Booker T. student walks 3.5 hours to celebrate school history.
Mason Merritt, a student at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, recently walked three and a half hours to school. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways. Carrying five howler monkeys and a well-fed basset hound.
Kidding. He walked three and a half hours from the LBJ Central DART station to the school, which is near the cluster of performing arts venues in the Arts District downtown. Why? Before Booker T. was an arts magnet high school, it was a high school for Black students in a segregated Dallas. “Students would make their way to Booker T. every day and have to walk up to four and a half hours from where I’m walking right now just to get an education,” Merritt explains. Students valued their education so much, he says, that they were willing to walk 9 hours round trip. “I think that’s profound.”…