep white schools open while closing Carver.