MELISSA PIERCE

Like her contemporaries Juanita Craft and Ebby Halliday, Melissa Pierce left a legacy in the area of education by donating the land for the construction of a church and for the Melissa Pierce School in 1953, in the African American settlement known as Joppa. At that time the schedule of classes at the Melissa Pierce School was disrupted during the months of September and October so that children could work in the local cotton fields. This meant that students attended classes for six weeks during the summer before breaking for September and October, and then resuming in November. In 1954 the parents of students of the Melissa Pierce School were organized by the Dallas chapter of the NAACP to demand admission into the all-white Linfield Elementary School located in the same ISD. Admission was ultimately denied. The Principal of the Linfield Elementary School refused the students, even after the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, by citing that the Texas Education Agency required schools to stay segregated. McCoy Collaborative is pleased to have assisted the Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) with a condition assessment of the school buildings as part of a larger plan to rehabilitate the Joppa community. For more on this project, see Dr. Kate Holliday of UTA’s presentation here.