🏢 Houston Public Library — Houston, Texas

African American History Research Center at the Gregory School

Houston's first public school for Black children, restored into a research center that keeps the memory of Freedmen's Town alive one archive at a time.

📖 About African American History Research Center at the Gregory School

The African American History Research Center is housed in the historic Gregory School, whose roots reach back to the 1872 Gregory Institute — named for Freedmen's Bureau officer Edgar M. Gregory and remembered as the first school for freed people in Houston. The current 20,000-square-foot white-brick building opened in 1926 in the Fourth Ward's Freedmen's Town, the neighborhood settled by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, and the Texas Historical Commission designated it a State Archaeological Landmark in 1995. After the school merged with Lincoln Junior High in 1980 the building sat empty until an $11 million restoration, funded partly by federal community development block grants, brought it back to life as a Houston Public Library research facility in December 2009. Originally opened as the African American Library at the Gregory School, it was renamed the African American History Research Center in the fall of 2022. Today it collects and preserves the documentary record of Black Houston, from the Demetrius Head Collection spanning 1942–2010 to papers on Black music, the Harrison family, and civil-rights organizer Christia Adair.

⭐ What makes this branch special

• Set in the restored 1926 Gregory School, a State Archaeological Landmark
• Freedmen's Town Gallery and two 'African Americans in Houston' galleries
• Oral-history recording room capturing living community memory
• Archival collections documenting Black Houston from the 1940s onward

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