Lincoln High School

Built in 1938 in South Dallas, Lincoln High School, located at 5000 Oakland Avenue, was the second Black high school in Dallas during the period of segregation. Its construction was necessitated by overcrowding at Dallas’s first large African-American secondary, Booker T. Washington High School.

Despite exceeding its initial budget, the school was rapidly constructed in less than a year at a cost of $380,000, provided through a Public Works Administration grant. The building, constructed in the International Style popular at the time, was designed by Dallas architect Walter C. Sharp and contracted by the Dolph-Bateson Construction Company. Dedicated on January 24, 1939, it was “one of the largest of its kind in the South and largest Negro high school in the city,” according to the January 25, 1939, edition of the Dallas Morning News. Facilities included twenty classrooms, an 800-seat auditorium, cafeteria, library, and physics and chemistry labs. The school was named after nearby Lincoln Manor, a residential area which was named in honor of President Abraham Lincoln. T. D. Marshall served as the school’s first principal, and initial enrollment totaled 1,255 students. In 1940 Lincoln graduated 116 students.

As the school was located in South Dallas, which at the time was comprised of predominantly White neighborhoods, residents and city officials worried about the interaction of and potential violence between White and Black youth. In late 1940 city officials decided to change the starting and ending times of the school day at Lincoln High School and Forest Avenue High School, the nearby White school, allowing a difference of thirty minutes in the morning and afternoon. Officials argued the change was allegedly to better enforce segregation and reduce interracial clashes, although the Dallas Morning News said that reports of clashes were “overestimated.” The city government also intended to create segregated sidewalks to prevent Black and White students from mingling. Early in the school’s history, White South Dallas leaders and residents pushed for its conversion into a White middle school or defense training school and the building of a new Black high school in hopes of decreasing the frequency of interracial fights among students.

The location of Lincoln High School and the resulting influx of Black residents into South Dallas upset many of their White neighbors due to their supposed negative impact on property values and alleged overrunning of White areas. Disagreements over how to address these issues sometimes resulted in physical violence between White South Dallasites.

The school faced numerous threats of violence during the four decades of its existence. In 1941 White Dallasites, under the auspices of the segregationist South Dallas Civic League, threatened to block the reopening of Lincoln High that autumn. Bombings in the vicinity of the high school were seen as a clear message from Lincoln’s detractors in the community and also as part of the broader conflict over segregation in Dallas. Racist South Dallasites filed several legal injunctions against the school in hopes of converting it into a White school, seemingly because of the school’s impressive facilities—in 1940 Lincoln was chosen as one of “the nine handsomest buildings constructed in Dallas within recent years.”

Threats and actual violent incidents in the area declined during World War II. After the war, the area around Lincoln saw a growth in its African American population, leading to a decrease in the conflicts related to the school. In the deadly flood of April 1942, Lincoln High School served as a shelter for displaced Black Dallasites.

Lincoln’s students and faculty frequently encountered discrimination in how their school was funded. For some time, the Dallas Board of Education paid teachers at Lincoln less than White teachers. In 1942 Thelma Page, a teacher at Lincoln High School, and the Negro Teachers Alliance of Dallas brought a federal suit against the Dallas Board of Education for its discriminatory payment practices, with a $540 pay gap between Black and White teachers. The board settled out of court and acknowledged that Black teachers deserved the same pay as their White colleagues. The board made up one-third of the difference in pay immediately and fully equalized teacher salaries within two years of the suit’s filing. Parents also complained about overcrowding and a lack of books for students.

Relatedly, school desegregation in Dallas—prompted by the passage of the landmark U. S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—dragged behind, with city officials insisting they would take their cues from the state government in Austin. Although the  Dallas Independent School District began desegregation in 1961, when eighteen African American students attended a previously all-White school, and claimed to be fully desegregated in 1967, it was still considered one of the most segregated school districts in the United States into the twenty-first century. Lincoln High School itself was integrated in 1970, but the school population was still almost entirely African American, reflective then of the majority-Black population of South Dallas.

In the mid-1970s the worsening quality of education at Lincoln prompted the board of trustees to initiate the Lincoln High Renewal Project, intended to improve both the high school’s facilities and its curriculum. A new Lincoln magnet school (known as the Humanities/Communications Magnet High School), built in front of its predecessor, opened in 1981, and the original, then known as the Lincoln Instructional Complex, became office space for Dallas ISD staff. The old Lincoln High School building was designated a Dallas Landmark in 1995 and received a Texas Historical Marker in 2006. The magnet school was still open in the 2020s.