Neal, Arthur Gladstone. Photograph. Ancestry.com
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Arthur Gladstone Neal, Jr. entered UT in 1956.
Arthur Gladstone Neal was born April 25, 1895 to Robert P. Neal and Ella May Roberson Neal in Navasota, Texas. Neal’s mother was from Tennessee and his father had been enslaved in North Carolina as a child. Robert P. Neal’s enslavers found that Robert P. Neal was incredibly smart, and they taught him to read and write. After the Civil War, at the age 15, Robert P. Neal ran away and began to pursue his studies. In 1872, Robert P. Neal entered Fisk University and he received his B.A. in 1880 and his M.A. in 1888. After that Neal worked as a school principal several cities in Tennessee and later in Independence, Texas. Eventually Robert P. Neal became the Assistant Principal of Prairie View Normal and Industrial College. In 1894, Robert P. Neal opened a business in Navasota, Texas which did catering, was a general store, a filling station and a real estate office, all run out of the same building registered as E.M. Neal & Co., named for Gladstone’s mother Ella May Roberson Neal. The Neals had three children including Robert C. Neal and Arthur Gladstone Neal, and their oldest child died young.
Arthur worked for his parents in their general store since he was a teenager and took over running the family store in Navasota in 1894. In June 1918, Neal enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in World War I in France where attained the rank of Private 1st Class. He was discharged in March of 1919. Neal stayed close to home after that, helping his aging parents and worked his entire life in their store
His brother Robert C. Neal followed in his father’s footsteps went to Fisk University in 1910 and then to Howard University in where he completed a B.S. in 1916 and then in 1954 he completed an M.A. at Texas Southern University. Robert C. Fisk was principal of Bryan Colored High School for nearly 20 years.
In 1930, Arthur Gladstone Neal married Elizabeth Parker and in 1931, the couple welcomed their daughter Rubye Elizabeth Neal. Later, they welcomed two more sons, Robert Neal in 1934, and Arthur Gladstone Neal, Jr. in 1936. Both of the Neal sons attended college.
Neal attended George Washington Carver High School in Navasota as an adult. He was sixty-one years old when he entered UT in the Fall 1956, making him the oldest Black student among his cohort. He died fifteen years later in Houston, Texas on March 4, 1971.