The Guinns: A Century (and Then Some) of Service

They were a family who produced educators and physicians who served this community from late in the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century.

James Elvis Guinn II was born in Fort Worth in 1866 to James and Susan Guinn. Records indicate that father James may have served in the 18th Colored Infantry Regiment of the Union Army. A freed man after the war, he moved to Texas from Missouri. Son James was the oldest of eight children.

In 1880 the Guinns lived on East 6th Street. Father James was a laborer; mother Susan took in washing and ironing. By the 1880s the eastern edge of downtown had become the center of life for Fort Worth’s African Americans.

Parents James and Susan, who could not read or write, encouraged their son to get a good education. He attended Fort Worth’s few public schools for African Americans.

In 1886 son James married Emma Jeanette Patterson. The next year James and Emma had a son, Elvis Emmett Guinn.

James Guinn attended Central Tennessee College, a historically African-American college, in Nashville.

After graduation James became a school teacher in Fort Worth. Early on he may have taught at South Side Colored School, which had opened in 1894 on Arizona Avenue at Rosedale Street southeast of downtown.

But in the 1900 census James was a professor at Prairie View Normal and Industrial College, a college for African Americans in Waller County.

Later in 1900 Guinn returned to Fort Worth and became principal of South Side Colored School. He was the first African-American Fort Worth native to be named principal of a Fort Worth school.

Emma, like James, had attended Fort Worth schools for African Americans. She graduated from Prairie View and, like James, returned to Fort Worth to teach school. By 1902 she was teaching in the Marine school district, which would be absorbed by the city of North Fort Worth.

By 1905 Emma was the teacher of Yellow Row Public School. Yellow Row was an African-American enclave in North Fort Worth. Yellow Row was located south of Northwest 12th Street between the Cotton Belt tracks and the West Fork of the Trinity River near Oakwood Cemetery.

Superintendent of North Fort Worth schools was M. H. Moore, who would become superintendent (as would his son) of Fort Worth schools.

Meanwhile husband James was still principal of South Side Colored School, one of two Fort Worth schools for African Americans. Isaiah Milligan Terrell was principal of the other school, Ninth Street Colored School (School No. 11), located on East 9th Street. It taught grades one through eleven. Terrell’s wife Marcelite was the school’s supervisor of music. Alexander Hogg was superintendent of Fort Worth schools.

In 1907 the east-west Texas & Pacific railroad tracks were the educational equator for African-American students: Students living north of the tracks and high school and seventh-grade students living south of the tracks attended North Side Colored School on East 12th Street. Students of grades one through six living south of the tracks attended Guinn’s South Side Colored School.

In 1916 both James and Emma were principals.

James Elvis Guinn II died in 1917. The obituary notwithstanding, he was still principal of South Side Colored School.

Guinn is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

In 1918 South Side Colored School was renamed for Guinn when a new building, designed by Sanguinet and Staats, opened.

Long after James E. Guinn died, his wife taught at the school named for him. In 1944 she retired after teaching forty-five years.

Emma Guinn died in 1949.

This panel shows the evolution of Guinn’s school from the 1894 South Side Colored School to the  1918 Guinn school at the corner of Rosedale and Louisiana (I-35W displaced Louisiana Avenue in 1952). In 1927 an elementary school building (Clarkson) facing north was added beside the 1918 building. In 1937 a middle school building (Withers) facing east was added. Guinn’s name appears above the entrance of the middle school building.

This photo of 1971 shows all three buildings. The 1918 building was demolished in 1986.

The surviving Guinn buildings now house the city’s Business Assistance Center and the Accelerate DFW Foundation.

A portrait of James E. Guinn was unveiled at the middle school in 1964. (Photo from Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society.)

By 1930 the Guinn school had become the largest in the district for African-American students from kindergarten through eighth grade. By 1971 its enrollment was 57 percent white.

The Guinn school closed in 1980 as its students and students of Van Zandt Elementary School transferred to the new underground Van Zandt-Guinn School, built on the site of the Van Zandt school on Missouri Avenue.

The Van Zandt in “Van Zandt-Guinn School” was Isaac Van Zandt.

Trivia no. 1: Isaac Van Zandt was (1) was Sam Houston’s chargé d’affaires for the Republic of Texas in Washington, D.C. and helped negotiate the annexation of Texas in 1845 and (2) the great-great-grandfather of singer-songwriter John Townes Van Zandt.

Trivia no. 2: Van Zandt-Guinn School is named for (1) a man who owned slaves and (2) the son of a former slave.

Now the Guinn family story passes to the next generation. Elvis Emmett Guinn, the son of James Elvis and Emma Guinn, in 1915 married Eva Dillingham. Elvis Emmett worked for the Railway Mail Service. Eva attended the school named for her husband’s father and worked as a seamstress for Stripling’s department store.

Emmett Elvis and Eva had two sons:

James Elvis Guinn III was born in 1917 just weeks after his grandfather died. (Photo from Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society.)

Guinn attended the Guinn school, I. M. Terrell High School, and Prairie View.

In 1941 James Elvis Guinn III graduated from Meharry Medical College, a branch of Central Tennessee College, where his grandfather and namesake had graduated. Meharry was the first medical school in the South for African Americans. During World War II Guinn was promoted to the rank of captain and served as a surgeon at Camp Livingston in Louisiana.

In 1945 he returned to Fort Worth to open his medical practice.

Dr. Guinn was the first African-American physician to perform surgery at St. Joseph Hospital.

In 1950 he was the last physician to attend to William Madison (“Gooseneck Bill”) McDonald. The two men lived two blocks apart on East Terrell Avenue.

Dr. Guinn retired in 2007 at the age of eighty-nine.

James Elvis Guinn III died in 2009.

He is buried in Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery.

The second son of Elvis Emmett and Eva Guinn was born in 1925. Edward William Guinn attended James E. Guinn School and I. M. Terrell High School, graduating in 1941. He graduated from Prairie View in 1945 and joined the faculty of Prairie View as a chemistry professor before earning his medical degree from University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1956. He opened his practice in Fort Worth in 1958.

In 1965 Guinn ran for election to Fort Worth city council. He lost.

He ran again in 1967.

This time he won, becoming Fort Worth’s first African-American city council member.

In 1968 Dr. Edward Guinn moved from his home on Ramey Street in Stop 6 to the J. Merida Ellis  house in Rolling Hills.

Dr. Guinn served two terms on the city council.

Guinn, with his brother, continued to serve Fort Worth’s African-American community. In 1975 the Guinn brothers constituted one-third of the six African-American physicians in Fort Worth.

Edward William Guinn died August 28, 2018 at age ninety-three. At the time of his death he was still licensed to practice medicine.

Dr. Guinn was remembered as a man of his community.

Daughter Jamie Guinn told the Star-Telegram, “He was offered lucrative partnerships in Philadelphia where he did his internship and his residency. Instead he turned those down to set up a practice in underserved community.”
Former Star-Telegram columnist Bob Ray Sanders said he looked up to Guinn, who had taken an interest in Sanders throughout his life.
“Dr. Guinn was my hero—always has been, always will be,” Sanders said. “The fact that he came back to Fort Worth after medical school and set up an office in an underserved area of our community and never left it speaks volumes.”
Kelly Allen Gray, one of two African Americans on the city council in 2018, said, “Dr. Guinn literally paved the way for people like me to be able to serve the city I love. He ran in a very difficult time in the height of civil rights movement. He played an active role on the Human Relations Commission and actually laid some of the groundwork for the policies we still use today.”

Reby Cary, who had been the first African American elected to the Fort Worth school board in 1974 and later served as a state representative, praised Guinn.
“I always said he was a pioneer as the first black city councilman,” Cary said. “He set the stage for all of us to come along after him.”
Edward William Guinn, who served this community for sixty years and whose grandparents had begun serving this community in the 1890s, is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

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2 Responses to The Guinns: A Century (and Then Some) of Service

  1. Dan Washmon says:

    Interesting that the demolished 1918 Guinn school building looks very much like the demolished 1918 D.McRae building….

    • hometown says:

      You’re right, Dan. I had not made that connection. Apparently different architects–Sanguinet and Staats (Guinn) versus John J. Pollard (D. McRae). But architects tended to design in styles that were popular at the time.

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