Booker T. Washington High School (Tulsa, Oklahoma)

Booker T. Washington High School is a high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was named after the African-American education pioneer Booker T. Washington. It is one of nine high schools in the Tulsa Public Schools system.OverviewBooker T. Washington is a public high school that accepts students based upon their academic merit, rather than their geographical location. The school uses applicants' middle school grades and attendance record, as well as their Iowa Tests of Educational Development scores, to determine admission. To ensure greater ethnic, economic, and intellectual diversity, students who live in historically minority and economically depressed neighborhoods are offered preferential consideration.HistoryOklahoma statehood brought about segregated schools for African-American children. The first such school in Tulsa was a two-room wooden building built in 1908 on Hartford Avenue, between Cameron and Easton Streets. It served grades 1 through 8 until 1913. In that year, Dunbar Grade School opened at 504 Easton Street in an 18-room brick building, with a four-room frame building that served as a high school.Booker T. Washington High School was founded in 1913, with a class of fourteen students and a staff of two teachers. The principal was E.W. Woods, a native of Louisville, Mississippi, who had just moved to Tulsa from Memphis, Tennessee. According to legend, Woods walked all the way from Tennessee to Oklahoma when he learned the new school was advertising for a principal. The original school building was at the corner of Elgin Avenue and Easton Street, in the Greenwood district of Tulsa.