The city of Houston was founded in the 1830s at the intersection of the Buffalo and White Oak Bayous, giving the city the name the "Bayou City." Like other Texas cities founded in a period of American settler colonialism and western expansion, Houston was at the intersection of the western frontier and Southern plantation slavery. During the Civil War in the 1860s, Houston was one of the only major cities in the Confederacy to avoid direct fighting and the destruction brought to much of slave-holding South, and thus the city remained relative prosperous throughout the war and was poised to experience rapid growth in the years after. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the city expanded, Houston became known as the "Magnolia City," reaching out all directions like the petals of a blooming magnolia flower. As the city grew, officials added a series of city wards, or political districts, to administer city operations. The future Northside community would be located north of downtown in the city's Fifth Ward.[1]

Decades after its founding, the city, once connected by the natural geography of bayous, was now connected by a growing web of railroads, a network that helped fuel 19th century American industrialization. By the 1880s, residential development began along the Southern Pacific Railroad in the Hardy Rail Yards in the city's Fifth Ward, in what was to become known as Houston's "Northside." From the beginning, the Northside was a working class community, settled initially by European immigrants building the city's railroads and then later by an increasing number of African Americans and Mexican immigrants.[2]

Boasting of the Northside's working class character, one community magazine remarked that after driving through the upper class and "finer residential sections" of the city he observed that "Not one hand did I see turned to useful toil..." However, on the Northside "the laboring man reigns supreme." Aside from the community's working class status, the magazine further emphasized the Northside's industrial might, noting that "Here on the North Side are to be found the smokestacks that have produced the skyscrapers of our great city. Here is produced the great bulk of the earnings that maintain the business of our city." The Southern Pacific Railroad, the South Texas Cotton Oil Company, the Houston Co-operative Manufacturing Company and the Western Metal Manufacturing Company were but a few of the industries in the Northside that the magazine proclaimed helped "make Houston the city of the South."[3]

Over the next forty years, the Northside's population grew to include a sizable number of African American families. In 1920, on Boundary Avenue, a few blocks from where Jefferson Davis High School would soon be built, the family of Henry Bell, a white steel worker, lived next door to the family of Archer Boyland, an African American Baptist preacher. And nearby, on Morris Avenue, Benjamin White, a Black coach cleaner for the railroad, lived next door to Sam Lasala, an Italian immigrant who also worked for the railroad as a carpenter. Through the late 1800s and into the 1920s, in a period of growing racial segregation, the Northside was one of the few areas of Houston where working class whites and African Americans lived together in the same community.[4]

Despite the integrated character of sections of the Northside, much of daily life remained racially segregated. In the summer of 1928, the children of white and Black Northside residents played at separate playgrounds. Throughout the 1920s and into the1930s, residential segregation became legally entrenched as real estate agencies and the federal government encouraged the policy of "redlining," designating racially coded labels to neighborhoods in order to systematically deny investment in Black, Brown and poor white areas. Redlining maps designated wealthy and exclusively white areas to the west of the Northside as "Still Desireable" [sic], but because of its racial diversity and working-class status, redline maps coded the Northside as "Definite Declining." Jefferson Davis High School would be built in the center of Houston's racial redlining, a policy that would set the stage for the evolution of the school and the surrounding community for the next century.[5]

From the 1920s through the 2020s, as the racial and demographic makeup of Houston's Northside community evolved from a predominately white community to a predominately Mexican American and African American community, its working-class character would remain intact. Institutions from churches to community centers would create the threads that would knit together the fabric of this community over the coming decades.