Fort Worth: I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA

Before Fort Worth ever heard “Yakety Yak” blast from a car radio or “Respect” explode from a jukebox, King Curtis was a teenager in the halls of I.M. Terrell High School — blowing his way into history alongside a classmate named Ornette Coleman.

Built in 1882 as the city’s first Black school, I.M. Terrell was Fort Worth’s answer to what happens when you concentrate extraordinary talent in one building and tell it the rest of the world is closed. Curtis Ousley — born February 7, 1934 — started playing saxophone at twelve. By his Terrell years, he was already operating at a level that suggested the normal rules didn’t apply. He’d soon prove it by turning down college scholarships to join the Lionel Hampton Band.

Coleman, three years older, was finding his own path at Terrell — one that would eventually rewrite the grammar of jazz entirely. The two played in the same circles, breathing the same Fort Worth air, learning what it meant to push a horn past its supposed limits. Terrell didn’t just teach music. It taught ambition.

Today the building operates as the I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA, and a historical marker outside bears witness to what once happened here. For a deeper look at the neighborhood that made him, visit the Stop Six Heritage Center. King Curtis never made it back to Fort Worth — he died in New York in 1971, stabbed outside his own apartment at 37. But the sound he started building in these hallways is still on the radio. Fifty years on, it still sounds like nobody else.