Founded in 1925, it was the first African-American (then labeled the "Colored" or "Negro") vocational-technical public high school) then established in the State of Maryland.

After several other name changes, building locations and curriculum variations, the emergent alumni, faculty and concerned citizens, with the help of the local "Baltimore Afro-American" newspaper campaigned for the "Negro High School" to have its own new building which was constructed in 1924–1925, on a city block at Carey and Baker Streets, in West Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood.

new Dunbar High on the other east side of town also received an art deco style building by the early 1930s.

The result was the establishment of two Vocational-Technical High Schools, with Carver Vo-Tech at Prestman Street on the west side and the newly merged old Boys and Samuel Gompers into a new Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, being built two years later in 1955 on Hillen Road.

Beginning in the Fall of 1954, following that May's Supreme Court decision of "Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas", Baltimore's "colored schools" system was dismantled gradually but increasingly year by year during the rest of the decade of the 1950s with small numbers of black students entering all the city's neighborhood/regional public high schools.