Here in East Austin once spread the campus of Concordia University Texas, a Lutheran college opened in 1926 to serve this community. The institution was established during the same era that Austin's 1928 city plan was being drafted — a moment when the city was actively engineering racial segregation into its spatial geography. Concordia's founding reflects the East Austin educational landscape that emerged when the University of Texas remained exclusively white: separate institutions had to meet the needs of students excluded from the flagship university.
Concordia was founded as a Lutheran institution serving a predominantly German-heritage community in Texas, distinct from the city's Black and Latino colleges, but it shared the geographic fate of East Austin — placed east of the dividing line and serving populations the city's mainstream institutions either excluded or neglected. Concordia University Texas relocated in 2008 to a new campus in northeast Austin designed to serve a broader, more diverse student body. The original East Austin campus has been redeveloped, but its history speaks to the patchwork of educational institutions that arose in a city that denied equal access to its public university for more than half a century.