Elk City, OK – Elk City’s non-profit hangout for teenagers will permanently close its doors Friday.
Chuck Hargrove, President of LTC, inc., made the announcement today on Facebook.
“It saddens me to post this! The Lincoln Teen Center will be permanently CLOSED this Friday!” Hargrove wrote. “The insurance company has dropped our liability insurance because of the age of our electric panel and wiring.”
He thanked all those who’ve donated to the teen center since 1999.
In its two-and-a-half decades, Lincoln Teen Center operated with funds provided by grants and donations.
Hargrove opened the Lincoln Teen Center at 1400 South Franklin 25 years ago in what remains of the former Lincoln School, Elk City’s school for Black students.
Sanctioned by the United States Supreme Court in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, first Oklahoma Territory, then the new state of Oklahoma, prohibited interracial public schools. In fact, for many decades, most aspects of Oklahoma life, including public education, would be segregated.
In the late 1920s, the Traders Cotton Compress was built here at 1600 S. Randall. Elk City’s Lincoln Community, centered at South Washington and Railroad Avenue, grew as many Black workers, attracted to cotton industry jobs in that compress and in a cotton oil mill located on East 7th Street, settled there.
Lane Elementary School was the community’s first school, and it began teaching students in the 1930-31 school year. The school would close for several weeks each year when it was time to gather cotton so that students could work.
The school’s name changed to Lincoln Elementary School in 1938, and the student enrollment that year was 65.
The Elk City Board of Education oversaw the Lincoln School, and in December 1938 the board bought the nearby one-room Ural School building and moved it to the Lincoln School in January. By the following July, an additional room was being built there, and other construction was underway.
The Lincoln School expansion project was a joint venture between Elk City Public Schools and the Works Progress Administration, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era agency that put millions of people to work.
The board also purchased nearly three acres of land for Lincoln School property, which was landscaped as part of the WPA project. A school water well was also dug.
Though the Lincoln School, which included secondary instruction, was always under the Elk City school board’s authority, the Lincoln Community didn’t formally become a part of Elk City until October 1951, a result of an annexation request.
Following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, Elk City Public Schools integrated.
Though the Lincoln junior high and high school students entered the newly-integrated “in-town” Elk City Schools in 1955, the Lincoln Elementary School remained open until the spring of 1965.
The last Lincoln High School class graduated two students in 1955—Kay Francis Bagby and Pearlie Mae Hastings.
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