By Kathryn Way
If Houston embraces its diversity, it also must preserve its past Celebrating successes of black ancestors requires we acknowledge racist beginnings
Preservation Houston Programs Director Jim Parsons balked at my lack of nuance when I asked him if he thought Houston was hostile to its own history. Given Houston’s tireless attempts to bulldoze the Astrodome, its own architectural mascot of the past half-century, I didn’t think I was going too far. Parsons, however, put it more delicately: “Houston has always been a forward-looking place.”
In the 1900s, we were an oil boomtown practically overnight. With NASA’s arrival in the 1960s, we became Space City. Houstonians wonder what will come next, seldom pondering what came before. Houston has countless stories to tell, but much like our public school history textbooks, the focus on white male narratives conflicts directly with the truth of our past.
From 1878-1911, black Houstonians were forced into labor on a sugar plantation just outside the city. The plantation’s wealthy owners were inconvenienced by the abolition of slavery. To maintain their profits, they needed a new way to force people to work their fields. In 1878, they signed a contract to lease the entire pris-
on population of Texas, comprised overwhelmingly of black men convicted of minor offenses. Conveniently, the 13th Amendment allows slavery or involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. Earlier this year, 95 black bodies were unearthed from the Sugar Land plantation’s cemetery.
Twenty miles from where prisoners were toiling in the sugar fields, black children were learning their letters and numbers at Charles W. Luckie School, one of Houston’s first black elementary schools, built in 1909 on Palmer Street in modern EaDo. The original structure burned down in 1917, but was rebuilt in 1918 and still stands. The Houston Post reported fondly on the school and its students until it closed in 1956. There’s a sickening possibility that some parents of the students at the Luckie School were being worked to death on the plantation nearby. Did they know? Did they see the smoke on the horizon billowing out of the nose of a beast that would gladly devour them?
The school’s namesake was a prominent black activist and educator. Graduating from Atlanta University in 1883, Charles Luckie headed west to teach black youth as part of a budding cultural renaissance taking place in Huntsville. He later became a professor of English and Latin at Prairie View A&M, also serving as university vice principal and treasurer. Luckie was mentioned in newspaper articles for making impassioned speeches, quoting Chaucer and inspiring even the governor of Georgia to his feet with a moving oration. His promising trajectory ended when he suffered a heart attack on New Year’s Day in 1909 at age 48. Luckie narrowly escaped the brutality of slavery but still died on his feet at work on a holiday .
Equally heartbreaking is history’s erasure of Luckie’s wife, Ida, an educator, activist, and poet. The dimming of Ida’s light is as painful as it was common not only then but also now for black women.
Luckie was largely forgotten until the Luckie School’s current owner, Mickey Phoenix, purchased the neglected building in 1992 to house her screen-printing business, Calico Printing. Phoenix became so invested in the building’s history, she eventually gave private tours. Now retired, Phoenix struggles to preserve the littleknown piece of Houston history. Developers show interest in the property, but never with intentions of preserving the building.
Parsons says the only hope for buildings like the Luckie School is historic designation. Though historic designation is ownerdriven, applicants must prove the property’s historical significance. With white narratives dominating the stories of our past, the real question is: significant to whom?
While organizations like the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (the University of Houston chapter assisted my historical research) are vital to building new structures to celebrate, preservation must come next. We are finally confronting America’s racist past by tearing down Confederate statues, but the bulk of discourse about this cultural moment still centers on white men. We have a crucial responsibility to preserve the endangered bits of black history that still exist. If we can’t save the buildings, the least we can do is keep their histories alive by telling their stories.
The onus to preserve this history should not fall on black citizens alone.
Like all Southern cities, Houston’s past is pockmarked by racism. The legacy of white Houstonians is celebrated, but underneath sugarcoated classroom tales are voices long stifled. Our legacy is in those 95 bodies unearthed in Sugar Land — as well as in the institutions demolished and paved over and in the stories, often erased, that took place within those buildings.
For Houstonians to continue looking forward, billing itself as a city that embraces its diversity, it is imperative that we also look back.