Gooseneck Bill's bank, I.M. Terrell High, Ornette Coleman and the grandmother of Juneteenth.
Gooseneck Bill
William Madison McDonald, nicknamed Gooseneck Bill, was a politician, businessman and banker of great influence in Texas and a leader of the Black and Tan faction of the Republican Party. In 1906 he founded Fort Worth's first African American-owned bank, the Fraternal Bank and Trust, as an enterprise of the state's Masons, and under his management it survived the Great Depression. He was probably Texas's first Black millionaire.
I.M. Terrell High School
Fort Worth's first public school for African Americans opened in 1882 as the East Ninth Street Colored School, with Isaiah Milligan Terrell as its head, and it was later renamed I.M. Terrell High School in his honor. It was the only African American public high school in Fort Worth, drawing students from across Tarrant County and beyond. The saxophonist King Curtis was a student there, playing music with his schoolmate Ornette Coleman. The high school closed in 1973 and reopened in 1998 as an elementary school.
Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth on March 9, 1930, raised in the city and played in the band at I.M. Terrell. His 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come was a watershed in the birth of avant-garde jazz, and in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, only the second jazz musician to do so.
Opal Lee
Opal Lee's family moved to Fort Worth when she was 10. On June 19, 1939, a few days after her parents bought a house on East Annie Street, then a mostly white area, 500 white rioters vandalized and burned it. For years she led walks to make Juneteenth a national holiday, and at 89 she walked from Fort Worth toward Washington to make her case. On June 17, 2021, she was there when President Joe Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth the eleventh federal holiday. She is often called the grandmother of Juneteenth.
Black Fort Worth Today
Fort Worth's Black history runs from the Fraternal Bank to the I.M. Terrell campus, and Black-owned restaurants, salons, shops and brands are part of everyday Fort Worth.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Fort Worth on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
The I.M. Terrell High School building. Photo: Joe Castleman (Gyrofrog), CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons