Schools and colleges29 cards: 7 firsts, 2 claimed firsts and 20 beginnings
Schools, colleges and libraries, from a school for four boys to the court cases over who could attend.
- Tyler’s oldest recorded school: four boys, west of townA school for boys on Oakwood Street, closed before the Civil War.
- A female seminary opens, later Charnwood InstituteDated 1851 by the city’s survey and 1865 by the Handbook.
- Tyler University opens as a Baptist academyIts women’s department became Eastern Texas Female College.
- The first school for Black children in the Tyler areaOpened with help from the Freedmen’s Bureau; attacked, it held on a few years.
- Tyler Colored High School, called the first known Black schoolA private school with John F. Anderson as principal.
- Tyler’s first public school opensIn the former East Texas Institute; Hubbard School followed in 1886.
- West End Negro School, Tyler’s first public school for Black childrenTyler’s first public school for African Americans, the wood-frame West End Negro School at Herndon and Front streets, was paid for with a $6,000 bond issue after a committee of Black residents asked for it.
- Texas College opens with six studentsCreated and supported by St. James CME Church.
- Five women’s clubs start a subscription libraryFree to the public by 1901; the Carnegie Library followed in 1904.
- Tyler Commercial College files its charterIts marker says it grew to be the nation’s largest commercial college.
- The East Texas Conservatory of Music opensEstelle Burns and the pianist Juan Roure; it ran until 1910.
- The Carnegie Library, Tyler’s first public library buildingThe fifteenth of 34 Carnegie libraries in Texas.
- A Baptist academy opens, later Butler CollegeNamed for its founder, Rev. C. M. Butler, at his death in 1924.
- Texas College organizes its first college-level classUntil then it taught the common-school grades.
- Emmett Scott High School is completedNamed for Booker T. Washington’s private secretary; closed by court order in 1970.
- Martin Hall goes up at Texas CollegeThe oldest intact building on the campus.
- Tyler Junior College opens at Tyler High SchoolOpens with 93 students and nine faculty members.
- Texas College is accredited as a four-year collegeRenamed Phillips University in 1909, then Texas College again.
- Tyler Barber College, called the country’s first for African AmericansHenry Miller Morgan, born in Tyler’s St. Louis community in 1895, opened Tyler Barber College at 212 East Erwin Street.
- The Ella Reid Library, once the Negro Public LibraryChartered and supported by Tyler’s African American community.
- An Army Signal Corps school trains at Tyler Commercial CollegeIts first class began radio training in April 1942.
- Voters create a separate junior college districtA tax levy and a bond issue for its own campus.
- Texas College houses a campus of Tyler Junior CollegeFrom 1946 to 1966.
- The Apache Roses perform for the first timeForty young women, at a TJC football game.
- Judge Justice rules that Texas must desegregate its schoolsUnited States v. Texas, 1970.
- A federal judge orders Tyler’s schools desegregatedJudge William Wayne Justice; the case closed in 2016.
- Tyler State College is foundedToday’s UT Tyler, founded as Tyler State College.
- Plyler v. Doe begins in TylerTyler ISD began charging $1,000 for each undocumented child in the 1977–78 school year.
- The UT Tyler School of Medicine seats its first classThe UT Tyler School of Medicine’s first class of 40 students received white coats in July 2023.