Fidelity Manor High School was a high school for African American children in Galena Park, Texas and a part of the Galena Park Independent School District (GPISD).
It opened in 1955 and was the only black high school in the district. As part of desegregation in the United States the school merged into the previously all-white Galena Park High School in 1969. The district also closed Fidelity Elementary School at that time.
History
The history of Fidelity Manor High School predates its 1955 opening as rudimentary records indicate that within the Harris County Common School District, Clinton Colored School existed in District 16 of what was then the city of Clinton, Texas as early as 1886. Clinton renamed itself Galena Park in 1936 when a petition submitted to the federal government for a post office revealed that the name Clinton already existed in the state. From 1886 until about 1922, there were at least two other schools designated for African-American children besides Clinton Colored School: Greens Bayou and Penn City. By 1916, District 16's Colored Schools saw the teaching of black children shared between Gladys Washington, Edna Griffin and long-term educator Mrs. Edna Hubbard. Mrs. Hubbard's husband, O. L. Hubbard, went on to found the first school in Independence Heights, Houston, an incorporated community proposed for the settlement of blacks. Rosa Young Yacome and Clara Jones were the only instructors in the Harris County Common School District 16 for school children of black African descent by 1919. Rosa Young Yacome, the highest paid African-American instructor at $50.00 a month, lived west of the Fidelity addition in 1920.
However, by 1922, the "Colored School" building located near the corner of East Street and Main Street in the black enclave of the Clinton community had as its principal and only instructor Ms. Freddie A. Emerson. As well as the hard work involved in teaching multiple grades, Emerson also faced a daily commute from her home in Harrisburg. She boarded a ferry daily on the south bank of the Buffalo Bayou, in order to cross the water to Clinton. Emerson lived only a short walk from the hand-pulled ferry to Johnson's Landing on the north side of the bayou, from where she would take a well-worn footpath to the black quarters located on South Main St., Clinton. White students who traveled to Harrisburg used this same ferry route to reach Milby High School, while others used this method to get to Harrisburg before catching a trolleybus to Houston.
In their book Galena Park: The Community that Shaped its own History, Roger Leslie and Sue Elkins Edwards suggest that the white Clinton School building was relocated in 1924 to the Fidelity Addition. A Sentinel newspaper staff writer states that the school was sold to a black church congregation and moved to a location on Avenue D and Main Street in the black quarter. However, Harris County Block Book records indicate that the Colored School on East Street and Main Street remained as a tax-exempt building until 1931, when one of the two lots it occupied was sold while the Galena Park Independent School District remained in control of lot 9. Records show that in the same year a school building became exempt from taxes on the Fidelity site on Bolden St. Whether or not folklore has become mixed up with actual history, the Fidelity School did exist on Bolden Street. Two years previously in 1930, the Galena Park Independent School District (GPISD) had become an official body and their placing of a facility at the Fidelity site was the second act designed to nurture African-American student education. The GPISD's ownership of two lots on East Street and their tax exempt status suggest that the body or its antecedents had begun providing education to black children eight years before it became an independent school district.
This school housed eight grade levels and offered courses in science, reading, writing, math, agriculture, and home economics. The classes contained twenty to thirty pupils almost equally spread across the various age groups. All were taught the same courses — reading writing and arithmetic. Children had near one-on-one instruction as they each had to approach the instructor's desk and read aloud. In 1931 Mrs. Emerson taught classes alongside her colleague Laura Bailey.