The firm, which included Lee Mason Fitzhugh (1877-1937) and Lester A. Byron (1889-1963), were designers of commercial, residential, and community buildings in Phoenix and around the state of Arizona from the 1910s through the mid-1930s.

[2][9][6] The school building, along with the land it sits on, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

[11] The school's alumni collected US$200,000, including a grant by the city's Parks and Recreation Board, to buy the building.

[9][11] A report by Phoenix NPR station KJZZ noted that the school campus could have been demolished, had efforts to save it fail to materialize.

[13][14] This will protect the school campus from demolition, as well as making the site eligible for city incentives to help with rehabilitation.

In 1950, two African Americans, Hayzel Burton Daniels and Carl Sims, were elected to the Arizona state legislature.

To end “separate-but-equal” once and for all, Daniels and two White attorneys, with the help of several Arizonan civil rights organizations, filed a lawsuit on June 9, 1952.

Segregation of African pupils by race has a detrimental effect on such African pupils, imparting to them a stigma of inferiority, retarding their educational and mental development, and depriving them of some of the benefits they would receive in an integrated school system.” [21]On February 8, 1953, Judge Struckmeyer ruled that the 1909 segregation law was unconstitutional, and that all high schools would have to integrate as soon as possible.

This was more than a year before the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

So on May 5, 1954, Superior Court Judge Charles Bernstein ruled in Heard v. Davis that all elementary school segregation in Arizona violated the 14th amendment.

[citation needed] Brown v. Board of Education was an important turning point of the Civil Rights movement.