In the middle of the neighborhood of Mayfield Park sits M. R. Wood Alternative Education Center, which today houses the state mandated Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) of Fort Bend ISD. It is also the only historically colored school that remains from Fort Bend’s era of segregation. Those two facts threw me when I first learned them. I’ve heard of the school-to-prison pipeline, of the egregious over policing of Black students within America’s schools, but this just seemed so blunt. Had they really turned the only Black school in the district into a juvie intermediary?
As with most things, it’s not quite that simple, and the school’s history stretches far further than the brick visage we see today. With roots dating back to 1897 as the Sugar Land Colored School, the school served as one of three schools serving Black children within the Sugar Land Independent School District area. In 1918, the school was renamed in honor of M. R. Wood, who served as president of the school board and made his living as a chemist at the Imperial Sugar Mill.
In fact, the entirety of Sugar Land’s history is inextricable from its past as a company town. The water tower and former refinery building loom in the horizon behind the school and serve as a constant reminder of the history that lies beneath our feet. The remnants are everywhere, they lie in our street names and our building signs, but you wouldn’t know it just by passing by. Almost weekly, my friends and I drive past the towering pillars reading “Imperial Sugar” on our way to the Rec center, but we never mention it. Of course we wouldn’t care about it. The mill shut down in 2003, 4 years before my birth and my parents’ arrival in the United States. So, the history blended back into the scenery, right alongside the Urban Air and Whataburger.
In February of 2018, contractors at the site of the construction of James Reese Career and Technical Center were backfilling a trench and discovered in the soil what appeared to be the remains of 95 unnamed individuals; victims of the system of convict leasing. To the rest of society, they were faceless, expendable laborers whose mistreatment was codified in the language of the Thirteenth Amendment. Today, they lie reburied in marked graves, yet to be identified by DNA analysis. Just across the open field, students walk into the Technical Center every morning.
Fort Bend ISD sits just southwest of Houston, encompassing areas of both Sugar Land and Missouri City. In fact, the district arose from the merger between the two city’s school districts in 1959. At the time, the district was small, comprising only a handful of schools, including M. R. Wood. The first graduating class of the new district walked with diplomas from the district’s flagship, Dulles High School, in 1962, and three years later, in 1965, the district officially desegregated.
Wait a minute.
What was going on for all those years?
I mean, in our classrooms, the narrative is pretty clear. Brown v. Board came down and overturned separate but equal, making possible the integrated school system we have now. If you paid attention, you might remember something about the 101st Airborne, the Little Rock Nine, Eisenhower.
Still though, I can’t help but feel like this nebulous, soupy view of history is woefully incomplete. I mean, the first Brown decision was in 1954. FBISD desegregated in 1965. That’s a decade of difference. If I was in third grade the year Brown was decided, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate from Dulles High School, and neither would my brother. I mean really think about that. This wasn’t just a single graduating class, there was a generation of kids who graduated under this segregation purgatory. So what was the hold up? What was happening to the kids attending officially segregated schools after Brown - after racism was supposed to be over?
The short answer is, I really can’t tell. The history is pretty opaque - narratives are hardly continuous. It seems like one day racism was explicitly part of the system and then the next our conversations suddenly shifted to talking about how we have to “acknowledge” and “recognize” a racist past. This whole segregation business is relegated to a weird, unspoken historical status. Resources, even official district ones, will in one breath acknowledge segregation and its “end” and then in the next, talk about our long and storied history, as if we could simply mention something like that and then just move on. It’s like talking to a friend that just ended a long term relationship, the topic just kind of floats in the background, it pervades every exchange, but nobody seems to mention it for fear of awkwardness.
“In September 1965, all schools were desegregated and the Oaklane and Staffordshire elementary schools were closed…The Administration Building was occupied in the summer of 1961. Fort Bend ISD had its first graduating class in 1960.”
What I do know is that, in the process of desegregating, all previously colored schools were closed and their students rezoned to various schools across the district, with only one exception. M. R. Wood would be the only one of these schools to remain under ownership of FBISD. Did this cause me to raise my eyebrows? Of course. I cannot know how many black teachers lost their jobs or were pressured into resigning because of this or edge case students who now had to walk miles to their new school. School’s weren’t just schools, they were playgrounds and places of community outside of home. They were integral parts of the neighborhoods they were surrounded by, but to the district, they were simply buildings to be demolished and sold off as plots of land. This is why I’m unsatisfied by these one-sided narratives of history - this radio silence. The most devastating inequalities fall on those with least access to the pen of history.
In Episode 2 of her podcast Nice White Parents, reporter Chana Joffe-Walt tells of a grassroots school boycott from 1964 organised by parents of color picketing in protest to the inequalities in New York City’s school system. Nearly half a million students participated in the boycott that day, demanding a realistic and transparent timeline for actual integration from the district.
Months later, 7,500 white demonstrators would protest the busing initiatives that resulted from the Freedom Day Boycott (https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/sep/24). One protest received minimal press coverage. The other received coverage from major TV networks and eventually got their way with the district. Suffice it to say, the district, to this day, has never proposed an integration plan for its schools.
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