Marlboro Heights: Segregation and Integration in a Military Town

Killeen in nineteen fifty was, according to its own census data, a town with no Black residents. The TSHA Handbook is blunt about how that had been managed: the community had, from its earliest years, openly discouraged Black and Catholic settlement. The railroad town that grew up on Bell County prairie was, by design, a white Protestant enclave.

Fort Hood changed the demographic mathematics overnight. The base arrived with soldiers from every corner of the country, including Black soldiers who needed housing, schools, and services. By the early nineteen fifties, a new subdivision called Marlboro Heights had been developed to accommodate Black residents, a separately platted neighborhood whose separateness was itself an expression of the segregation that still structured Texas civic life even as the Army was officially, on paper, moving toward integration.

President Truman had ordered the desegregation of the armed forces in nineteen forty-eight. The Army's implementation was neither swift nor uniform. The Killeen city school board voted to integrate its high school in nineteen fifty-six, two years after the Supreme Court's Brown decision and one year before the crisis at Little Rock.

Whether this was early or late depends on the measure. Dozens of smaller Texas towns integrated later; many larger ones held out longer. For a community whose economy had become entirely dependent on a federal military installation, perhaps the arithmetic of federal compliance was simply clearer here than elsewhere.

What is certain is that the town grew at a pace that made any static portrait obsolete within a decade. More than ninety-five new permanent commercial buildings went up between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty-one alone.