Charles Hamilton Houston Memorial: History
The site of the Charles Houston Recreation Center is significant in Alexandria’s history as the original home of the Parker-Gray School, located in the Parker-Gray Historic District. In 1920, the Parker-Gray Elementary School was constructed on the southern end of the block, facing Wythe Street. The new public school was constructed for the education of African American boys and girls, replacing the deteriorating and inadequate Hallowell (girls) and Snowden (boys) schoolhouses. The new facility was named for John F. Parker and Sarah J. Gray, beloved African American teachers and principals in those two schools. Initially, the school served grades one through eight. African American students who could afford to continue their high school education traveled by bus to Washington, D.C., or went off to boarding school.
In 1932, the Parker-Gray High School became Alexandria’s first African American high school. Its first four-year high school class graduated in 1936. Over time, the school gained a reputation for its dedicated teaching staff who, despite the constraints of segregation, were able to provide a positive learning experience. Over the years, increased enrollment created a need for larger quarters for the high school. In 1941, concerned citizens began to petition for a new facility and eventually appealed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for assistance.
NAACP lawyers, led by Charles Houston, conferred with city, state and federal officials. An attorney with a national reputation, Houston used his influence and knowledge to aid the Alexandria African American community. On May 31, 1950, the new Parker-Gray High School, located at 1207 Madison Street, was dedicated. Sadly, Charles Houston died on April 22, one month before the dedication. In appreciation for all his hard work to obtain the new school and to help with other issues vital to improving Alexandria’s education system, the former Parker-Gray School was renamed the Charles Houston Elementary School.
Charles Houston’s legacy was far reaching. As Dean of Howard University Law School, Houston influenced a generation of civil rights lawyers. He was a master tactician and successfully argued the Missouri ex. Rel. Gaines v. Canada case before the United States Supreme Court in 1938. The Gaines case, the first to establish the principle of equality of education, paved the road for the landmark decision in 1954 of Brown v. Board of Education. Fittingly, the victorious lawyer in the case that ended racial segregation was Houston’s protégé, Thurgood Marshall. Ten years later, integration of Alexandria’s public schools was achieved.
See below for more information on Charles Hamilton Houston.
Click Here for more information on Parker-Gray.
Charles Hamilton Houston
born September 3, 1895, Washington, D.C.
died April 22, 1950, Washington, D.C.
American lawyer and educator instrumental in laying the legal groundwork that led to U.S. Supreme Court rulings outlawing racial segregation in public schools.
Houston graduated as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College (B.A., 1915). After teaching for two years at Howard University in Washington, D.C., he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was commissioned a second lieutenant in field artillery and served in France and Germany during World War I. Following his discharge in 1919, Houston enrolled at Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1922; D.J.S., 1923), where he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He went on to study civil law at the University of Madrid. After being admitted to the bar in the United States in 1924, he practiced law with his father until 1950.
As vice-dean of Howard University Law School (1929–35), Houston shaped it into a significant institution. The school trained almost one-fourth of the nation's black law students, among them Thurgood Marshall. During Houston's tenure the school became accredited by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association.
Houston made significant contributions in the battle against racial discrimination, challenging many of the Jim Crow laws. In 1935–40 he served as special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), arguing several important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for Missouri to exclude blacks from the state's university law school when, under the “separate but equal” provision, no comparable facility for blacks existed within the state. Houston's efforts to dismantle the legal theory of “separate but equal” came to fruition after his death, with the historic Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, which prohibited segregation in public schools.
Houston's contributions to the abolition of legal discrimination went largely unrecognized until after his death. He was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1950. Several public schools bear his name, as does the main building of the Howard Law School, which was dedicated in 1958. A law professorship and several student organizations also honor Houston.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Guide to Black History: www.britannica.com/blackhistory
Before Brown: Charles H. Houston and the Gaines Case, essay by Douglas O. Linder, professor of law at University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law
This essay provides in-depth historical information on Charles Hamilton Houston.
From the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law web site
Charles Hamilton Houston Residence
Location: 1744 S Street, NW
Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950) was born in Washington, DC to Mary Hamilton Houston, a teacher and hairdresser, and William Houston, an attorney. His childhood home was 1444 Swann St., NW. He entered M Street High School (now Dunbar High School) at the age of 12 and graduated at age 15. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1915, Houston returned to Washington and taught English at Howard University until 1916. From 1917 to 1919, he served as second lieutenant in France during World War I. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University Law School with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1922 and later received the Doctor of Juridical Science at Harvard. In 1924 he returned to Washington, where he joined the faculty at Howard University Law School and his father's law firm.
Houston was appointed vice dean of Howard University Law School in 1929. Houston helped transform the law school from a part-time night school to an accredited full-time program. By the 1930s, Howard University had become a center for reform-minded, activist lawyers. It was at Howard University that Houston and his colleagues developed the legal strategies for challenging American institutional racism through the federal courts. Houston was a mentor to an entire generation of African American lawyers.
In 1935 Houston joined the NAACP as special legal counsel. Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and other lawyers pushed the federal government to take responsibility for protecting the civil rights of African Americans, effectively transforming the lives of all citizens. He participated in court cases involving racial discrimination in labor unions, workers' compensation, housing, higher education, jury selection, and access to public services. These cases include the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decreed racially segregated education to be unconstitutional. Although Houston died in 1950, he had been the first lawyer for the local school desegregation case that became Bolling v. Sharpe, which was a component of Brown v. Board of Education, and had laid the groundwork for the winning legal arguments in Brown and a host of other desegregation victories.
Houston's parents, William and Mary Houston, bought 1744 S Street, NW, about 1924. He and his wife Henrietta Williams Houston moved there about 1943.
Parker-Gray History
The Parker-Gray neighborhood is an important African American community in Old Town Alexandria. Influences in its development came from a variety of sources including the slave trade, retrocession of Alexandria by the District of Columbia, the Civil War, segregation, civil rights protests and the eventual integration of the Alexandria public school system.
The current street pattern of the neighborhood was shown on maps as early as 1798. By 1810, a small enclave of houses was home to a group of free African American families, though most of the land remained open until the 1860s. Because the city was a part of both Virginia and the District of Columbia for the first half of the nineteenth century, free African Americans from other parts of Virginia migrated to Alexandria to escape laws that made it difficult for them to remain in the commonwealth. Along with the former slaves who had been freed or had purchased their own freedom came recently escaped slaves.
For many decades, the land was used primarily for military purposes. Sometime before 1791 and prior to the area’s residential use, a gun powder mill or magazine was built. The facility remained in place until 1818. Beginning with the War of 1812 and continuing until the Civil War, the land was also used as a military parade ground. During the war, when the City was an important military center for the Union Army, the Army made extensive use of the vacant areas as sites for encampments, hospitals, stables, and several large food-production facilities from which bread and other items were shipped to soldiers in various battlefields. The military-run bakery that occupied an entire city block was believed to be the largest in the world at the time. Known as the Government Bakehouse, it consumed 400-500 barrels of flour a day and had 200 employees producing 90,000 loaves of bread a day.
Alexandria and the Slave Trade
The city’s role in the slave trade grew as a result of the collapse of the local tobacco industry by the eighteenth century. Surrounded by vast tobacco plantations, Alexandria witnessed decreasing tobacco production because the overworked soil became increasingly less fertile. Many large farms had gone out of production by the decades prior to the Civil War. Larger land holdings were subdivided and sold to farmers, often northerners, who converted them to other kinds of agriculture such as production of grains. The production of wheat and other grains in the decades before the war also brought millers and others involved in processing and trading in grains into the area in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. After experiencing a recession in the post-tobacco era, the city saw an economic revival around wheat production by the 1820s.
The result of these changes for the African American community was that large numbers of enslaved individuals were no longer needed in local agriculture. Rather than freeing them, many local land owners began to either hire them out to in-town employers or sell them to slave traders who in turn sold them to other individuals in the south, where cotton farming was on the rise. Being sent south usually meant being permanently separated from other family members.
Although Alexandria had a well-established reputation as a regional slave-trading center by the mid-nineteenth century, it also had an important community of free African Americans. Slave owners who did not sell their slaves through the markets sent some to live in urban areas where they were hired out to various employers. This made it possible for some of them to find second jobs, working in the off hours to earn money to buy their freedom.
The recently freed individuals, however, were caught in a rapidly evolving political dilemma prior to the Civil War. During the time that it was a part of the District of Columbia (1791 – 1846), Alexandria was a refuge for African Americans including some individuals who had recently escaped slavery. In this period, the degree to which Virginia laws applied or could be enforced in the city was not clear. For example, Virginia passed a law in 1805 making it illegal for freed slaves to live anywhere in the state. Attempts were apparently made from time to time to enforce this law. This and other factors complicated the situation. Being hired out could make it possible for an enslaved individual to earn money to purchase his freedom. However, the influential Quaker community pressured its members to avoid business dealings with slave owners which, in turn, made it more difficult for the “bondsmen” to achieve freedom this way.
The question of whether Virginia’s or the District of Columbia’s laws applied to African Americans in Alexandria was one issue that led to an appeal to the federal government to remove Alexandria from the district, which they did by passing special legislation in 1846. Only a few short years later, in 1850, the federal government passed the second “Fugitive Slave Act.” From the late 1840s until the beginning of the war, Alexandria’s free black citizens lived a precarious existence. As an example of the problems that occurred with the retrocession, a school that had existed since 1812 to educate the children within the African American community ceased operation in 1847 because suddenly it was no longer a matter of interpretation whether Virginia laws against educating black residents applied in Alexandria.
During the war, however, Alexandria once again began to develop a growing African American community, comprised largely of individuals who had formerly been enslaved and had begun to move into the city from surrounding areas.
Neighborhood
The majority of the area did not begin to develop as a unified neighborhood until after 1870. Several whole blocks of what is now the Parker-Gray district were owned by prominent individuals or families by 1877. A large tract covering at least two city blocks along North Patrick Street was part of the estate of Henry Daingerfield, a wealthy Alexandria merchant. One of these blocks was cleared for the construction of Parker-Gray Elementary School in the twentieth century.
In 1877 other owners of larger tracts included brothers George and John Seaton. George Lewis Seaton, (1822–1881) was born third of 11 children to free black parents. Seaton’s mother Lucinda was born a slave to George and Martha Washington and was freed by Martha when Lucinda was an infant. George Seaton went on to become a prominent master carpenter and builder, and one of the wealthiest African American residents of Alexandria at the time. He built the house at 404 S. Royal Street and lived there from the early 1870s until his death in 1881. Another house he built may be seen at 323 S. St. Asaph Street. Seaton also established a prestigious civic career including serving as a state legislator during Reconstruction. He founded the local Black YMCA and constructed the first public schools for black students, the Snowden School for Boys and the Hallowell School for Girls. Seaton also served on the jury during the trial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Among the other leading citizens of the Parker-Gray area in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were educators, clergymen, business owners and veterans. Some were former slaves or the children of former slaves, and some were among the first African Americans in the city to serve as elected officials.
Thomas and Sarah Foster lived at 221 Patrick Street with their eight children in the 1870s and 1880s. Thomas was a former slave. The two oldest sons, George and Lorenzo Foster, were Buffalo Soldiers who served in the 10th U.S. Cavalry in the Great Plains and the Southwest. George had enlisted in the United States Colored Troops in 1863 and was one of the first African Americans recruits to serve in the Civil War.
Churches
The historic development of some of the oldest African American religious institutions in the Parker-Gray neighborhood illustrates how the neighborhood developed as an outgrowth of other African American neighborhoods near it, with strong ties to older enclaves. Several of the churches that served as early anchors of the community came into the neighborhood as either relocations or extensions of older congregations from other parts of the city. The churches are significant as centers of African American activity within the neighborhood.
Meade Chapel Protestant Episcopal Church
Meade Chapel is probably the second oldest African American institution to be housed in an extant historic building in the Parker-Gray Historic District. It was originally created in 1869 to serve the Cross Canal neighborhood, northeast of the district. The congregation was founded as a mission of Christ Church, whose 1767 building remains a prominent landmark near the southeast corner of the neighborhood. The mission was created not specifically to serve African Americans, but to serve the Cross Canal neighborhood, then a mixed race neighborhood which Christ Church considered to be at a far enough distance to merit a new church. A history of the congregation says: “Although early accounts…do not mention the race of its congregation, it is safe to assume that the congregation was either white or of mixed races under white leadership.”
In 1871-72, the congregation set out to create a “colored Sunday School,” apparently in recognition of the need for such an institution among African Americans living in the area. In a November 1872 report, parishioner John Janney Lloyd, a member of Alexandria’s prominent Lloyd family, reported to the vestry “that quite a number of colored persons had expressed a desire that we would furnish a suitable place to be used as an Episcopal Church for colored persons.” The vestry responded to this request in the spring of 1873 by making the church building available to an all-black congregation.
In March 1873, Anna Maria Fitzhugh of Fairfax County (an aunt of Robert E. Lee’s wife Mary) offered a parcel at the corner of Princess and Columbus Streets as a new location for the church. The move was announced in the Alexandria Gazette on April 9, 1873, but no reference was made to race. A week later, when the intention that the church serve an all-black congregation became public, the neighbors began objecting. Although an attempt was made to appease the neighbors by announcing that they were looking for another site, the church was relocated by the end of April 1873 to the parcel Mrs. Fitzhugh had provided. The 1870 building was jacked up and moved on rollers from the Cross Canal basin to the new site on Columbus Street. Christ Church used this series of developments to re-frame itself as an all-white congregation, transferring the membership of the African American congregants who attended church in Old Town to the new Meade Chapel location.
Other Important Churches
Mt. Jezreel Baptist Church was formed when a split in the congregation occurred at Shiloh Baptist Church. Shiloh traces its history to a group of 50 African Americans, former slaves and possibly some soldiers, who organized as a congregation at L’Overture Hospital, a military hospital for African American soldiers operated during the war at what had been Price and Birch’s slave prison. Runaway slaves were held at this location by the Union Army as a control measure until the end of slavery.
St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church was created by a group of African American members of the city’s original Catholic parish, St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. The Third Baptist at 919-921 Princess Street and Ebenezer Baptist at 907-909 Queen Street were both constructed in the 1890s. In 1870, while serving as the pastor of Third Baptist Church, Rev. George Parker became the first African American to be elected to Alexandria City Council.
Businesses
By the 1860s, two mainline railroads and numerous railroad spurs occupied two or three of the neighborhood’s most central north-south streets. The railroad lines connected the city to other parts of Virginia and to Maryland during and after the Civil War.
One or two modest-sized dairy processing plants, including the Comico Products Corporation’s “Milk Products” facility, were opened. The neighborhood contained a large hay and feed warehouse, the ca. 1918 building of the Hooge Grain and Feed Company, serving farmers who came to town for supplies. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the neighborhood had a number of other businesses closely connected to agriculture, including a vinegar-processing plant, several horse-related businesses including livery stables, and at least one meat-packing plant – the Armour and Company Wholesale Meats.
Growth in the neighborhood was also influenced by commerce located a few streets away which employed many of the residents. This included a textile mill, the Alexandria County Courthouse, the Alexandria Canal which connected Alexandria to Georgetown, and Portner’s Brewery founded in 1862. After the war, Portner’s became one of Alexandria’s most important manufacturing concerns. It also created a large demand for bottles. Three glass factories were built in Alexandria between 1890 and World War I. The factories became the city’s main industries for a period, employing the area’s blue collar workforce and sustaining the city in the same decades that many of the neighborhood houses were being constructed. The presence of the city’s largest employers so close to the area appears to have been a major factor in its growth.
African American Businesses
As the city’s largest African American neighborhood by the mid twentieth century, Parker-Gray became home to some of the most enterprising members of the African American community and to a number of businesses owned by and serving African Americans. The businesses included restaurants and bars, beauty shops and barber shops, grocery stores, drug stores, dressmakers, a dentist, physicians, lawyers, an insurance company, auto repair companies, a theatre and several bakeries.
The locations of bakeries and confectionery shops in the neighborhood were identified as landmarks of the African American community. Mills Bakery, located at 921 Oronoco Street was in business from about 1888 to about 1910 and a confectionery shop called “Jimmie’s Place,” was located at 728 N. Patrick Street in 1936. The Alexandria Home Bakery was located at 521 Henry Street. An article from the Alexandria Gazette says that “Jackson’s Home Bakery was one of Alexandria’s best known black-owned businesses during the 1920s and 30s. Old friends here can’t remember Mr. Jackson’s first name. He was simply Baker Jackson, a great salesman: ‘You could just be talking to him, and he’d sell you something.’ ”
By the 1950s, the neighborhood had commercial businesses oriented to travelers passing through on U.S. Rt.1, including carry-out shops, gas stations, and automobile dealerships. The Blue Silver Diner at the corner of Henry and Wythe Streets (now Blue and White Take-Out) came to Alexandria as a pre-fabricated metal building in 1951 from Orlando, Florida, where it was manufactured by the Silver Coach Company. Initially owned by a Greek American family, it was later sold to African American owners.
Businesses Owned by White Merchants Serving an African American Clientele
At the core of Parker-Gray, a few commercial businesses were operated by white families, including several German, Jewish, and Eastern European families who may have been recent immigrants. An early example was George Baier, a former employee of Portner’s Brewery, who had a saloon at 300 N. Fayette Street in the late nineteenth century. A few decades later, Louis Rosen and Samuel Rubin ran the Royal Meat Market from a mid-nineteenth-century commercial building at 300 N. Patrick Street. In 1940-41, they built a new shop building across the street at 301 N. Patrick Street. It was designed in the Art Deco style by architect Paul S. Lubienski. The 1941 Royal Meat Market Building was purchased by Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1966 and is now used as the Collins Educational Building. A family named Shapiro had the Check Soda Company complex at 207-213 N. Payne Street and owned a store in the neighborhood. People who remembered Mrs. Shapiro later observed “she always made sure the neighbors had food.”
Movie Houses
Among the most important commercial establishments were the community’s movie theaters. The Capitol Theatre was built in 1939 by H.A. Wasserman at N. Henry and Queen Streets to serve the city’s African American community. It replaced an earlier theater building called the Lincoln, which had been built about 1920 at the same site. The Capitol was designed by John Zink in a modest interpretation of the Art Deco and Moderne styles. A simple but sizable building erected by the construction firm of D.E. Bayliss, the Capitol had the unusual distinction of having been built in only twenty days. The building (1101 Queen Street) houses a Gourmet Shop and is currently for sale.
In 1947-1948, a second “blacks only” theater was built, just a block away at the corner of N. Fayette Street and Queen Street. The Carver Theater (later called the King’s Palace) was also designed by John Zink. The Carver had seating for 700 in an auditorium that was decorated with murals. The building is now home to the Antioch Church of Christ. The Capitol Theatre and the Carver Theater defined prominent corners in the Queen Street business district, the core area for African American commerce.
Fraternal Societies and Recreation Facilities
Southern society became more segregated as new institutions were built for African American citizens by government entities, and as the African American community began to build its own private institutions. By the early twentieth century, Parker Gray became home to institutions that served African Americans from across the city, including private clubs and segregated schools and libraries. The buildings built in the district to provide locations for fraternal societies and other recreational facilities were nearly all constructed for the African American citizens in the era of segregation.
Nationally, the fraternal lodge known as the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks in the World (IBPOE) was created about 1900 when African Americans attempted to join the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks and were refused. They formed a parallel national organization and started chapters in many cities. Alexandria had a strong IBPOE lodge and by 1904, the lodge members had built their original building at 227-229 N. Henry and by 1932, they had greatly expanded and remodeled it. Over the years, the building was the scene of performances by a number of nationally known African American entertainers.
Other private institutions within the district established by African Americans include an American Legion Lodge, William Thomas Post 129, at 224 N. Fayette Street. The lodge was chartered in 1931 and is named for the first African American from Alexandria killed in World War I. In the segregation era, it was the only American Legion lodge in the city open to African Americans. A Masonic lodge, Lincoln Lodge #11, at 1356 Madison Street occupies a small house and has a bronze plaque on the building’s façade which says “Alfred S. Hamilton Building” in honor of a past member to whose memory the building was dedicated in the 1980s.
Recreation Facilities
The Parker-Gray and surrounding area has at least two extant historic buildings that were built as recreation centers. One was a USO club house at 1605 Cameron Street, now the Dr. Oswald Durant Memorial Center. The other is the Alexandria Boys and Girls Club building at 401 N. Payne Street. There was also a USO club for African American citizens at Pendleton & Patrick Streets which served as overflow space for Parker-Gray School during the war.
The Alexandria Boys and Girls Club (originally known as the Alexandria Boys Club), at the corner of N. Payne Street and Princess Street, was created in 1936 as a philanthropic project. Dr. Robert South Barrett, Jr., who is also credited with designing the building, was the son of Robert South Barrett, a prominent Alexandria minister, and Kate Waller Barrett, a philanthropist and social worker. He also gave the Queen Street library to the city as a memorial to his mother.
Robert Robinson Library (Alexandria Black History Museum)
The most important African American heritage site within the neighborhood is the location of the former Robinson Library at 632 North Alfred Street, now the Alexandria Black History Museum. The Museum serves as a community center, research center, and local history museum and symbolizes the inadequate results of the “separate but equal” doctrine. The Robinson Library came about as a result of what may have been the first use in the United States of a “sit-in” as a form of peaceful demonstration to protest segregation. More than two decades before the well-known 1960 Woolworth lunch counter sit-in occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, the nationally publicized sit-in at Alexandria ironically resulted not in ending segregation, but in creating a separate library for African Americans.
The city’s first public library built in Alexandria did not offer African Americans the same library card and lending rights that it offered to white citizens. Still in use, it is located at 717 Queen Street, not far from the Parker-Gray neighborhood. When the city built its first public library in 1937, members of the library board and other city leaders began with the assumption that the new facility would be exclusively for white members of the community.
On March 17, 1939, Samuel Wilbert Tucker, a local African American attorney, and George Wilson, a retired army sergeant, went to the library and asked for an application to get a library card. They were told that African Americans were not to be issued library cards at this facility, as the two-year-old library had been created as a facility for “whites only.”
Samuel W. Tucker was born in 1913 at 916 Queen Street. Like many others, Tucker had to travel to Washington, D.C. to earn his high school degree. In 1933, at age 20, he graduated from Harvard University and returned to Alexandria. Although he did not earn a law degree, he studied the law on his own and passed the law exam the same year that he graduated from Harvard. He was admitted to the bar in 1934.
Tucker, who lived near the new Kate Waller Barrett Memorial Library, decided to take action toward integration. He trained five African American male youths for a defiance of library rules and regulations. On August 21, 1939, they entered the library peaceably, one at a time, and asked for a library card. Each was refused. According to Tucker’s instruction, each man went to the stacks and selected a book to read. Taking the book to a table, each read his book quietly, as the library staff was thrown into a panic. The librarian, Catherine Scoggin, asked them to leave but the five stayed seated, remaining courteous as they had been prepared by Tucker. Scoggin left the library and alerted the city manager who, in turn, called the police. The five youths continued to read quietly until the police arrived and arrested them for disorderly conduct.
After an initial hearing in which Tucker and the city attorney offered opposing arguments, the youths were released until they could be tried. The case was put off indefinitely, with a series of continuances, and was never actually resolved. However, it placed the white community on the defensive, as reflected in the press coverage that followed. The event got national publicity, but only briefly because international news was unfolding in Europe, as Hitler invaded Poland just a few days after the sit-in.
Two days after Tucker’s suit on behalf of Sergeant Wilson was heard in court, City council voted to approve funding for Robinson Library on January 12, 1940. The Robinson Library opened its doors on April 22, 1940. To Samuel Tucker, the construction of Robinson Library was a sign that his effort for integrated facilities had been defeated. He was outspoken in refusing to be issued a card for the new library. The new library was far from equal, at a smaller scale, with cast-off books, used furniture, and much lower budgets for construction and administration. Although he was disappointed with the results of his actions, the real results came more than two decades later when the same techniques proved more effective on a broader stage. By 1965, the Parker-Gray neighborhood began to see these results as legal segregation was officially ended and as the neighborhood’s schools and libraries became integrated.
Samuel W. Tucker practiced law in the Parker-Gray area for many years. After serving in the infantry in World War II, he participated in litigation over desegregation against more than 50 school boards in the 1950s and 1960s.
Schools
Other than churches, the institutions with the longest history as segregated facilities were schools. The development of segregated schools including Hallowell School for Girls, Snowden School for boys, Parker-Gray Elementary School and Parker-Gray High School shaped the neighborhood and even gave it its name.
Schools were the earliest known African American institutions to develop within the Parker-Gray neighborhood. Although the state of Virginia passed laws against educating African Americans, there were opportunities to provide education before the laws went into effect and at times when enforcement was lax. However, the changing situation gave the schools a precarious existence until after the Civil War. The earliest schools were held in private homes in various parts of the city at least as early as 1809. Schools were conducted by African Americans and by whites and some were provided free of charge. A few schools primarily conducted evening classes and may have been designed to teach reading and writing to adults rather than children.
At the end of the War of 1812, the African American community created its own parallel to the Washington Free School, a school that had been endowed by George Washington. The classes for African Americans were held on the third floor of the Alexandria Academy Building at 604 Wolfe Street, about five blocks southeast of the Parker-Gray Historic District. That same year, the academy purchased land at 218 North Columbus Street to start a school for girls in the white community. The shell of the building at 218 N. Columbus Street is still standing, incorporated later in the nineteenth century into an Italianate design for a lodge facility. The school at the old Academy Building went out of operation in 1847, as did many other small schools that had been operating in other locations in the city, casualties of the city’s retrocession to Virginia.
Hallowell and Snowden Schools
After the Civil War, with the help of the Freedman’s Bureau, two new school buildings were built for the education of the Alexandria’s African American citizens. Both school buildings were built by noted African American master carpenter George Seaton. The Seaton School, which was later known as Snowden School for Boys, was built by April 1867. Hallowell School for Girls was opened in November 1867. Originally called the Alfred Street School, it was renamed the Lee School when Robert E. Lee died and later renamed for Benjamin Hallowell, a Quaker who had taught school in the city.
Hallowell School was funded directly by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Each school was set up with a board of trustees. In the case of the Snowden School, it is known that all members of the board of trustees were African American. Hallowell School was located on N. Alfred Street between Princess and Oronoco Streets (407-415 N. Alfred Street) and Snowden School was located on S. Pitt Street between Gibbon and Franklin Streets in the southeast quadrant of the city. In 1870, the two schools officially became part of the city’s public school system.
Parker-Gray Elementary School
The role of the neighborhood in the greater community was secured in 1920 when the city consolidated the Hallowell and Snowden schools into a city-wide elementary school and built a new building for it within the neighborhood, on Wythe Street. The location placed it at a distance from other, older African American neighborhoods, some of which had already begun to shrink in size or importance. The school became a magnet for African American families seeking to relocate into one larger neighborhood.
Known as Parker-Gray Elementary School, the name was created by combining the surname of the principal at Hallowell School for Girls, Sarah Gray, with that of John Parker, principal at Snowden School for Boys. By selecting this name, the school district established a sense that the school would continue some of the traditions and heritage of the two older schools. The school was overcrowded from the time it opened, and the city’s African American residents generously subsidized it by helping to pay for furniture and books. It was built to be an elementary school, but in time, some high school classes were offered there.
Henry T. White, the principal at Snowden, became the first principal of Parker-Gray Elementary School. Prior to that, he was also the only man to serve as principal of Hallowell. White lived at 511 Henry Street beginning about 1903, but moved 1012 Pendleton Street about 1910, where he lived until his death in 1950. Born a slave in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, in 1862, he taught at segregated schools in other parts of Virginia before coming to Alexandria. In his seven years as principal at Parker-Gray Elementary School, followed by seven more years of teaching there, he faced great challenges in a crowded facility that relied on charitable parents and neighbors within the African American community to provide supplies when the public school system did not always provide everything the facility needed.
Parker-Gray High School
By the 1940s, Parker-Gray Elementary School had older students taking high school classes. The situation was not ideal because the school was crowded and did not offer a full program. Some students relocated to Washington, D.C. after completing their Parker-Gray coursework to earn a high school diploma. Neither the Alexandria city schools nor any of the nearby high schools on the Virginia side of the Potomac allowed African Americans access.
In 1950, recognizing that the education of the African American community should include more than elementary instruction, the city built a new high school several blocks west on Madison Street in the “Colored Rosemont” neighborhood. The name “Parker-Gray” was transferred to the new all-black high school. To recognize the contributions of the civil rights attorney who had fought for the new high school, the city renamed the building the Charles Houston Elementary School.
The city schools remained segregated by law until it was overturned in 1965. Up to that time, Parker-Gray High School was the only school offered for African Americans to complete the higher grades. After the end of segregation, 11th and 12th grade students at the high school were sent to T.C. Williams High School. The Parker-Gray High School building was then used as a middle school facility, but only for a few years.
Both the elementary school and high school buildings were demolished in the 1970s. In 1976, on the former site of the Parker-Gray Elementary School and Charles Houston Elementary School, a recreation center was built. This building was demolished in 2007 to make way for the new, state-of-the-art Charles Houston Recreation Center, which opened in February of 2009. Although the school buildings are no longer standing, their presence secured the African American identity of the neighborhood.
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City of Alexandria, VA
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