A big multi-class reunion is scheduled for Saturday, August 19th, at the West Columbia Civic Center for everyone who attended Charlie Brown High School. The event will kick off at 10:30 a.m. and will include a short program at 12:30 p.m. honoring the Tigers championship basketball and football teams. Lunch catered by Hinze’s BBQ of Wharton will follow. The Charlie Brown Tigers state championship basketball teams of 1948, 1950 and 1952, and the 1953 state championship runner-up football team will be honored, as Will former teachers, at Saturday’s reunion.
West Columbia Mayor Laurie Kincannon (center) designated Saturday, August 19, 2023, as Charlie Brown School Day in the City of West Columbia at Monday night’s city council meeting. Charlie Brown alumni will reunite Saturday.
Tickets for Saturday’s class reunion are $40 for adults and $10 each for children over 12. Children under 12 will be allowed in free. There will be a dance with a disc jockey playing music from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Civic Center. Tickets for the dance only will be available for $10 each.
Saturday’s class reunion will be the first for Charlie Brown High School alumni since the Coronavirus pandemic. The theme of this year’s reunion is “Keeping Hope Alive, We’re Not Going Back.” CBHS alum Dorothy Lewis Fisher will deliver a speech at the reunion about the history of Charlie Brown High School. The school’s history will also be announced at various intervals during the Columbia High School Roughnecks’ six home varsity football games at Griggs Field this season, according to Columbia-Brazoria Independent School District Superintendent Steven Galloway.
This picture of the old Charlie Brown School is on display at the Columbia Historical Museum in West Columbia
The original school for black students in West Columbia was established in 1900 as a one teacher school at the Negro Baptist Church that was located near where a new convenience store is presently under construction across Highway 35 from the H.E.B. grocery store. The first teacher at this school was Alta Mae Williams. She taught all elementary grades. The school changed locations a number of times as the enrollment numbers increased greatly over the years early in the 20th century.
A brief history of the Charlie Brown School on display at the Columbia Historical Museum in West Columbia states that a tract of land on Bernard Street was donated by affluent black West Columbian Charlie Brown. This former slave came to Texas as a free man from Virginia and accumulated great wealth following the Civil War, primarily through his investments in the timber business. Informaton on display at West Columbia’s museum reveals that Charlie Brown, who lived from 1828 to 1920, “eventually owned about a third of the land in West Columbia — some 3,000 acres.”
A two-story building was donated to West Columbia’s black school system in the early 1900s. “Through the efforts of the entire community the building was moved across town to the Bernard Street site,” the story of the Charlie Brown School reads in the museum. “Mules and oxen were used in order to accomplish this undertaking.”
That school building was destroyed by the devastating 1932 hurricane. It was replaced with a wooden U-shaped building (pictured above). In the late 1950s a brick structure which is still standing was built. The Charlie Brown School was used as an intermediate school for fifth and sixth graders following racial integration in the 1960s. The school has not been used since the West Brazos Junior High School was constructed on Highway 36 north of Brazoria.
For information about Saturday’s Charlie Brown School reunion, contact Wanita Bess at (979) 297-0920 or Kathleen Jones Woodson at (979) 345-2526.