Hazel Harvey Peace

In 2009, the City of Fort Worth named its newest municipal building, the Hazel Harvey Peace Center for Neighborhoods, in honor of this local neighborhood advocate. In 2010, Fort Worth ISD opened the Hazel Harvey Peace Elementary School in southwest Fort Worth.

The Fort Worth Public Library held a public celebration for Peace's 100th birthday in 2007. She died on June 8, 2008, at the age of 100 and was buried alongside her husband at Cedar Hill Memorial Park in Arlington, Texas.

In 1992, Hazel Harvey Peace received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Texas Wesleyan University, and Fort Worth Public Library's youth center was named after her. In 2001, Peace participated as an Olympic torchbearer in advance of the Salt Lake City winter games. In 2007, the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science created an endowed professorship in children's library services in Peace's honor, the first in Texas to be named after an African American woman.

After retiring from I.M. Terrell, Peace worked in administrative positions at Bishop College and Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, and Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas. She retired from education in 1981.

Peace was presented with Fort Worth Human Relations Commission's Humanitarian Award in 1977 and 1985. In 1988, she received the United Way's Hercules Award. In 1987, she was nominated to the Texas Women's Hall of Fame, but ultimately not inducted.

Peace was known as the "matriarch" of I.M. Terrell High School, working there from 1924 until it was closed in 1972 due to court-ordered desegregation. She spent nearly 50 years at the school, first as a teacher, then as counselor, dean of girls, and, finally, vice principal. She taught whatever subject was needed, including English, drama, debate, and history. Peace launched a children's theater at I.M. Terrell, where kids from local black elementary schools could attend plays, as well as a debate club. Due in part to Peace's tireless efforts to make up for the segregated school's lack of resources, I.M. Terrell became known for the quality of its college-prep curriculum and for producing most of Fort Worth's black middle class. Known locally as a "monument to black accomplishment," jazz musician Ornette Coleman, Texas state legislator Reby Cary, Harvard professor James Cash, Jr., and legendary Fort Worth journalist Bob Ray Sanders are among Peace's former students.

She attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C., where she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first black sorority in the United States. Graduating in 1923, Peace returned to Fort Worth to teach at her alma mater, by then renamed I.M. Terrell High School, while still a teenager herself. Between school years, she attended summer classes at Columbia University in New York, living at the YWCA in Harlem during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. After earning her master's degree from Columbia, she continued her postgraduate education by taking summer courses at the University of Wisconsin, Vassar College, Hampton University, and Atlanta University.

Hazel Harvey married contractor Joe Peace (1908–1959), a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, in 1938. She never dropped her maiden name, always using her full name, Hazel Harvey Peace. The couple had no children, but she was nicknamed "Mama Hazel" by her students, whom she considered family.

Hazel Bernice Harvey Peace (August 4, 1907 – June 8, 2008) was an African-American educator, activist, and humanitarian in Fort Worth, Texas. The namesake of an elementary school, municipal building, and library youth center in Fort Worth, Peace overcame racial segregation to provide opportunities for African Americans, youth, and women in Fort Worth, Dallas, and throughout the state of Texas.

Hazel Bernice Harvey Peace was born August 4, 1907 in Waco, Texas to Allen H. and Georgia Mason Harvey; the family moved to Fort Worth three months later. Peace's father was a Pullman porter on the Missouri and Pacific Railroad, and her mother was a homemaker who also owned a children's clothing shop. An only child and considered a prodigy, Peace was reading at the age of four. She attended James E. Guinn Elementary School through sixth grade, then went to high school at the Fort Worth Colored School, graduating at the age of thirteen. An active reader, she spent much of her time at Fort Worth's segregated Carnegie Public Library, where she could check out books, but not stay and read them.