Although the structure known as Parker-Gray High School was demolished years ago, its historical significance remains in the collective heart, if not the political conscience, of many Alexandria residents. In early 20th century Virginia, Jim Crow was alive and functioning well. The term Jim Crow refers to a variety of laws intended to control certain social behavior. Jim Crow screamed racial segregation, especially in public schools.

Alexandria’s Parker-Gray High School is a heritage study in racial integration. Responding directly to the community’s heart-felt expression, developer Trammell Crow has teamed with The Parker-Gray Alumni Association to celebrate Parker-Gray’s educational history. Together they have applied for a Virginia Highway Marker to memorialize the city’s black-only High School. Trammell Crow is redeveloping the property at 800 N. Henry Street, a property adjacent to the facility’s 1950 site.

The Parker-Gray Elementary School for colored was established in 1920 including elementary grades one through seven. A year later Alexandria’s black community "begged the school authorities" for a high school. Their plea was ignored. Instead Parker-Gray Elementary School added an eighth grade: one classroom, one teacher and 18 students.

Until the mid-1930s enterprising blacks traveled to the District of Columbia for high school: to attend either Armstrong or Dunbar High Schools. Alexandria’s black population, especially individuals between the ages of 75 and 95 remember Jim Crow. For these residents, discrimination remains uniquely personal.

On December 4, 1931, the President of the Parker-Gray PTA wrote to The Alexandria Gazette: "As law-abiding citizens of the city of Alexandria, we appeal to those in power to consider the serious condition of educational opportunities for negroes in this city. We regret to say that our condition is worst than that of any other group in any other city the size of Alexandria in the State of Virginia."

The President continued: "Our children are compelled to go to Washington or other cities to complete their high school education. When they go to Washington they must compete with children who have been well prepared. The result is that many of them must repeat the little work that they have already done. On the other hand our children must enter the Washington schools under false pretense. They must declare that they are residents of Washington. The crowded conditions in the schools of Washington are making it more difficult for them to continue this policy."

In 1924 the Parker-Gray neighborhood was microcosmic, 50.88% of residents were black. The city directory lists the first Parker Gray High School as Wythe Street, between Patrick and Alfred Streets, basically an expansion within the existing Parker-Gray Elementary School building. Parker-Gray’s ninth grade reportedly became available in 1927, with the remainder of the high school grades added no later than 1936. When the new Parker-Gray High School opened in 1950, it was relocated from Wythe Street to 1207 Madison Street.

Today the Charles Houston Recreation Center, now closed and being rebuilt, occupies the School’s former Wythe Street site. The Recreation Center is so named because beginning in October, 1933 – coincident with the organizing meeting of the Alexandria chapter of the NAACP – civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston "spoke on the necessity of high school facilities for negro children in Alexandria, and urged the citizens associated to continue their fight." The Charles Houston Recreation Center is scheduled to reopen in spring 2009.

In brief, Houston relied on Plessy vs. Ferguson's 1896 separate but equal doctrine to prove Parker Gray High School’s Wythe Street facilities unequal. Said Charles Houston in 1934: "all education, white and Negro, is feeling the pinch of the depression; but in the South common rumor is that Negro education is being sacrificed so as to save white education from being curtailed. This is distressingly true in the allocation of PWA and other public funds for the purposes of building and repairing school buildings."

According to Dr. Fred M. Alexander, Virginia’s 1946 Director of Negro and Elementary Education, the greatest strides in Negro education in Virginia were made in the periods between the school years 1926-27 and 1944-45. In 1946 Alexandria’s black activists again complained that Parker Gray’s Wythe Street High School facility was overcrowded. Parker-Gray’s High School enrollment was slightly more than the nearby, white Alexandria High School yet Parker-Gray operated with about one-third the school improvements budget. In a remedial effort, the city appointed a committee to study the problem.

"During the past several years, colored Alexandrians have become increasingly aware of their inadequate school buildings," reported The Alexandria Gazette on February 25, 1946. A few months later the newspaper noted that "negotiations for acquiring a site for a Negro High School were recently completed." The deed books confirm that the city purchased five land parcels between June 1948 and December 1952 at the Madison Street location.

"Trammell Crow is pleased that it could partner with the Parker-Gray Alumni Association regarding Charles Houston’s role and others in the establishment of a public, African-American high school at 1207 Madison Street," said Chris Roth, President, Northeast Operations. "It is appropriate that the rich and diverse Parker-Gray heritage be preserved, and that this historical marker be one of the first steps in creating the heritage trail discussed in the Braddock Road Area Neighborhood Plan."

"The principal, faculty and students were sorely in need of a separate high school building," recorded Jim Henson and the Parker-Gray Alumni History Committee in 1976. "Finally in September 1950, the new high school building was opened and carried the name of Parker-Gray." The elementary school initially was named for principals John Parker and Sarah Gray, but it was Charles Houston who championed the high school’s cause.

"Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall’s mentor and law school professor, was the brilliant thinker who crafted the strategy that ended legalized segregation in the United States," wrote Mildred Neely. "The litigation campaign Houston launched to reverse the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling paved the way for Marshall’s triumph in Brown vs. Board of Education." By demonstrating the failure of states to live up to the 1896 Plessy rule Houston hoped, as the NAACP liked to say "to kill Jim Crow."

Brown vs. the Board of Education overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine in 1954. Houston’s colleagues, despite his death in 1950, credit him as the "Moses of that journey." Still Alexandria resisted, waiting until 1959 to integrate its public schools.

"In 1959 [Alexandria’s] School Board was taken to court, and, on January 23, 1959, Judge Albert V. Bryan ordered the Alexandria City Schools to start integrating," reported The Alexandria Gazette in 1971. "At the time, Alexandria had three high schools: George Washington, Francis Hammond and black Parker-Gray. Less than 20 black students, on a freedom of choice basis, started the desegregation process." The Parker-Gray High School later closed.

"It all means so much to me," said Catherine Ward, President of the Parker-Gray Alumni Association. "My heart just aches because nothing was done much to preserve the high school. It’s really hard to put my feelings into words. Both schools are gone the alumni are like family and we want to keep the legacy alive. The new Parker-Gray High School opened 29 years after the epic educational struggle began. Although de jure segregation is no longer law, to what extent is the Plessy rule still practiced today?