Booker T. Washington High School (Tulsa)
| Booker T. Washington High School | |
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Booker T. Washington Pep Rally
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| Location | |
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1514 East Zion Street Tulsa, Oklahoma 74106 United States |
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| Coordinates | 36°11′18″N 95°58′16″W / 36.188205°N 95.971009°WCoordinates: 36°11′18″N 95°58′16″W / 36.188205°N 95.971009°W |
| Information | |
| Type | |
| Established | 1913 |
| Principal | Mr. Thomas Padalino (interim) |
| Grades | 9-12 |
| Number of students | 1,337 |
| Color(s) | Orange and Black |
| Mascot | Hornets |
| Website | btw |
Booker T. Washington High School is a high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was named after the African-American education pioneer Booker T. Washington. It is one of nine high schools in the Tulsa Public Schools system.
Booker T. Washington is a public high school that accepts students based upon their academic merit, rather than their geographical location. The school uses applicants' middle school grades and attendance record, as well as their Iowa Tests of Educational Development scores, to determine admission. To ensure greater ethnic, economic, and intellectual diversity, students who live in historically minority and economically depressed neighborhoods are offered preferential consideration.
Oklahoma statehood brought about segregated schools for African-American children. The first such school in Tulsa was a two-room wooden building built in 1908 on Hartford Avenue, between Cameron and Easton Streets. It served grades 1 through 8 until 1913. In that year, Dunbar Grade School opened at 504 Easton Street in an 18-room brick building, with a four-room frame building that served as a high school.
Booker T. Washington High School was founded in 1913, with a class of fourteen students and a staff of two teachers. The principal was E.W. Woods, a native of Louisville, Mississippi, who had just moved to Tulsa from Memphis, Tennessee. According to legend, Woods walked all the way from Tennessee to Oklahoma when he learned the new school was advertising for a principal. The original school building was at the corner of Elgin Avenue and Easton Street, in the Greenwood district of Tulsa.
By 1920, the four-room high school had been replaced by a three-story brick building. This continued to operate for nearly three decades.
The high school escaped destruction during the Tulsa race riot of 1921. Immediately after the riot, the American Red Cross used the building as its headquarters for relief activities. About 2,000 people were temporarily sheltered there. A hospital facility was set up, along with a dental clinic, a venereal disease clinic, and a medical dispensary. The Red Cross inoculated about 1,800 refugees against tetanus, typhoid and smallpox.
The Tulsa Public Schools district was slow to react to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that de jure racial segregation was unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed all racial segregation in the United States. During the 1971-72 school year a small number of progressive Caucasian students voluntarily transferred to Booker T. Washington in a special program called "Metro." The program was successful as a proof that voluntary desegregation would work at Booker T. Washington High. In 1973 Booker T. Washington was chosen to be the vehicle for Tulsa’s school desegregation program. At that time, Tulsa was racially divided along north-south lines, and the school was in historically African-American north Tulsa, making this the first integration program in a historically African-American school.
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