ALEXANDRIA, Va – On May 31, 1950, Parker-Gray High School was dedicated at 1207 Madison Street as Alexandria’s first dedicated high school building for Black students, marking a milestone in the city’s long fight for equal access to public education.
The dedication followed a years-long campaign by Alexandria’s Black community and civil rights attorney Charles Houston, who served as lead NAACP counsel and pressed city, state, and federal officials to fund a separate high school building. Until then, Black students in Alexandria who wished to continue beyond the eighth grade had to travel to Washington, D.C., or to Manassas, Virginia, to attend a segregated high school, despite a 1920s Virginia law requiring public education through high school.
A name rooted in the city’s earliest Black schools
The school’s name traces back to two of Alexandria’s earliest African American schools, both opened after the Civil War under the Freedmen’s Bureau: the Snowden School for Boys, in the 600 block of South Pitt Street, and the Hallowell School for Girls, in the 400 block of North Alfred Street. As both buildings became overcrowded and dilapidated, the community pressed for better facilities — a campaign led by the Rev. S.B. Ross of Third Baptist Church, Samuel Tucker, Samuel Madden, Henry T. Taylor, Mrs. Blanche Taylor, the Teachers’ Association and alumni of both schools.
When the new combined school opened in 1920, it was named Parker-Gray in honor of Snowden’s principal John F. Parker and Hallowell’s Sarah A. Gray.
A New School, separately and unequally funded
In September 1920, Parker-Gray opened at 901 Wythe Street, teaching grades one through eight under teacher-principal Henry T. White and nine other teachers. The City of Alexandria provided only the barest necessities; community members and alumni raised about $4,000 themselves to outfit the building — chairs for the auditorium, a stage curtain, equipment for the home economics room, reference books, a typewriter, a Victrola and records, even half the cost of window shades…