The
Freedmen's Bureau opened schools for children in the area after the establishment of Freedmen's Town. The
Texas Legislature authorized the creation of public schools for Freedmen's Town by 1870. By 1872 most of the students and teachers who were at the bureau schools, which were closing, left them to attend the state-managed Gregory Institute, named after
Edgar M. Gregory, an officer in the Union army in the
U.S. Civil War and the assistant commissioner of the Texas area's Freedmen's Bureau. The school, which first opened in 1872, was the first school for freed people in Houston. Mike Snyder of the
Houston Chronicle said that it was "perhaps" the first school for freed people in the State of Texas. By 1876 the school became a part of the Houston public school system. In its history the Gregory School occupied three different buildings: the first two were a brick building and a wood-frame building with two stories; the second was ruined by a fire, prompting the construction of the third, a facility opening in 1926, made of white brick. In the period before its closure, it was a K-8 school separate from what was initially Lincoln Junior-Senior High School. It was one of two schools enrolling zoned residents of the Housing Authority of the City of Houston or HACH (now
Houston Housing Authority)
public housing complex Allen Parkway Village. In the 1979–1980 school year, the school had 882 elementary students, with 553 (62.7%) being black, 184 (20.9%) being Hispanic, 137 (15.5%) being Asian, and eight (0.9%) being white. The building was vacant from 1980 until its re-purposing as a library. The library was scheduled to open on November 14, 2009. In November 2010 members of the Gregory Library Watch, a group started in January 2010, accused the library of deliberately not archiving certain historical documents.
Lenwood Johnson, an organization member, stated that the library refused to archive documents about an effort to prevent the closing of Allen Parkway Village, and Timothy O'Brien, a member of the group, said "They don't want to hear the low-income black history because it indicts the African-American politicians." ==Collections==