The Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas, was the sole public education institution for the town's Hispanic students from 1909 to 1965. At first glance, it’s a rather unmarkable, plain-looking, one-story building that sits in an unadorned lot in the dry West Texas town of Marfa. It has off-white adobe walls and a metal roof.
On the front, it has two narrow vertical windows and a wooden door. A handful of utilitarian steps with no railings lead inside. And yet Blackwell School is the newest site in the U.
S. National Park system because of the remarkable story of what happened here. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland formally established the school as a National Historic Site on Wednesday, according to a news release from the National Park Service.
It’s one of 76 sites with that designation. It joins the ranks of such historically important places as the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in New York, the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, D.C.
, and the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site in Alabama. The National Park Service now has a total of 430 units , including 63 National Parks, under its wide umbrella. History of Blackwell School Built in 1909, the school “serves as a significant example of how racism and cultural disparity dominated education and social systems in the United States during this period of de facto segregation from 1889 to 1965,” the NPS release said.
Unlike schools in much of the South that primarily focused on segregat.