In the Lamar's early history, students were segregated into different schools by race. In 1967 the school had 2,040 students. Until 1970 HISD categorized Hispanic students as being White, so Jay P. Childers, author of "The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement", wrote that in terms of ethnic ratios, "Exact numbers for the late 1960s are impossible to calculate" for that reason. As evidence that non-Hispanic White students were the vast majority at that time, he used images from the school newspaper, "The Lancer".