Emma Shirley Henderson Wallace, a native of Waxahachie, Texas, was born in 1876 and attended Prairie View College before becoming a teacher in 1896. She taught in Tyler, Ellis County, and Jefferson County before moving to Orange in 1901 to become one of four teachers at Orange Colored School, then housed in the Salem Methodist and Mount Zion Missionary Baptist churches. She joined the Orange Public School faculty in 1914. Widowed after the death of Lofty Henderson, she married Anderson Wallace in the 1920s. After first serving as a teacher at Moton High School, named for educator Robert Russa Moton, she was appointed principal in 1933. During her 13 years of leadership, the campus gained a library, basketball and tennis courts, a band, choir, drama group, and student clubs, and in 1946 a drill corps was formed to support the school's longtime Dragons football team. That same year, at the request of the Moton School Parent-Teacher Association, the school was renamed Emma H. Wallace High School in her honor. She retired from Orange public schools in 1952, was active in Mount Zion Baptist Church, the Civic Betterment League, the Order of the Eastern Star, and other organizations, moved to Dallas in 1959, and died there in 1968. The Orange community continued to honor her memory for her dedication to educating the youth of its African American community and for her devotion to her pupils' success.