This year’s TCU Homecoming festivities will include a special tribute to beloved Fort Worth educator and community leader Jennifer Giddings Brooks ’71 (MS ’74) — TCU’s first Black Homecoming Queen.
On Friday, Oct. 22, a portrait of Brooks will be unveiled at the Dee J. Kelly Alumni
& Visitors Center. During the Homecoming game on Saturday, she will be recognized
as the first Black Homecoming Queen and escorted onto the field with TCU’s 1995 and
1996 Coming Home Kings and Queens.
“I’m honored. It really is just a great feeling,” Brooks said. “I’m very seldom speechless, but when they called me, I really was speechless.”
When she was named Homecoming Queen in 1970, Brooks also felt honored and that the election symbolized acceptance by the TCU student community.
“One of the things that sometimes gets lost is, with everything that was happening in the world during that time, for TCU to be that school in the Southwest Conference to have the first Black Homecoming Queen, I think, provided some sense that TCU students are independent,” she said. “They have their own thoughts and feelings of who they want to represent them.”
The installation of the portrait fulfills one of the central goals of the Race & Reconciliation Initiative, which is to tell a more complete TCU story.
“It is rather uncanny that we find ourselves at the half-century mark since Jennifer
Giddings was elected the first Black Homecoming Queen,” said Frederick W. Gooding
Jr., RRI chair and the Dr. Ronald E. Moore Honors Professor of Humanities. “Yet, Dr.
Brooks’ trailblazing accomplishment did not come without personal cost or sacrifice.
She kept her head held high amidst an environment that was not always as graceful
as she was with regard to respecting her identity. Nonetheless, we remain appreciative
and wish to acknowledge this important part of our past; ’tis never too late to reconcile.”
The idea for the portrait came through RRI’s oral history project currently underway.
Brooks is one of more than 20 Horned Frogs being interviewed by postdoctoral fellow
Sylviane N. Greensword.
“One thing that we don’t see much at TCU is representation of some of the Black faculty
and alums who have had some of those breakthroughs,” Greensword said. “So we thought
what can we do to make Black achievements visible to the TCU community without being
simple tokenism? With Dr. Brooks’ story, it wasn’t hard to single her out as one of
the great achievers because of her accomplishments during and after her enrollment
at TCU.”
Brooks later earned her doctorate in education from Texas Women's University. Her career stretches from elementary school to higher education, including roles as principal of a high-performing inner-city school, the inaugural director of TCU’s Center for Urban Education and faculty member and founder/CEO of Brooks Educational Consultants.
Her extensive community involvement includes serving on the boards of Performing Arts Fort Worth, United Negro College Fund and Visit Fort Worth, the advisory boards of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and the Amon Carter Museum and the TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine’s Diversity Standing Committee. She has been honored as an Outstanding Woman of Fort Worth, an Outstanding Texan and with Bank of America’s Local Hero Award.
During the pandemic, Brooks used the extra downtime to spearhead efforts — via phone calls and Zoom meetings — to install two new historical markers on Fort Worth’s Heritage Trails. Markers honoring the Black Business District and the Black Medical District were unveiled Oct. 1.
She and her husband, Tarrant County Commissioner Roy Charles Brooks, have two adult children — Royce and Marion — who are both attorneys.
For Brooks, one of the things she’s celebrating about being “the first” in her homecoming honor at TCU is the doors it has opened for her to meet people, develop friendships, speak to groups such as incoming students and parents and serve as a mentor to many.
“My whole focus is: OK now we’ve gotten to this point,” she said. “What can we do to make life better for that next generation? How can I help them?”
Read more from Jennifer Giddings Brooks, in TCU Magazine.