1 Mortimer J. Adler helped inform my sense of what were the great books of the world. His Great Ideas from the Great Books (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), came into my hands by way of the library of my high school philosophy teacher, John Conway. As for UT ranking at the top of my list of universities, it rated so highly because I knew that my uncle, Grant Saint Julian Jr., was one of the first Negroes to attend the school as a microbiology graduate student. He became a scientist, and from as young as I can remember he represented for me the finest living example of an educated person. I should note here that throughout this book I deploy the wide variety of names used to denote people of African descent in the United States of America: niggers, n/Negroes, coloreds, blacks, Afro-Americans, African Americans, and New Africans both in direct quotations and in my own text. My approach is sometimes synchronic and at other times idiosyncratic. If the reader is flexible and good humored, no confusion at all should occur.

2 E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3 Mark Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925- 1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Mark Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4 Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

5 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), is an important classic written by the Texas-based sociologist Henry Allen Bullock. He wrote the book after becoming a faculty member at UT and following a long career at Prairie View A&M University.

6 Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (New York: Verso, 1995), 18.

7 The late Prairie View A&M historian George Ruble Woolfolk described a Kulturkampf, or cultural struggle, between the Anglo-Protestant and Latino-Catholic regimes, with Africans caught in the middle. See Woolfolk, The Free Negro in Texas, 1800-1860: A Study in Cultural Compromise (Ann Arbor: University Microform, 1966), 12-35.

8 Gratz v. Bollinger, 122 F. Supp. 2d 811 (E.D. Mich. 2000); Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 97-CV-75928-DT, 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3256 (E.D. Mich. Mar. 27, 2001); Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 518 U.S. 1033 (1996); Johnson v. Bd. of Regents, 263 F.3d 1234 (11th Cir. 2001); Smith v. University of Washington Law School, 233 F.3d 1188 (9th Cir. 2000), cert. denied, 69 U.S.L.W. 3593 (U.S. May 29, 2001) (No. 00-1341). Justice Lewis F. Powell’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), represents the controlling law that all the above cases seek to overturn. In Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of race as a “plus factor” in higher education admissions, holding that “the interest of diversity is compelling in the context of a university’s admissions program,” because it contributes to “the robust exchange of ideas” (ibid., at 314-15). Justice Powell relied on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Sweatt v. Painter in his finding that “our tradition and experience lend support to the view that the contribution of diversity is substantial,” particularly in the area of legal education. Heman Sweatt certainly felt that diversity was a substantive value; had he not, he would never have sued to enter the UT School of Law.

1 Juneteenth is the name black Texans gave to their 19 June emancipation day celebration that marks the day in 1865 when a military officer at Galveston announced the news of the end of chattel enslavement.

2 Frederick Eby, The Development of Education in Texas (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 266.

3 On the forty acres issue, see Amilcar Shabazz, “Land, Reparations and the Freedpeople: Some Lessons of History,” in The Forty Acres Documents (Baton Rouge: House of Songhay, 1994). For the Texas state constitution, see C. R. Granberry and Helen Avery, Texas Legislative Manual: 45th Legislature (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1937), 66. For his hypothesis as to why Texas legislators wrote Article 7, see Alton Hornsby Jr., “The ‘Colored Branch University” Issue in Texas—Prelude to Sweatt vs. Painter,” Journal of Negro History 76 (April 1973): 51. Although his opinion of the effect of the South Carolina higher educational experience is plausible, Hornsby offers no citations to support it. The University of South Carolina had two blacks on its board of regents from as early as 1869 and accepted black people as students and as faculty members from 1873 to 1877. See Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 232-33, and George Brown Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900 (1952; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 18, 227, 291-92.

4 On Alta Vista’s fitness for farming, see Henry C. Dethloff, A Centennial History of Texas A&M University, 1876-1976, vol. 1 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1975), 312. Dethloff notes that Alta Vista’s land turned out to be more suitable for agriculture than that of the main A&M branch in College Station. For summaries of the legal and institutional history of higher education in Texas, see Texas Legislative Council, Higher Education Survey, Part I (Austin: Texas Legislative Council, 1951), 1-19; and Graham Blackstock, Staff Monograph on Higher Education for Negroes in Texas (Austin: Texas Legislative Council, November 1950), 1-11.

5 Dethloff, Centennial History of Texas A&M, 313. On Alta Vista’s failing “completely” and blacks of the 1870s having “not the faintest notion of scientific farming,” see Eby, Development of Education in Texas, 274-75.

6 Cuney’s statements are quoted from Maud Cuney Hare, Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People (1913; reprint, Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1968), 37-38.

7 Cuney’s daughter also resisted the rituals of white supremacy. In 1897, as a talented pianist who had studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music and a pupil of Edmund Ludwig in Austin, Maud Cuney Hare refused to hold a recital at the Austin Opera House because its management insisted that colored members of the audience sit in the balcony away from whites. She and Ludwig canceled the engagement and instead performed at the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute, where the demeaning requirement of segregated seating would not be practiced. See Hare, Norris Wright Cuney, 32-33, 214-15. On Cuney as a “strong” but compromised black leader, see Merline Pitre, Through Many Dangers Toils & Snares: Black Leadership in Texas, 1870-1890, 2d rev. ed. (Austin: Eakin Press, 1997), 211, 215-16.

8 David A. Williams, “The History of Higher Education for Black Texans, 1872- 1977” (Ed.D. diss., Baylor University, 1978), ch. 2, and George Ruble Woolfolk, Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience, 1878-1946 (New York: Pageant Press, 1962), ch. 5, discuss the struggle for the constitutional “colored” university.

9 Lawrence D. Rice, The Negro in Texas: 1874-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 209, 239.

10 In surveying the relevant literature, no works adequately address the development of public education in Texas. Rice, Negro in Texas; Eby, Development of Education in Texas; and C. E. Evans, The Story of Texas Schools (Austin: Steck, 1955), particularly fail to show how black Texans contributed to the growth of public education; James M. Smallwood, Time of Hope, Time of Despair: Black Texans during Reconstruction (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981), 68-95, does, however, give it some attention.

11 See Barry A. Crouch, The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Texans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), ch. 2, and William Lee Richter, “The Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865-1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1971), 192. Additionally, Kiddoo founded a school at Galveston that educated African American troops in the area and produced several teachers who stayed in Texas after their muster-out.

12 Richter, “Army in Texas during Reconstruction,” 193.

13 Smallwood, Time of Hope, 94. Diane Neal and Thomas Kremm, “ ‘What Shall We Do with the Negro?’: The Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas,” East Texas Historical Journal 27 (Fall 1989): 30, found that total black enrollment was 6,449.

14 From “An Act of the United States Congress,” 30 March 1870, quoted in Graham Blackstock, Staff Monograph on Higher Education for Negroes in Texas (Austin: Texas Legislative Council, 1951), 2-3.

15 Charles W. Ramsdell, Reconstruction in Texas (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1910), 300.

16 From “An Act of the Texas Legislature,” 6 February 1884, quoted in Blackstock, Higher Education for Negroes (1951), 5. Barry A. Crouch and L. J. Schultz, “Crisis in Color: Racial Separation in Texas during Reconstruction,” in African Americans and the Emergence of Segregation, 1865-1900 (New York: Garland, 1994), 49, write that racial hierarchy and separation in Texas “did not wait until the decade of Plessy vs. Ferguson to solidify. Rather, it was a basic fact of life during the years 1865 to 1877.” The “basic fact” emerged because of specific actions of certain whites that certain blacks did there best to contest.

17 My analysis differs sharply at points from Lawrence Rice’s conclusions in his Negro in Texas, 276-80. Until 1896, whites correctly interpreted black demands for equal rights as a desire for social integration and racial equality, despite the frequent denials of leaders like Cuney. There is no evidence to prove that black Texans “accepted” an inferior caste status in the social structure of the state and nation. Thus, the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine was “out of harmony” with the “racial mores of the South” to the extent that black southerners were recognized as a part of the South. The construction of blacks as slaves, as a class, and as a caste subordinate to whites has always been contested and was never accepted on an ontological level. The efforts of blacks to oppose white hegemony have had their high tides and low ebbs, but the challenge to historians is to discern why and how patterns of resistance succeed or fail and not to declare some cut-off score at which the conclusion is drawn that all blacks then believed in the white view of their innate, biological, intellectual, or cultural inferiority to whites.

18 Harrison Beckett’s Works Progress Administration interview is in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, supp. 2, ser. 2, vol. 2, Texas Narratives, pt. 1 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 230-32.

19 Ibid., vol. 6, pt. 5, 1951.

20 The order “spread like wildfire in Texas,” after Texas legislator David Abner Jr. founded the first lodge on 13 January 1879. See Charles Brooks, The Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of the Odd Fellows in America (Freeport: Libraries Press, 1971), 150, and J. Mason Brewer, Negro Legislators of Texas (Austin: Pemberton, 1970), 42.

21 Quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 566.

22 Rawick, ed., American Slave, suppl. 2, ser. 2, vol. 6, Texas Narratives, pt. 5, 2344.

23 Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), provides a sociological model for analyzing the historical context of blacks in Texas between 1865 and 1965. The model has been criticized on many grounds, one crucial deficiency being its failure to account for so-called upward mobility for some blacks inside the internal colony. I embrace its language here because it emphasizes the conquest and enslavement experience and a racial labor principle that put black workers at a special disadvantage in global terms.

24 Sources on the CTSAT include Vernon McDaniel, History of the Teachers State Association of Texas (Washington: National Education Association, 1977), 145, and Melvin J. Banks, “The Pursuit of Equality: The Movement for First Class Citizenship among Negroes in Texas” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1962).

25 Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” Up from Slavery (1900; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1963), 156. On the CTSAT, see the “Report of a Committee on Industrial Education” quoted in Eby, Development of Education in Texas, 271.

26 Eby, Development of Education in Texas, 270-73. Population figures are taken from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population in the United States, 1790-1915 (1918; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 36.

27 A portion of the bibliography in William Riley Davis, The Development and Present Status of Negro Education in East Texas (1934; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1972), 139-45, provides a reliable compendium of the reports and bulletins of federal, state, institutional, and philanthropic organizations on education, especially higher education for blacks in Texas, up to 1932.

28 Thomas Jesse Jones was the director of research for the Phelp-Stokes Fund. On his “critical attack upon black higher education,” see James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 250-51; see also his discussion of the influence of industrial philanthropy, such as the General Education Board, on black institutions of higher learning (245-78). On the founding of the Division of Negro Education, see Bruce Glasrud, “Black Texans, 1900-1930: A History” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Technological College, 1969), 243.

29 Artemisia Bowden, “Education, Negro,” in Walter Prescott Webb, ed., The Handbook of Texas, vol. 1 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952), 544-45. C. E. Evans, The Story of Texas Schools (Austin: Steck, 1955), 252, notes that the legislature granted the State Board of Education no more than “advisory authority” over the board of directors of the Agricultural and Mechanical College; this limited the DNE’s power to improve conditions at Prairie View in particular and the higher education of blacks in general.

30 George A. Works, Texas Educational Survey Report, vol. 8 (Austin: Texas Educational Survey Commission, 1925), 218.

31 Ibid., 1:247-48.

32 Anderson, Education of Blacks, elaborates on the board’s overall view of “negro” higher education in the South. He stresses how the board favored the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education and favored a drastic reduction in the number of public and private institutions trying to provide blacks with an opportunity for higher education. Many of the recommendations of the Survey, by way of Favrot, were consistent with Anderson’s observations.

33 L. D. Coffman et al., Texas Educational Survey Report: Higher Education, vol. 6 (Austin: Texas Educational Survey Commission, 1925), 73.

34 Woolfolk, Prairie View, 228-31. See also Dethloff, Centennial History of Texas A&M, 321.

35 Arthur Klein, Survey of Negro Colleges and Universities, Bulletin, no. 7 (Washington: GPO, 1929), 3.

36 Dethloff, Centennial History of Texas A&M, 321; see also Woolfolk, Prairie View, 236-41, for more on the Klein survey and his follow-up survey of 1930 (specifically focused on land-grant colleges), and Prairie View principal Banks’s use of the Conference of Presidents of Negro Land-Grant Colleges to help convince A&M officials of his sense of Prairie View’s needs.

37 See Woolfolk, Prairie View, 244-58, on the “North-South pivot,” that is to say, the purposes that Banks would seek to satisfy through spearheading a variety of conferences at his college.

38 Proceedings of the First Annual Session of the Conference on Education for Negroes in Texas (Prairie View: Prairie View Standard, 1930), 5.

39 Proceedings of the Eighth Educational Conference (Prairie View: Prairie View College State Normal and Industrial, November 1932), 5.

40 Woolfolk, Prairie View, 268, discusses how Bullock, among others, would receive fellowships from groups like the General Education Board. In exchange, Banks or his representative attended conferences these groups held or the college supplied the “constant request from field agents of critical professional information” and other data. A near complete list of the studies and bulletins from all of the annual conferences up to 1941 was published in Proceedings of the Eleventh Educational Conference (Hempstead: Prairie View College Press, November 1940), 6.

41 See Eleventh Educational Conference, 3.

42 Eighth Educational Conference, 6.

43 Ibid., 11-12.

44 Ibid., 19.

45 Ibid., 25, 69.

46 Eby, Development of Education in Texas; he was also noted for his Education in Texas Source Materials (Austin: University of Texas, 1918).

47 Frederick H. Eby, “History of the Development and Expansion of Public Education in Texas,” in Eighth Educational Conference, 16-17.

48 I. Q. Hurdle, “The Program of the State Association for Colored Teachers and Its Effectiveness in Increasing the Availability of Education for Negroes in Texas,” in Eighth Educational Conference, 86. On the CTSAT’s complete slogan, see McDaniel, Teachers State Association, 145.

49 Hurdle, “Program of the State Association for Colored Teachers,” 86. Hurdle’s admonition that members of the teaching profession “be sure to cultivate the habit of love for people” is indicative of a contrasting function of black education to white and of a black-white difference in mentality. The teacher as a source of affection and empathy was central to the existence of “Negro Education as a Way of Life,” as Henry Allen Bullock puts it in History of Negro Education, 147-66. Bullock’s discussion, despite its many limitations, is one of the most suggestive interpretations available of the segregated black school’s role in shaping an antisegregation, antiracist social movement. He termed the school-based process of counter-hegemonic production, that is to say, of creating “uppity” Negroes, “a school system in unconscious rebellion” (157, 160-66). The analysis presented here departs in a substantial way from Bullock’s interpretation. He exaggerates the over-determination of the economic structure to a point that it becomes difficult to see how black schools contributed, as he argues they did, to the production of anticaste social revolutionaries. He is inspiring, however, in his attempt to contextualize the dissident function of black higher education.

50 Hurdle, “Program of the State Association for Colored Teachers,” 86.

51 On the influence of the “classical sociological view of social movements” on the contextualization of the “black freedom struggle” in historical literature, see Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in Charles W. Eagles, ed., The Civil Rights Movement in America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 19-32. Carson usefully suggests that historians view civil rights in a larger historical context.

52 Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood: KTO Press, 1979), ix.

53 Ibid., 235.

54 It is likely that many schoolteachers supported the movement. McDaniel, Teachers State Association, 33-34, 145-53, indicates that the legal campaign against the white primary was of great concern to the CTSAT.

55 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington: GPO, 1904), 392, 396; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the U.S. Taken in the Year 1910, Occupation Statistics (Washington: GPO, 1914), 520-22; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the U.S. Taken in the Year 1920 4, Occupations (Washington: GPO, 1923), 1022-25; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the U.S.: 1930 4, Occupations, by States (Washington: GPO, 1933), 1582-84; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the U.S.: 1940 3, The Labor Force, pt. 5 (Washington: GPO, 1943), 488, 492.

56 Hamilton may have learned of the unsuccessful Hocutt case, in which a black student sought admission to the law school at the University of North Carolina in 1933, but there is no evidence that he was inspired by the incident. He may just as well have read about West Virginia’s enactment of a measure in 1933 that provided assistance to blacks who had to leave the state for graduate and professional education.

57 J. Mason Brewer, Heralding Dawn (Dallas: Mathis Publishing, 1936), 17.

58 On the DNCC, see Marvin Dulaney, “What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in Dallas, Texas?,” in John Dittmer, George C. Wright, and W. Marvin Dulaney, Essays on the American Civil Rights Movement, ed. W. Marvin Dulaney and Kathleen Underwood (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1993), 70. While the Klan had declined considerably by 1926, it still exerted influence in Dallas and elsewhere in Texas into the 1930s. See Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), ch. 6. “In March 1931,” wrote Jackson, “fourteen armed Knights abducted and flogged two Communist organizers in Dallas for making speeches against Jim Crow (segregation) laws and the lynching of Negroes” (80).

59 Smith has not yet received the full-length biographical treatment he deserves, but one source on this important leader is a sketch in Effie Kaye Adams, Tall Black Texans: Men of Courage (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1972), 22-27; the Antonio Maceo Smith Papers are in the possession of his widow, Ms. Fannie Smith of Dallas. See Dulaney, “What Happened,” 92 n. 12, on the DNCC’s hiring of Smith.

60 Adams, Tall Black Texans, 23.

61 Michael L. Gillette, “The Rise of the NAACP in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (April 1978): 393-94.

62 See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 59, 62, and 294-95 n. 13, for information on TCIC activities that Ames led; namely, state support for a home or “training school” for delinquent black girls, the erection of a tuberculosis hospital, the securing of greater services for blacks from the state Department of Health, and a drive for adoption of textbooks on black history. On the rise of the CIC in response to the cutting off of communication between the races, considered an “insidious” product of the Progressive era’s perfecting of segregation, see Jack Temple Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 179.

63 R. T. Hamilton, “Resolution Presented Inter-racial Commission at Prairie View,” UTPOR, group VF 18/C.

64 All letters and documents in UTPOR. All of the letters are dated 11 March 1936, except for the one to Virginia, dated 29 June 1936.

65 “Proposed Bill,” UTPOR, avoided any mention of race by referring to “such persons” unable to pursue certain courses of studies offered at the University of Texas or some other state-supported institution “because of provisions of Section 7 of Article VII of the Constitution of Texas.” The draft bill authorized the appropriation of $15,000 each year from 1937 to 1939 for out-of-state tuition assistance.

66 Banks, “Pursuit of Equality,” 400, states that the new graduate division was established “to forestall a suit.” There is, however, no evidence that such a suit was seriously impending in 1937 or that state legislators acted in reaction to such a concern.

67 Banks, “Pursuit of Equality,” 359 n. 144. The quotation is from Neil Gary Sapper, “A Survey of the History of the Black People of Texas, 1930-1954” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1972), 358 n. 143. Sapper states that Hamilton and other school-aid-campaign supporters did not trust the lobbyist who drafted the bill and guaranteed its passage for an additional $3,000.

68 “Negro Education,” Dallas Dispatch, 1 March 1937.

69 “Dallas Negroes Ask State Aid for Education,” Dallas Express, 26 February 1937. Evidence has not been found to substantiate the claim that Hamilton and the editor of the Dallas Dispatch made that most of the faculty members of the black colleges of Texas had come from the North. Hamilton’s estimate of 97 percent, however, might not have been too badly exaggerated, if he had said that most black faculty members had received some part of their education in a northern school. See Michael R. Heintze, Private Black Colleges in Texas, 1865-1954 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 120-26.

70 “An Appropriation that Should Be Voted,” Dallas Times Herald, 27 February 1937.

71 HI, 5 June 1937, 1-2. Spurred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Gaines case (see Chapter 2), in early 1939, Governor James Allred called for the legislature to pass the student assistance bill. See Sapper, “Survey,” 360-61.

72 Larry D. Hill and Robert A. Calvert, “The University of Texas Extension Services and Progressivism,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 86 (October 1982): 253. The authors point out an element of hypocrisy when they write that “in spite of avowed nonelitism, progressivist extension services for many years generally did not encompass black schools” (231 n. 1). To be sure, Texas segregationists left the matter in the hands of Prairie View and the other black colleges; but they must have overlooked the effect that inadequate funding had on the ability of these colleges to reach the black population.

73 Sapper, “Survey,” 360.

74 Quoted in Michael L. Gillette, “Blacks Challenge the White University,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 86 (October 1982): 321.

75 Ibid., 321-22. See also Sapper, “Survey,” 360.

76 Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938).

77 Jessie P. Guzman, Twenty Years of Court Decisions Affecting Higher Education in the South, 1938-1958 (Tuskegee, Ala.: Tuskegee Institute, 1960), 3-4.

78 R. T. Hamilton, “Professional Training Problem of Negroes,” Dallas Times Herald, 31 December 1938.

79 “Scholarship Funds Inadequate; Negroes May Enter A. & M. College,” Dallas Express, 22 April 1939.

80 Murphy to President, 15 January 1939; Hayes to George E. Bethel; Goss to J. W. Calhoun; and Jackson to Registrar, 6 March 1939, all UTPOR.

81 Dallas Express, 9 September 1939, 1, and 16 December 1939, 3.

82 Brewer, Heralding Dawn, 17.

83 John Lee Brooks, “J. Mason Brewer,” in ibid., 3.

84 Brewer, Heralding Dawn, 20-21.

85 Henry Allen Bullock, “Negro Higher and Professional Education in Texas,” Journal of Negro Education 18 (Summer 1948): 380-81.

1 Several works examine the legal struggle against segregation. Among the most important studies are Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Also see Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); M. M. Chambers, The Colleges and the Courts, 1946-50 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); Loren Miller, The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro (New York: Pantheon, 1966); Ozie H. Johnson, Price of Freedom (n.p., 1954); and Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

2 Abram Harris and Sterling Spero provided this ideological quartet in their essay “The Negro Problem,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 11, ed. E. Sebigmann and A. Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 346. See William Darity Jr., ed., Race, Radicalism, and Reform: Selected Papers, Abram L. Harris (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 14-21, for a succinct overview of these contending social philosophies as Harris analyzed them. Typologies are always fraught with difficulties, but I prefer Harris’s framework to the three “trends” in John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Cell identified accommodation, confrontation, and separation as the major responses to segregation of blacks in the United States and South Africa. Accommodation corresponds to the interracial conciliation position used here; confrontation corresponds less neatly to the civil libertarianism and class consciousness positions; and separation represents a part or a potential part of the militant race consciousness position.

3 An insightful article on the Second World War as a “watershed” in modern black history is Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History 55 (June 1968): 90-106. For the concept of ideology that helps guide the present work, see Martin Seliger, The Marxist Conception of Ideology: A Critical Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). He defines what he termed the “inclusive conception” of ideology as “[The] sets of factual and moral propositions which serve to posit, explain and justify ends and means of organized social action, especially political action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, destroy or rebuild any given order” (1).

4 Banks was undoubtedly one of the most powerful men of color in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s. He exercised his power cautiously and constructively. Unfortunately, no biography exists of him nor is he included in a collective biography of black college presidents during his era. Much of his memory remains in legend and folklore and, of course, the built environment at Prairie View. His style may be suitably epitomized by an anecdote of undetermined origin or veracity. It goes that Banks discovered a young faculty member sitting with his legs propped up reading an edition of Academe. He asked the man if he was an employee of the college, to which the scholar came to attention and answered in the affirmative. Banks, who had clearly seen what the man was reading, told him to stop wasting time and that if he had nothing better to do to go and move some boxes that were in the corridor.

5 George R. Woolfolk, “W. R. Banks: Public College Educator,” in Alwyn Barr and Robert A. Calvert, eds., Black Leaders: Texans for Their Times (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1981), 132. Also see Woolfolk’s discussion of how Banks got the principalship of Prairie View. He states that there was an attempt by a group of blacks to “smear” Banks as a radical by pointing to his “ties to Du Bois” (135). To debunk this effort to derail his candidacy for the Prairie View job, Woolfolk writes, Banks wrote a series of letters to A&M president T. O. Walton, “claiming closeness to Booker T. Washington.” I have been unable to find these letters. Walton did not leave his papers at Texas A&M, and their whereabouts are unknown.

6 HI, July 19, 1941, 15. See also Neil Gary Sapper, “A Survey of the History of the Black People of Texas, 1930-1954” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1972), 403-4.

7 Woolfolk, “W. R. Banks,” 147-48; quotation on page 147.

8 T. S. Montgomery, The Senior Colleges for Negroes in Texas: A Study Made at the Direction of the Bi-Racial Conference on Education for Negroes in Texas (n.p., April 1944), 4. The meeting took place in the Senate chamber of the Texas state capitol.

9 Montgomery, Senior Colleges, 12. Brown’s scholarly output is interesting, but there is little biographical material on this Texas woman. In 1939, when Congress directed the U.S. Office of Education to make a study of the higher education of blacks, she was selected to join the survey staff as senior specialist in social studies. In the resulting four-volume work called the National Survey of the Higher Education of Negroes, Brown authored the first volume, titled Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems (Washington: GPO, 1942). The BCNET’s generous use of all four volumes, especially Brown’s, attests both to the work’s methodological strength and to its neutrality toward segregation. Brown did, however, present a strongly analytical and critical discussion of American race relations, the content of which moved John W. Studebaker, U.S. commissioner of education, to submit a draft of the chapter to a panel of scholars for their criticisms. UT had three members on the panel: President Rainey, Robert Sutherland (director of the Hogg Foundation), and Mary Decherd (assistant professor of pure mathematics). Noted anthropologists Melville Herskovits and W. Lloyd Warner, as well as the eminent Howard Odum, director of the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Research in Social Science, were the best-known white scholars that were sent drafts of Brown’s second chapter. Black scholars invited to critique her work were Charles Thompson, dean of Howard University’s College of Liberal Arts and editor of the Journal of Negro Education (arguably one of the most important scholarly periodicals produced by blacks in that period); Charles S. Johnson, director of Fisk University’s Department of Social Science; and John W. Davis, president of West Virginia State College. Will W. Alexander, Jackson Davis, Frances C. McLester, and John Pomfret were the other invited critics. Brown explained that two roads lay before America: integration of the Negro or the perfection of a racially balkanized, antidemocratic nation-state such as what loomed on the South African horizon. She endorsed the preservation of democracy in America by the elimination of the “nonrational” barriers to social mobility the white majority imposed on blacks. Negro integration into American life, Brown insisted, would “not come about as a result of fiat or force” and could not “be achieved either rapidly or by arbitrary methods, and any great progress toward such a goal must, perhaps, be counted by generations rather than by years.” See Brown, Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems, 20.

10 Montgomery, Senior Colleges, 12-13. It is ironic but customary that Montgomery chose to cite the white managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Mark Ethridge, for a summation of black aspirations and desires and for black folks’ ideological position on race, national identity, miscegenation, and the political economic order. The citation also appears to have been gratuitous, since this passage closely resembles Brown, Socio-Economic Approach, 19-20.

11 Montgomery, Senior Colleges, 83-84.

12 Orville Bullington to John A. Lomax, 7 January 1944, “The Homer Rainey Controversy” file, John A. Lomax Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin. That an educated man like Bullington would send out a letter with “Negro” consistently spelled in lowercase form can only be taken as additional evidence of the contempt in which he held people of African descent. On antidiscrimination provisions in government contracts, especially concerning the U.S. Navy, see Dennis D. Nelson, The Integration of the Negro into the U.S. Navy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951); John W. Davis, “The Negro in the United States Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard,” Journal of Negro Education 12 (Summer 1943): 348; and Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Blacks in the Military (New York: Free Press, 1986).

13 The black press became self-consciously militant during the years of the Second World War, more than at any other time in the first half of the twentieth century. The reference to white supremacists as “American Hitlers” was quite common. Such a reference appears in HI, 5 November 1938. The black conservative and iconoclastic columnist George Schuyler stated flatly: “Our war is not against Hitler in Europe, but against Hitlers in America” (quoted in Dalfiume, “ ‘Forgotten Years,”’ 94). See also Lee Finkle, “The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest during World War II,” Journal of American History 60 (December 1973): 692-713, and Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” Journal of American History 58 (December 1971): 661-81. Sitkoff notes that the NAACP repeatedly compared “Hitlerism with American racism” (665) and encouraged blacks to protest Jim Crowism at every chance. Dorie Miller was killed in action on the Liscome Bay aircraft carrier when a Japanese torpedo tore into its aft on 24 November 1943. See Effie Kaye Adams, Tall Black Texans: Men of Courage (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1972), 113-15.

14 Montgomery, Senior Colleges, 84.

15 Ibid. For a discussion of the regional education program, see Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, ed., The Negro Year Book, 1952: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life (New York: Wise & Co., 1952), 231-35.

16 Montgomery, Senior Colleges, 85.

17 Ibid., 87.

18 Woolfolk, “W. R. Banks,” 149.

19 Woolfolk notes that Rhoads was a contender for the principalship of Prairie View but the A&M board of directors passed over him in favor of Banks (ibid., 134). On the two men’s educational background, see Woolfolk on Banks in ibid., 132; see also Vernon McDaniel, History of the Teachers State Association of Texas (Washington: National Education Association, 1977), 127. Apparently, Michael R. Heintze, in Private Black Colleges in Texas, 1865-1954 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), erred or meant an honorary degree where he credits Banks as earning an master’s degree from Paul Quinn College in 1922. Quinn was “striving” to get the Texas State college examiner to recognize its four-year programs and had no graduate degree offerings whatsoever. On Paul Quinn College, see Arthur J. Klein’s study for the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Education, Survey of Negro Colleges and Universities, Bulletin no. 7 (Washington: GPO, 1929), 856-65. Klein chided the college for granting “a very excessive number of honorary degrees” (862). In 1924-25 the college conferred twelve honorary doctor of divinity degrees but granted fewer than that in academic degrees. Banks may have gotten such a degree in like manner.

20 On Hamilton, see Tempie Virginia Strange, “The Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce: A Study of a Negro Institution” (M.A. thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1945), 10, 12-13, 58, 174, 243-44.

21 See McDaniel, Teachers State Association, 49-51, and Melvin J. Banks, “The Pursuit of Equality: The Movement for First Class Citizenship among Negroes in Texas, 1920-1950” (D.S.S. diss., Syracuse University, 1962), 347-401.

22 Sources on the Texas CODE include McDaniel, Teachers State Association, 41- 42, and Banks, “Pursuit of Equality,” 354-64, which notes that CODE “planned the strategy” while the NAACP supplied “legal advice and defense” and that TCNO acted as the “spearhead and shock absorber” of the University Movement and the fight to equalize the salaries of black and white public school teachers (363).

23 For information on Wesley, see Nancy Ruth Eckols Bessent, “The Publisher: A Biography of Carter Wesley” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1981), 125-68. In 1940, moreover, Wesley added the influential Dallas Express to his chain of papers.

24 Charles Hamilton Houston, “Statement on the University Cases,” II-A-29, NAACP Papers.

25 Walter White, “Keynote Address,” 1941 Annual Conference, II-A-30, NAACP Papers.

26 Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 122.

27 NAACP Youth Section Resolution, 1941 Conference, II-A-30, NAACP Papers.

28 A. Maceo Smith to Marshall, 9 April 1945, II-A-147, NAACP Papers.

29 The Texas Primary Case refers to Smith v. Allwright (the lawsuit of a black dentist in Houston, Lonnie Smith—of no relation to A. Maceo Smith), which ended in the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that blacks could not be barred from voting in the Democratic Party primary. See Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood: KTO Press, 1979), 222-25.

30 HI, 6 January 1945; HP, 31 May 1945. On the Permanent University Fund, see Berte R. Haigh, Land, Oil, and Education (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1986), especially 296, where it is noted that UT and Texas A&M split the proceeds from the fund on a two-thirds and one-third basis, respectively; David F. Prindle, “Oil and the Permanent University Fund: The Early Years,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 86 (October 1982): 277-98, is useful on some of the machinations of the UT regents in relation to the fund and how Texas A&M got into the honey pot, but it is silent on the legislature’s refusal to permit Prairie View to obtain some revenues.

31 Merline Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lula B. White and the NAACP, 1900- 1957 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1999), ch. 5; “Black Houstonians and the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine: Carter W. Wesley versus Lulu B. White,” Houston Review 12 (1990): 23-36.

32 Tushnet, NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 107-9. Kluger, Simple Justice, 523, presents Thurgood Marshall as vacillating on the timing of a direct-assault strategy against segregated education as late as 1951.

33 Founded in 1919, the CIC was the South’s premier interracial organization for nearly two decades. It successfully attracted support from a small constituency of white southerners in locales where the NAACP garnered little or none. In November 1943, however, it was voted out of existence. Remnant branches of the organization in Texas cities like Houston continued functioning into the 1950s, although they were more of a function in a meeting sense than actual organizing or work projects, even after they went on record opposing segregation. See “Elimination of Segregation Stressed during Party of Interracial Commission,” HI, 29 January 1949, for a description of the 1949 annual meeting of the Texas CIC. See also Raymond Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884-1970 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977), 146, and David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 40-43.

34 Wesley to Marshall, 11 August 1943, Wesley File, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

35 Southern Regional Council, The Southern Regional Council: Its Origin and Purposes (Atlanta: SRC, 1944), 4. See also George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 719, where he states that credit for the idea of a black summit should go to a white woman, Jessie Daniel Ames, who “prodded” Hancock to call for the Durham conference. Gavins, Perils and Prospects, 117-19, and Hall, Revolt against Chivalry, suggest that Hancock was already thinking along the lines of a conference independent of Ames.

36 Wesley to Marshall, 11 August and 25 October 1943, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

37 Wesley to Attorneys A. P. Tureaud et al., 1 May 1945, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

38 Wesley to Marshall, 12 July 1945, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

39 Marshall to Wesley, 16 July 1945, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

40 Marshall to Wesley, 17 December 1943 and 28 January 1944, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

41 Wesley to Marshall, 28 January 1944 and 3 September 1945, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

42 Marshall to Wesley, 21 August 1945, II-B-218, NAACP Papers. In the same file, see also Wesley to Marshall, 3 September 1945; Wesley notes that Marshall’s summary “substantially states the agreement we made.” He goes on to chide Marshall for being a “turn-coat” sending out “a damn fool directive . . . calculated to set up two organizations” when “a straightforward letter” to Wesley would have drawn the SNC-EEO’s “pre-acknowledgement” that it would not “curtail the field of operation of the NAACP” (Marshall to Wesley, 26 September 1945, ibid.). The special counsel replied in a testy manner to Wesley: “I told you that I was wrong in sending out the memorandum without personally acquainting you with the fact. I told you personally I was wrong, and you continue to remind me that I was wrong. What do you want, an affidavit?” He also noted that there was no “good plaintiff for the law school,” and he suggested starting a case at the primary or secondary school level.

43 Marshall to Byrd, 15 April 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers. Marshall wrote Byrd two days after the conference, apparently believing that the meeting was scheduled for 20 April. In Byrd to Marshall, 18 April 1946, ibid., Byrd replied that he “didn’t think much of” the conference. “The committee sppears [sic] to be weak and poorly organized and uncertain as to what steps to take next,” wrote Byrd. He continued, “I feel that if Carter Wesley steps down as President, and he insists upon stepping down, this will be the end of the Committee.” He also observed that the SNC-EEO went on record commending the NAACP for taking action in Texas with the Sweatt case and in a school case in Texarkana, as well as in Kentucky “and other communities spear heading the attack for equal educational facilities.”

44 Open letter from Smith and Wesley to Friend, 3 September 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

45 Lulu White to Walter White, handwritten note on Smith and Wesley’s open letter, stamped 14 September 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers. White stated, “I know full well [the TNCEE] is Maceo’s idea. He has attempted before for a compromise.” Among other factors, what infuriated Lulu White was Smith and Wesley using a mailing list she regarded as the private property of the NAACP. Given Smith’s role as an executive officer and spearhead in both the TCNO and Texas State Conference of NAACP Branches, White’s perception may have been blurred by her fury. Whether her charge of their unauthorized use of NAACP property was merely a low blow or a valid complaint, Wesley and Smith saw no impropriety in their conduct.

46 Walter White to Marshall, 12 September 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

47 Marshall to Wesley, 18 October 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

48 White to Marshall, 11 December 1946, II-C-193, NAACP Papers.

49 “The Colossal Fraud,” HI, 7 December 1946. The sociologist Henry Allen Bullock was a columnist for Wesley’s papers. He wrote strident articles challenging Prairie View officials to not involve the school in makeshift arrangements that would make it “a Benedict Arnold of Negro education.” See HI, 30 March 1946.

50 “Quit Kidding,” HI, 14 December 1946 and 28 December 1946; Pitre, “Black Houstonians,” 31-32.

51 When Lulu White finally resigned as Houston branch executive secretary in June of 1949, she stated that the time had come to “OBEY” her husband as she had vowed at their marriage to do until death did they part. “We must recognize [Wesley] to be the enemy that he is,” she bitterly wrote in letter of resignation published in full in Wesley’s paper. See “NAACP Sec’y Quits,” HI, 18 June 1949.

52 A biographical study of Julius White would make interesting and enlightening reading. Two historians use “truculent” to describe him. See Michael L. Gillette, “The Rise of the NAACP in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (April 1978): 409, and Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory, 207. The fullest account of White can be found in Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow.

53 Walter White to Marshall, 30 December 1946 and 6 January 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

54 “NAACP Sec’y Quits,” HI, 18 June 1949.

55 Wesley to Jones, 2 January 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

56 Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee, Texas NAACP, 18 December 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers. The defendants’ claim that they would open in Houston a Negro law school by 1 February satisfied Archer that the separate-but-equal doctrine had been upheld.

57 Wesley to Marshall, 23 December 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers. In this letter Wesley stated that the TNCEE and TNCO were one and the same organization by “gentlemen’s agreement” between him and A. Maceo Smith. To the extent that Wesley is accurate in this claim, Tushnet, NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 107, is far off the mark in his idea that the conference “existed almost exclusively on paper.” Indeed, it existed in the dollars, sweat, and tears of scores of the Lone Star State’s most influential black leaders and activists. “Jester to Address Negroes of Austin,” 22 March 1947, Informer, indicated the existence of a county branch of the TNCEE, the Travis County Association for the Equalization of Educational Opportunities. The association sponsored a mass rally and invited Governor Beauford Jester to the Dorie Miller Auditorium to speak on the Texas University for Negroes “among other vital topics.”

58 Marshall to Wesley, White to Wesley, 27 December 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

59 Wesley to Marshall, Wesley to White, 30 December 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

60 White to Marshall, 6 January 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

61 Marshall to Wesley (draft), 6 January 1947; Wilkins to Marshall, 7 January 1947; Marshall to Wilkins (memo), 7 January 1947; Marshall to Wesley, 7 January 1947; all in II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

62 Wesley to Marshall, 9 January 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

63 Marshall to Wesley, 13 January 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

64 Wesley to Local Branch (Houston) NAACP, 17 January 1947; Wesley to Marshall, 18 January 1947; Marshall to Wesley, 22 January 1947; all in II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

65 Nabrit to Wesley, 30 January 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

66 Marshall to Wesley, 5 February 1947, and Wesley to Marshall, 13 February 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers. The NAACP did not count Wesley out altogether. When called upon to send a congratulatory note on the seventh anniversary of Wesley’s New Orleans Informer, Walter White had a letter drafted for his signature hailing the paper as carrying out the “sacred duty” of “uncompromisingly” focusing “attention upon the discrepancies in our nation between the democratic ideal and democratic fact.” See White to Harrington, 26 April 1947, and White to Wesley, 6 May 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

67 Memorandum to Gloster B. Current from Thurgood Marshall, 8 July 1947, Marshall File, NAACP Papers.

68 Alan Scott, “Twenty-Five Years of Opinion on Integration in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 48 (September 1967): 158. Gale L. Barchus, “The Dynamics of Black Demands and White Responses for Negro Higher Education in the State of Texas, 1945-1950” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1970), 21-22, notes that the poll was published widely in Texas newspapers. He does not provide a citation for the poll data he furnishes but does state that “trained colored interviewers” were used so that black respondents would be encouraged to report their true opinions.

69 HP, 11 and 12 February 1947; Barchus, “Dynamics of Black Demands,” 23- 24.

70 “Segregation Intensifies Suspicion and Distrust, Sociologist Asserts in Sweatt Hearing at Austin,” HI, 17 May 1947. See also Barchus, “Dynamics of Black Demands,” 33-34; Sweatt v. Painter, Transcript of Records, U.S. Supreme Court (October 1948), 189-208; and DMN, 15 May 1947. On the emergence of an antiracist and antisegregation argument among American social scientists, see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an American Idea (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 409-30, 453-57. Despite the paucity of commentary on Redfield’s appearance as an expert witness in the Sweatt case, The Social Uses of Social Science: The Papers of Robert Redfield, edited by Margaret Park Redfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), has two articles, particularly Redfield’s 1946 piece, ”Race and Religion in Selective Admission,” that help reveal his political and ethical concerns. He criticized quotas that limited the numbers of Jews admitted to graduate and professional schools and also gave strong support to the black struggle to democratize higher education: “It is notorious that educational facilities offered Negroes are inferior to those provided for whites,” he wrote. “The Gaines decision is now eight years old, but it will not be claimed that Negroes find ready for them everywhere state institutions of higher learning and professional training equal to those open to whites. . . . Decisions of the Supreme Court have given legal recognition to local practices of segregation, but they have not made racial or religious discrimination lawful. It is the duty of every citizen to work to overcome such discrimination” (174).

71 “NAACP Sets Stage to Enter Hearne Suit,” HI, 27 September 1947.

72 R. M. Blocker, Arthur Mack, General Washington, C. G. Jennings, Luell Mack, and J. Wesley Simms, “Petition of the Negro Citizens Committee of Hearne, Texas,” II-B-147, NAACP Papers.

73 A. Maceo Smith to Lulu White, 14 August 1947, II-B-147, NAACP Papers.

74 Ray Osborne, “Negro Pupils Quit Classes: White School Denies Hearne Girl Entry,” DMN, 18 September 1947.

75 The communication between Sanchez and Marshall is suggestive of a heretofore unexamined connection between the Mexican American legal work against segregated education and the NAACP’s work, which reached a watershed with the Brown ruling in 1954. Sanchez held that the testimony of experts so effectively used in the Mendez case might be useful to the NAACP legal effort. “Our segregation suit,” he boasted, “was won before we went to Court!” If there had been a trial, he explained, “we had certain procedures in mind that would have gone a long way toward proving our case. All these may have some value to you in your field.” Al Wirin initiated the correspondence between Sanchez and Marshall. The NAACP special counsel stated he would contact Sanchez on his next trip to Texas. See Sanchez to Marshall, 6 July 1948, and Marshall to Sanchez, 14 July 1948, II-A-147, NAACP Papers.

76 A. Maceo Smith to Carrie Mack, 19 October 1948 and 5 May 1949, II-B-147, NAACP Papers. Smith to Marshall, 22 October 1948, II-B-147, NAACP Papers, reveals some of the problems and plans, at least in Smith’s mind, for carrying forward the Hearne suit and preparing the way for the launching of suits in “other centers.” The Hearne schools did not begin to desegregate until twenty-five years later.

77 Tushnet, NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 152.

78 Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy,” 671. It has been twenty years since any historian has looked over and dug into the Beaumont Race Riot of 1943, but the need and opportunity for research on the event and the larger issue of domestic terrorism is pressing. See James A. Burran, “Violence in an ‘Arsenal of Democracy’: The Beaumont Race Riot, 1943,” East Texas Historical Journal 14 (Spring 1976): 43, and James Olson and Sharon Phair, “The Anatomy of a Race Riot, 1943,” Texana 11 (Spring 1973): 64-72.

79 On the Negro Goodwill Council of Beaumont, see Nancy Dailey, “History of the Beaumont, Texas, Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1918-1970” (M.A. thesis, Lamar University, 1971), 45-46. See also Amilcar Shabazz, “The Desegregation of Lamar State College of Technology: An Analysis of Race and Education in Southeast Texas” (M.A. thesis, Lamar University, 1990), 76-81, on the black branch of Lamar; and Amilcar Shabazz, “The African-American Educational Legacy in Beaumont, Texas: A Preliminary Analysis,” Texas Gulf Coast Historical and Biographical Record 27 (1991): 73-74, on the education of blacks in Beaumont after 1948.

80 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 313, 497-99, 511, and 512, offers a picture of Marshall as chivied by Du Bois and his anticolonial and socialist agenda draining precious pennies from NAACP funds.

81 “Strutting Across the Stage,” HI, 12 July 1947; “We Query the NAACP,” HI, 5 September 1947.

82 Marshall, “Preliminary Statement,” 5 September 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

83 Marshall to Martin, 3 October 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

84 Marshall to Wesley, 3 October 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

85 Marshall to Wesley, 16 October 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

86 Wesley to Marshall, 27 October 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

87 See Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in The Civil Rights Movement in America, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 19-32.

88 Marshall to Wesley, 6 December 1947, II-B-218, NAACP Papers.

89 See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 335, 345, on Du Bois’s 1934 flack with the NAACP, and 534, for the 1948 falling out. Wesley published Du Bois’s “My Relations with the NAACP” in the Houston Informer in two parts beginning in the 27 October 1948 weekly issue. The quote is from the 30 October 1948 issue. See Howard Jones, The Red Diary: A Chronological History of Black Americans in Houston and Some Neighboring Harris County Communities (Austin: Nortex Press, 1991), 160, on Du Bois’s lecture in Houston. Greater research is needed on his appearance at TSUN and his relationship with Wesley.

90 Barchus, “Dynamics of Black Demands,” 53-54, is the only source for this debate and is a problematic one. Barchus cites as his source an article in the 26 February 1948 issue of the Houston Informer. In that year, however, HI, which always came out on Tuesdays and Saturdays, was published on 28 February 1948. I studied this issue carefully using microfilmed editions of the paper at both the University of Houston and Houston Metropolitan Research Center. I found no article discussing such a debate. An issue of HI did appear on 26 February 1949, but the microfilmed edition at both libraries was incomplete for that date. Barchus’s citation error does not suggest that the debate never occurred. It seems likely, however, that it occurred in 1949; Barchus’s account must be relied on until a copy of the article is located. An added problem arises from Barchus furnishing only the last name, Shaw, as the co-debater with Wesley. An educated guess would identify Charles Shaw as the person he meant. Shaw is profiled in Andrew Webster Jackson, A Sure Foundation (Houston: A. W. Jackson, 1940), 25-27.

1 Michael L. Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas, 1937-1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1984), 25-27.

2 See Michael L. Gillette, “Heman Marion Sweatt: Civil Rights Plaintiff,” in Black Leaders: Texans for their Times, ed. Alwyn Barr and Robert A. Calvert (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1981), 175-77, and Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 126-36.

3 On Sweatt’s becoming the “test case,” see Gillette, “Heman Marion Sweatt,” 158-61, and “Heman Sweatt Twenty-Five Years Later: The Price and the Product of Black Efforts to Integrate White Institutions,” 13 August 1973, from the private papers of Albert H. Miller, in possession of the author. Professor Miller shared these papers with me when I was a student in his course “The History and Philosophy of Education” at the University of Houston.

4 “Texas Prexy Asked to Admit Negro Student,” HD, 9 March 1946.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.; see also Gillette, “Heman Marion Sweatt,” 167-68.

7 “Sweatt Denied Entry to University of Texas: Sellers, Stevenson Say Negroes Must Have Law Training,” HI, 23 March 1946.

8 The Texas A&M makeshift was located in Houston at 409½ Milam Street in the McDonald, or U.B.F., Building. The lawyers involved with W. R. Banks in this scheme were Henry Stuart Davis and W. M. C. Dickson, who had practiced law from his office on Milam for almost forty years after completing studies at Boston University in 1907. See HI, 7 December 1946; HP, 28 November 1946; and Gale L. Barchus, “The Dynamics of Black Demands and White Responses for Negro Higher Education in the State of Texas, 1945-1950” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1970), 15-16. For information on Dickson and Davis, see Carter Wesley, “Archer Welches, Marshall Argues, Sweatt Appeals,” HI, 21 December 1946.

9 Newspaper article clipping, “Class of ‘50’ Starts Work: Only One Chair Needed as Law School Opens,” II-A-147, NAACP Papers.

10 HD, 9 March 1946.

11 Tom Allen, “Lone Negro Law Student Resigned to Segregation,” Daily Texan, 25 September 1947; Sweatt to Marshall, 21 September 1947, and Marshall to Carl Murphy, 30 September 1947, NAACP Papers. Carl Murphy was editor of the Afro-American newspaper from 1922 to 1967. He and Marshall were frequent correspondents.

12 See Howard Jones, The Red Diary: A Chronological History of Black Americans in Houston and Some Neighboring Harris County Communities (Austin: Nortex Press, 1991), 182-83; Michael L. Gillette, “Blacks Challenge the White University,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 86 (October 1982): 344; and William Henry Kellar, Make Haste Slowly: Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 89-92, for Doyle’s involvement in Houston’s major integration cases. Also, Marshall to Murphy, 30 September 1947, NAACP Papers, shows the special counsel’s indignant attitude toward Doyle: “He should have added [to his analogy about accepting segregation] that while the white people will be eating the breast, the thigh and the other good portions of the chicken in the house, he is not only eating in the backyard, but his eating is limited to the neck and the feet.” Marshall probably discloses here more about his view of segregated legal education than what Doyle actually experienced. In 1970, Gale Barchus, a graduate student at UT, interviewed Doyle for his master’s thesis. Doyle reported to him that he felt he got a “good education,” perhaps even a better one than the white students on the Forty Acres. As proof for his contention, he cited the individualized attention and the ability to recite and have in-depth discussions on points of law with his professors (among the best at the law school). In his first year at the makeshift law and graduate center at Austin, Fornie Brown and Heaulin Lott were his classmates. They did not join him when the classes were relocated to the Houston campus, whereupon he became the first black man to get a law degree inside the state of Texas. Lott, however, was co-counsel on the Houston city schools desegregation suit. On Doyle’s involvement in the cafeteria desegregation case, see Barchus, “Dynamics of Black Demands,” 45-47.

13 Painter to Davis, 16 May 1947, and Davis to Painter, 24 March 1947, UTPOR, VF 18/C.

14 Morton is profiled in Effie Kaye Adams, Tall Black Texans: Men of Courage (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1972), 91-93.

15 Craft to Wilkins, 27 April 1946; Morton to Smith, 3 December 1946; Marion C. Ladwig to Walter White, 4 April 1947; all in II-B-193, NAACP Papers.

16 Thurgood Marshall wrote to Carter Wesley that “the position taken by the students of the University of Texas to my mind is one of the most important vantages we have yet run across” (Marshall to Wesley, 20 December 1946, II-B-218, NAACP Papers). In Wesley to Marshall, 23 December 1946, ibid., the publisher, wishing to downplay the importance of the UT student supporters as evidence of the need for the NAACP to have exclusive control of the movement, commented that he did not “care what the students of the University of Texas said, did, promised, or may do.” He felt the UT students “were fighting for a principle, not for the NAACP or for Sweatt individually.” Marshall in a letter to Donald Jones, 29 October 1947, ibid., revealed a more race-conscious position: “I have been told about the white students of the University of Texas forming a chapter of the NAACP, as if that had some mysterious power in it. Brother, the NAACP still depends on the masses of Negroes, and it will get that support in proportion as it serves them, and as it cooperates with the leaders throughout the state.” See also “UT Student Joins Youth Council in Protest against Two-Room Law School Here,” HI, 14 December 1946, which focuses on student leader John W. Stanford. Marion Ladwig fingered Stanford as a member of the communist club or “cell” at UT. He contended that there were three cells in Austin: a weak and unorganized one at Samuel Huston College, which may have involved J. H. Morton Jr., son of the NAACP Austin branch president; a small one at UT composed of “some of the most active, sincere, capable leaders” from various UT student groups, and a strong one in downtown Austin (Ladwig, “Misguided Talents,” Speech to the Wesley Foundation, University Methodist Church, 13 April 1947, Austin File, II-B-193, NAACP Papers). For the reaction of Austin branch leaders to the UT campus chapter’s political developments, see DeWitty to Walter White, 1 April 1947, Ladwig to Walter White, 4 April 1947, and Ladwig to Gloster Current, 12 April 1947, ibid. Apparently, the controversy between Ladwig, the UT college chapter, and the Austin branch led Gloster Current, director of branches, to draft a new policy governing the relationship between college chapters and local branches, giving the former complete autonomy from the latter; see Memorandum from Current to Walter White et al., 12 April 1947, ibid.

17 Smith to Morton, 12 December 1947, II-B-193, NAACP Papers.

18 Durham to Smith, 9 December 1948, II-B-193, NAACP Papers.

19 In Austin, beside the aforementioned application of Ben Davis, a school teacher named Veola Hicks Young applied to UT for graduate work in counseling psychology; see Painter to R. O’Hara Lanier, 26 November 1948, UTPOR, VF 18/C. Although the lawsuit of black dentists Everett H. Givens and James H. Carlock (who intervened and made it a class-action suit) demanded the establishment of a black dental school over desegregation of the school for whites in Houston, it nevertheless added to the charged atmosphere in Austin; see Givens v. Woodward 207 S.W. 2nd 234. From Marshall, Texas College education professor J. Nathaniel Nelum applied for work through UT’s Extension Division. Painter informed him that UT had arranged to offer classes to “qualified Negroes” on a contract basis with TSUN; see Nelum to Painter, 2 March 1948, VF 18/C, UTPOR, and Painter to Nelum, 10 March 1948, ibid. A white challenge to segregation at TSUN came in the form of an application from Jack Coffman, “a white citizen of Houston, who represents that he is a social science major from Penn College, Oscaloosa, Iowa, desires to be admitted to the Texas State University for Negroes for the purpose of taking courses in social science”; see Attorney General Price Daniel to TSUN Board of Directors, Opinion No. V-645, 31 July 1948, II-B-205, NAACP Papers. Another white, Harold Schachter, applied to TSUN later that year, and the TSUN Board denied him admission on the grounds of the V-645 opinion. The names Coffman and Schachter suggest that both these whites were Jews. In the latter case, the student may have been a member of the Houston Youth Council of the NAACP; see “NAACP Youth Council Protests Exclusion of Whites from Texas State University,” HI, 22 January 1949. Black-Jewish relations, especially the development of Afro-Jewish cooperation regarding the problem of segregation and civil rights, are virtually an uninvestigated area in Texas history. The involvement of Coffman and Schachter in the antisegregation struggle is likely evidence for the need and opportunity for research in the area.

20 “What the Regions Are Doing,” Southwest, Crisis (April 1949): 119.

21 Morton quoted in “37 Negroes May Seek to Enter UT,” Daily Texan, 27 April 1949; see also Crisis (June 1949): 183-85, and the photograph on page 220 in Crisis (July 1949).

22 Virginia Forbes, “UT Refuses Admission to 33 Negro Students: College Seniors Seek Graduate School Entry,” Austin Statesman, 27 April 1949.

23 Kirk quoted in “35 Placard-Carrying Negroes Are Refused Admission to UT,” Daily Texan, 28 April 1949 (from “Integration Scrapbook,” Center for American Studies, University of Texas); Forbes, “UT Refuses.”

24 See George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 101-20. Green noted that while Jester would make speeches about “racial purity,” he was unlike other governors during what he calls “the primitive years” of Texas politics: “Jester would sit down and talk with black political activists” (120). He would sit, but he never deigned to offer a chair to his black visitors. Neil Gary Sapper (“A Survey of the History of the Black People of Texas, 1930-1954” [Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1972], 155-56) argued that Jester’s meeting with five members of the TCNO “elicited hope among black Texans” (156). On another black delegation that Jester received, the Negro Goodwill Council of Beaumont, see Nancy Dailey, “History of the Beaumont, Texas, Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1918-1970” (M.A. thesis, Lamar University, 1971), 46. On the Fifty-first Legislature, see Rupert N. Richardson, Ernest Wallace, and Adrian Anderson, Texas: The Lone Star State, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1981), 422-25.

25 Arthur DeWitty, “State Medical School to Enroll Herman Barnett,” HI, 27 August 1949. See also Painter to Barnett, 18 August 1949, UTPOR.

26 Craig F. Cullinan to Painter, 11 February 1948, UTPOR; attached to this cover letter is a duplicate of the original contract dated 24 January 1948. Copies of contracts that extend this agreement are in the same file; see also letters of request from TSUN president R. O’Hara Lanier to Painter, 15 September 1948, 30 April 1949, ibid.

27 On the opening of the Houston Negro Hospital, see Howard Jones, Red Diary, 88-89. John O. King, Joseph Stephen Cullinan: A Study of Leadership in the Texas Petroleum Industry, 1897-1937 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970), 214, observed that the Pennsylvania oilman made the $80,000 endowment as a memorial to his eldest son, John Halm Cullinan, who died in 1920 of a pulmonary ailment. In 1937, Cullinan, the child of Irish immigrants, died and left as the largest charitable bequest in his will $524,000 to the Houston Negro Hospital.

28 Leake to Painter, 26 August 1946, UTPOR. At the time Leake wrote this letter he was fifty years old, had a stellar reputation in the field of pharmacology and in the history of medicine, and was a well-respected and well-connected medical educator and administrator. He accommodated white southerners’ peculiar oppression of blacks but probably had misgivings over barring the admission of qualified black students from UTMB. See “Conversations with Chauncey Leake, Sr. Founder and Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco,” University of California, San Francisco Campus History Project, in Chauncey Leake Papers, Moody Medical Library, Blocker History of Medicine Collection, UTMB, Galveston, Texas. Of particular interest is M. Rita Carroll’s interviews with Leake conducted between November 1976 and April 1977 in which he recollects his involvement in the desegregation of UTMB (107-9, 113).

29 Cullinan to Painter, 13 July 1949, UTPOR.

30 Green dubbed the political elite that dominated state governance since 1939 the “Establishment” in his Establishment in Texas Politics, 3-10. By this moniker, Green attempts to finesse the liberal-conservative ideological dichotomy that V. O. Key Jr. (Southern Politics [New York: Vintage, 1949], 255) contended had “real meaning” in the one-party Democratic politics of Texas. His description of a provincial, paternalistic, reactionary, individualistic, anticommunist, pro-Ku Klux Klan, moralistic, anti-New Deal Anglo-Texan ruling class oversimplifies but remains useful as a starting point for analyzing mid-twentieth-century politics in the Lone Star State.

31 Cullinan to Painter, 13 July 1949, and the reply letter from Painter to Cullinan, 15 July 1949, UTPOR.

32 In the 1930s and early 1940s, Barnett could have been inspired by the examples of aviators of other ethnic groups but few from his own. Bessie Coleman, a native Texan who obtained her pilot’s license in France in 1921 but died in 1926 at thirty-four years of age, may have captured young Barnett’s imagination. See Ruthe Winegarten, Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 155-57. Also, the close proximity of San Antonio, where Barnett went for his high school education, very likely brought him in contact with airmen and the idea of flying since the city was home to a large military air base.

33 Wylma White Barnett, interview by author, 16 July 1995. On Tuskegee airmen see Charles Dryden, A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997); Robert J. Jakeman, The Divided Skies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992); and William Wolf, “USAAF Pilot Training in World War II,” Historical Aviation Album 16 (1980).

34 Barnett interview.

35 “Says Time Ripe for Negroes to Enter Texas Med School,” Informer, 12 March 1949.

36 “NAACP Hails First Break in U. of Texas Jim Crow,” Press Release, 26 August 1949, NAACP Papers.

37 DeWitty, “State Medical School.”

38 Barnett interview; R. O’Hara Lanier to D. Bailey Calvin, 10 September 1949, UTPOR; R. O’Hara Lanier to C. D. Leake, 21 October 1949, UTPOR. Barnett’s widow noted that her husband’s erstwhile lab partner apparently took the experience with Barnett to heart such that many decades later, when he died, his survivors had the act recorded in his obituary as one of the most important moments in his life. She also recalled that a white woman of some wealth in Galveston wrote out a blank check in Barnett’s name for him to use when he needed something for his education and did not have the money for it. Barnett appreciated the gesture but never used the check (“Conversation with Chauncey Leake,” 107).

39 Barnett interview.

40 Barnett to Morton, 19 November 1949, NAACP Papers.

41 Quoted in “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront: Southwest Region, Barnett Regular Student,” Crisis (December 1950): 727-28. Carter Wesley’s Informer broke the story of the VA tuition imbroglio in “TSU Pays for Barnett! Segregation Costs up $6000 for State,” Informer, 14 October 1950. The VA’s nonpayment of Barnett’s tuition (and another black veteran’s tuition in the 1950-51 school year) resulted from a “legal technicality.” The VA paid tuition to a university only for courses listed in its official catalog. TSUN had no medical courses in its catalog because it had no medical school. The VA could not pay UTMB directly the tuition because it did not recognize the enrollment of Barnett nor any other black student. TSUN chairman of the board W. R. Banks had no quarrel with TSUN paying the $3,000 per-year sum per black student attending UTMB on a contract basis. “Why we’ll simply have to pay it,” Banks stated, “We don’t see why we should expect the federal government to take care of a state obligation.”

42 “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” 727-28.

43 Barnett interview. In “Conversations with Chauncey Leake,” 107, Leake remembered the standing ovation for Barnett, whom he referred to as an “excellent man. He did well.”

44 “Conversations with Chauncey Leake,” 108; Barnett interview; “Will the Brutal Beating of Dr. Barnett Be Whitewashed?” Informer, 18 July 1953.

45 “TSU Pays for Barnett!”; “Houstonian to Enter U. of Texas Medical School,” Informer, 10 July 1954. McMillan did not complete her studies at UT. She went on and finished at Meharry in 1959.

46 Lanier to Painter, 9 January 1950, UTPOR.

47 Painter’s assurance that he would maintain segregation was reported in “Negro Student Due to Begin Study at U. of T. in Austin,” HC, 9 January 1950. Luciel Decker to Theophilus Painter, 9 January 1950, UTPOR.

48 Painter to Decker, 3 February 1950, UTPOR.

49 Brogan to Painter, 24 January 1950, UTPOR.

50 Omega Psi Phi fraternity to Painter, 21 January 1950, UTPOR. There is no evidence that Painter ever replied to the fraternity’s letter.

51 Kirk to Dolley, 3 February 1950; Simmons to Smith, 4 February 1950; Dolley to Professor H. A. Calkins et al., 15 February 1950, all in UTPOR. The other faculty members were W. E. Gettys, H. E. Moore, E. S. Redford, C. A. Timm, and O. D. Weeks.

52 “Negro Enters, Quits Texas U.,” NYT, 7 February 1950. Kirk to Dolley, 7 February 1950, and McCown to Kirk, 9 February 1950, UTPOR.

53 Kirk to McCown, 15 February 1950, UTPOR.

54 French F. Stone to Kirk, 2 March 1950, UTPOR; on Kirk’s ultimate graduation from UT, see Alwyn Barr, Black Texans (Austin: Jenkins, 1973), 215; for an example of an antisegregation fight Kirk led to victory, see “Austin City Council Opens Library Facilities to Negroes,” HI, 5 January 1952; and on the imbroglio created after the Associated Press reported that Kirk had approved of the resolution of the Kansas Board of Education that upheld noncompliance with the Supreme Court’s finding in Brown, see “State School Board Hedges on Stopping Jim Crow in Schools,” HD, 17 July 1954, and “Texas,” SSN, September 1954, 11.

55 “Let’s Not,” Time, 27 March 1950.

1 Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities (New York: Norton, 1973); George Fuermann, Reluctant Empire (New York: Doubleday, 1957); and George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), discuss Texas in the fifties and sixties and briefly treat themes such as white supremacy and racial politics. However, “the period since 1954 is particularly in need of historical treatment,” writes Alwyn Barr, “Black Texans,” in A Guide to the History of Texas, ed. Light Townsend Cummins and Alvin R. Bailey Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 121; also on this point, see Alwyn Barr, “African Americans in Texas: From Stereotypes to Diverse Roles,” in Texas through Time: Evolving Interpretations, ed. Walter L. Buenger and Robert A. Calvert (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 78; and Buenger and Calvert, “Introduction: The Shelf Life of Truth in Texas,” ibid., ix-xxxv, which makes an impassioned plea to historians not only to address issues of race, ethnicity, community, gender, and class (which they argue Texas historians have “ignored because they conflict with the pristine image of the past”) but also to overturn the “Anglo Texas myth” that straitjacketed previous histories (xxxii-xxxv). Two recent students of Barr’s also have contributed related works; see Martin Kuhlman, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas: Desegregation of Public Accommodations, 1950-1964” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1994), and Virginia Lee Spurlin, “The Conners of Waco: Black Professionals in Twentieth-Century Texas” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1991).

2 “Let’s Not,” Time, 27 March 1950.

3 Attorney General Price Daniel, open letter to Attorney Generals, undated, PD Papers. Daniel’s closing words wishing a happy Christmas season indicates that he sent this letter out in December 1949.

4 Connor to Hare, 10 January 1950, and Connor to Daniel, 10 January 1950, PD Papers, Box 58. On Albert Carmichael see V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics (New York: Vintage, 1949), 332-33. On Folsom, whose first gubernatorial administration went from 1947 to 1951, see Key, Southern Politics, 42-44, 57; Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Knopf, 1985), 64-65, 91; William D. Barnard, Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, 1942-1950 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); and two biographies, Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, Big Mules and Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), and George E. Sims, The Little Man’s Big Friend: James E. Folsom in Alabama Politics, 1946-1958 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985).

5 “Southern States Support Texas in Sweatt Case,” 23 March 1950, II-B-147, NAACP Papers; Brief of the States of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents at 20-25, No. 44 [Sweatt v. Painter (Oct. Term 1949) (USSCL). Those states not joining Texas included Alabama, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia.

6 W. R. Hughes to Daniel, 4 April 1950, PD Papers, Box 58.

7 “High Court Will Rule in Segregation Cases,” NYT, 5 April 1950, p. 39, c. 6.

8 “Southern States Support Texas in Sweatt Case,” 23 March 1950, II-B-147, NAACP Papers.

9 Edna B. Kerin, “Separate Is Not Equal,” Crisis (May 1950): 292. Kerin also cites the Japanese-American Citizens’ League as among those filing briefs in support of the NAACP position in the Sweatt and McLaurin cases. Amici curiae briefs specifically filed in behalf of Sweatt include (by date) the Motion and Brief of the Committee of Law Teachers Against Segregation in Legal Education in Support of Petition for Certiorari (9 May 1949); Brief for Congress of Industrial Organizations in Support of Petition for Certiorari (13 May 1949); National Citizens’ Council on Civil Rights (25 May 1949); and the American Veterans Committee (26 May 1949). On Solicitor General Perlman’s brief, see “Separate Not Equal,” Crisis (April 1950): 244; and on the Texas Council of Negro Organizations hiring a Dallas-based law firm to prepare an amicus curiae brief see “Sweatt Case,” Crisis (March 1950): 181. Interestingly, no Mexican American organizations, which for four decades had been fighting in the courts for educational equality in Texas, submitted an amicus curiae brief, or if they did, the NAACP or the Supreme Court did not accept it. George I. Sánchez, a leading figure in the Mexican American educational rights struggle as president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and chair of several educational committees, knew of Marshall and the NAACP’s legal campaign; but his absence and the absence of LULAC at the fateful hour of the Sweatt case remains a mystery. The New York City headquartering of the NAACP legal staff and black leaders in Texas having built, at best, weak political ties with their Mexican American neighbors must offer a partial explanation for the lack of a strong alliance between African and Mexican Americans in regard to the abolition of discrimination in education. The two groups did not experience identical problems in this area, but their source, white Anglo supremacist control, did represent a potentially unifying common denominator. On the Mexican American fight for educational equalization, see Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

10 Thomas I. Emerson, John P. Frank, Alexander H. Frey, Erwin N. Griswold, Robert Hale, Harold Havighurst, and Edward Levi, “Segregation and the Equal Protection Clause: Brief for the Committee of Law Teachers Against Segregation in Legal Education,” Minnesota Law Review 34 (March 1950): 327-28. See also, “Law Teachers Hit Texas Segregation,” NYT, 20 January 1950. For the reaction of Price Daniel and Dean Ozie Johnson of the TSUN School of Law, see “ ‘Irrelevant Factors’ Are Charged by Dean in Texas University Segregation Complaint,” ibid. Daniel suggested the law educators did not know the factual record of the case, and he turned the idea of racial inferiority back on the opponents of segregation, stating that the professors “think less of the ability of Negroes to build and operate their own schools than the people of Texas.” Dean Johnson, the head Negro in charge of building the black law school, answered that his school had received the approval of the American Bar Association and that all the fuss about equality stopped there.

11 “18 Back Negro’s Suit to Enter U. of Texas,” NYT, 16 January 1950. See also SCEF Press Release, NAACP Papers, and “Eighteen Back Negro’s to Enter U. of Texas,” NYT, 16 January 1950. NAACP officials mistrusted the SCEF, an attitude that was carried over from its dealings with SCEF’s parent organization, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. See Linda Reed, Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 114-16. The NAACP’s organ, the Crisis, did, however, publish the findings of a SCEF poll of 15,000 (3,375 replied) staff and faculty members at 181 accredited colleges and universities in fourteen southern states regarding desegregation. On the poll, see “Southern College Teachers Repudiate Jim-crow Education,” Crisis (January 1950): 25-26; for the complete report, see “Attitudes of Southern University Professors toward the Elimination of Segregation in Graduate and Professional Schools in the South,” Journal of Negro Education 19 (Winter 1950); and Southern Patriot 10 (November 1949). The key event SCEF organized against higher educational segregation, which took place on 8 April 1950, four days after oral arguments in the Sweatt case (and on the day the Supreme Court justices secretly conferred on the matter), was its First Southwide Conference on Discrimination in Higher Education at Atlanta University. The conference was also the last event of its kind that SCEF pulled off. Howard University president James M. Nabrit Jr., who addressed the conference, discussed “the Legal Approach,” but he did not mention Marshall or the legal work of the NAACP by name. In fact, according to the proceedings of the conference published in Discrimination in Higher Education (New Orleans: Southern Conference Education Fund, n.d.), only one speaker referred to the NAACP; he mentioned a booklet that the NAACP and the American Jewish Congress co-published.

12 Kerin, “Separate Is Not Equal,” 292. Although no wave of violence came in the wake of the Court’s decision prohibiting the exclusion of blacks from the primary elections of the Democratic Party in the state, subterfuges such as the formation of the Jaybird Democratic Association, as well as the poll tax and other economic pressures, especially in rural East Texas, confirm that blacks had hardly become “part and parcel” of the electoral process. See Darlene Clarke Hine, “The Elusive Ballot: The Black Struggle against the Texas Democratic White Primary, 1932-1945,.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (April 1978): 224-29, and Robert Calvert, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” in The Texas Heritage, ed. Ben Procter and Archie P. McDonald (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Forum Press, 1980), 150-51. For a detailed treatment of the showdown in the Supreme Court on segregated universities, see Mark Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 137-49.

13 Clark quoted in Dennis J. Hutchinson, “Unanimity and Desegregation: Decisionmaking in the Supreme Court, 1948-1958,” Georgetown Law Journal 68 (1979): 89-90. For Clark’s background, see Jan Palmer, The Vinson Court Era (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 12-13; Mary Beeman, “New Deal Justice: Tom Clark and the Warren Court, 1953-1967” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1993); A. Timothy Warnock, “Associate Justice Tom C. Clark: Advocate of Judicial Reform” (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 1972); and Michael Philip Fricke, “Justice Tom Clark and Civil Rights,” Report, Austin: Public Affairs, 1992.

14 Hutchinson, “Unanimity and Desegregation,” 20-21.

15 Painter to Banks, 1 May 1950, UTPOR.

16 Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 637. The Pittsburgh Courier, 17 June 1950, reprinted the full text of the decision.

17 Joseph J. Rhoads, Advancing the Cause of Democracy in Education (Marshall: Texas Commission on Democracy in Education, 1951).

18 Ibid.

19 “TCNO Slates Dallas Meeting,” HI, 1 July 1950; “Texas Council of Negro Organizations Vows ‘To Fight Segregation Until It Disappears’ at Dallas July 4th Meeting,” Shreveport Sun, 15 July 1950; Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 147. For a listing of antisegregation suits in Texas up to the early summer of 1950, see Price Daniel to Judge A. O. Newman, 19 June 1950, PD Papers, Box 58.

20 “Klan Launches Member Drive in Texarkana,” Dallas Express, 8 July 1950. On Allan Shivers’s rejection of the NAACP’s plea that he get the Texas Rangers more involved in helping the Dallas Police Department with its investigations, see “Governor Refuses to Intervene in Bombing of Negro Houses in Dallas,” HI, 15 July 1950. For an interesting study of white supremacy in Dallas in the middle of the twentieth century that is framed around the South Dallas bombings of 1950, see Jim Schutze, The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1986). Schutze notes that the July bombings were part of a wave of terror that started in February of 1950 and lasted into 1951. The Sweatt decision is not identified in his undocumented work as a catalytic agent for the June and July bombings, but the possibility that the decision sparked the bombings is not inconsistent with his picture of a rising level of reaction among working- and middle-class whites to the crumbling of segregation, especially in their residential areas.

21 “Talmadge Defiant; Others Hail Court,” NYT, 6 June 1950; “Problems for the South Seen,” NYT, 7 June 1950; Talmadge and Guill quoted in “Anti-Bias Rulings Denounced,” NYT, 7 June 1950.

22 “Rehearing is Sought in Texas Bias Ruling,” NYT, 21 June 1950.

23 Carter Wesley, “Ram’s Horn,” HI, 14 October 1950.

24 Robert B. Kelley to Daniel, 18 May 1947, and S. C. Hobbs to Daniel, 19 May 1947, PD Papers, Box 56; George W. Hawkes to Daniel, 16 February 1948, PD Papers, Box 57.

25 A. R. Kavanaugh to Daniel, 6 June 1950; Edith Robeson to Daniel, 7 June 1950; E. M. Brady to Daniel, 10 June 1950; and Herbert B. Harlow to Daniel, 12 June 1950, all in PD Papers, Box 58.

26 Charles A. Howell to Daniel, 14 June 1950, PD Papers, Box 58.

27 Sam Kinch and Stuart Long, Allan Shivers: The Pied Piper of Texas Politics (Austin: Shoal Creek, 1973), 81-89; O. Douglas Weeks, Texas Presidential Politics in 1952 (Austin: Institute of Public Affairs, University of Texas, 1953), ch. 8. See also Clint Pace, “Daniel Advises Rights Battle,” DMN, 10 May 1950; Jay Walz, “Court Gives U.S. Top Rights to Submerged Coast Oil Land,” NYT, 6 June 1950; and “Daniel Says Court Erred on Tidelands,” HC, 21 June 1950.

28 “Negro Situation,” undated handwritten letter, UTPOR.

29 Painter to Lanier, 9 May 1950; Robert R. Douglass to Frances Grimes, 11 May 1950; Brogan to Painter, 29 May 1950; and Painter to Lanier, 30 May 1950, all in UTPOR.

30 Lanier to Painter, 20 April 1950; Lanier to Painter, 11 May 1950; McCown to Chase, 4 May 1950; McMath to Dana Young, 8 May 1950; and W. R. Woolrich to McMath, 18 May 1950, all in UTPOR. See also “First Negroes Enter U. of Texas: Students from Austin and Waco Seek Degrees,” HC, 7 June 1950, and “Texas University Enrolls 2 Negroes,” NYT, 8 June 1950.

31 “Texas University Enrolls 2 Negroes”; “First Negro Enters University of Texas,” NYT, 9 June 1950; Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, ed., The Negro Year Book, 1952: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life (New York: Wise & Co., 1952), 240.

32 “First Negro Enters University of Texas.” Chase went on to become the first black to earn a degree from UT’s School of Architecture. In 1993, he received the UT Ex-Student Association’s Distinguished Alumnus Award and won a $4.7 million contract to build a five-story parking facility at the campus. See Robert C. Newberry, “John Chase Integrated UT, Now He’s Designing It,” HP, 18 January 1994, A-17, and Nia Dorian Becnel, “John S. Chase,” Texas Architect (November/December 1989): 47.

33 Pence to McMath, 10 June 1950, from papers in the possession of John Chase Sr. Also in these papers is a favorable letter Masood Ali Warren, a sculptor in Los Angeles, sent to McMath on 11 June commending him for his “democratic gesture in welcoming student John Chase into the Department of Architecture and into the University of Texas.”

34 Anonymous note to McMath, undated, copy in Chase’s personal papers; the original is in the archives of the School of Architecture; John Chase, interview by author, 1 March 1996.

35 The quote about Chase’s marital status is from “UT Approves 3 Negroes for Immediate Entrance,” unidentified clipping, in Chase papers.

36 See Tracy Shuford, “Sipping Tea with John Chase,” Texas Alcalde, March/ April 1996, 20-25; and Chase interview.

37 Painter to Lanier, 7 July 1951, and Lanier to Painter, 17 July 1951, UTPOR.

38 Wright, Warren, and Hartshorn to Lanier, 19 September 1951; Lanier to Painter, 20 September 1951; Painter to Lanier, 24 September 1951; and Hartshorn, E. S. Richards, and Warren to Lanier, 19 September 1951; all in UTPOR.

39 Washington is quoted in “When the Barriers Fall,” Time, 31 August 1953, 40. Sweatt to Marshall, 28 October 1950, NAACP Papers; Michael L. Gillette, “Heman Marion Sweatt: Civil Rights Plaintiff,” in Black Leaders: Texans for their Times, ed. Alwyn Barr and Robert A. Calvert (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1981), 181-82. See also “Heman Sweatt’s Victory,” Life, October 1950, for pictures of him in class seated next to white students in the back row and walking with a white student in front of the UT tower.

40 See Gillette, “Heman Marion Sweatt,” 157-84. I am also indebted to Albert H. Miller for sharing “Heman Sweatt Twenty-Five Years Later: The Price and the Product of Black Efforts to Integrate White Institutions” (proposal and paper delivered at the 1974 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association); Helen C. Moore, “The Lonely Struggle of Heman Sweatt” (paper presented to Dr. Albert Miller, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 9 May 1973); and other insights and documents in his possession related to Sweatt’s life and times. Moore’s paper contains many lengthy quotes from seventeen hours of tape-recorded interviews between Sweatt and Michael Gillette. She received access to the tapes from James L. Sweatt, the brother of the late Heman Sweatt.

41 “When the Barriers Fall,” 40.

42 Grant Saint Julian, interview by author, 25 February 1996.

43 The Handbook of Texas, s.v. “Anderson, Monroe Dunaway,” and “Texas Medical Center” (W. J. Battle); Dr. Anthony Wayne Beal, interview by author, 18 August 1995. My gratitude goes out to Dr. Dashiel Geyen and Dr. Janis Beal Geyen for their helping me obtain this most enlightening and delightful interview.

44 Beal interview.

45 Beal interview; certificates dated 1950-51 and 1952 and signed by Kelsey and the school’s dean (illegible) that were hanging on the wall in Beal’s office.

46 Zeb Poindexter Sr., interview by author, 8 March 1996; “2 Negroes to Attend Texas U. Dental Unit,” NYT, 11 September 1952; “2 Negroes Will Enter Dental Unit,” HC, 10 September 1952.

47 Poindexter interview. Dr. John V. Olson replaced Elliott as dean. See Walter C. Stout, The First Hundred Years: A History of Dentistry in Texas (Dallas: Egan, 1969), 233-34.

48 “Texas Junior Colleges Are Community Colleges,” Texas Outlook, December 1951, 10.

49 “Howard County Junior College Accepts Negroes,” HI, 8 September 1951. Neil Gary Sapper, “A Survey of the History of the Black People of Texas, 1930- 1954” (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1972), 451, cites the same source and dates Texas Southmost’s desegregation in 1951. However, Guzman’s Negro Year Book, (240), an otherwise accurate and complete source on southern colleges’ early moves toward desegregation, does not include Texas Southmost. This may be because the school either did not receive or did not return his questionnaires. It is most unlikely the school would have sent out a press release on its admitting blacks. Adding to the mystery is the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ Equal Protection of the Laws in Public Higher Education, 1960 (Washington: GPO, 1961), 67, assertion that Texas Southmost College did not issue a declaration of an open policy until the 1958-59 academic year. This statement is most likely an error, however, since the junior college definitely had blacks enrolled by 1954. For an interesting take on the black experience in Brownsville, see Matt Thomas, Hopping on the Border: The Life Story of a Bellboy (San Antonio: Naylor, 1951). Milo Kearney’s studies of Brownsville’s general and educational history did not prove to be useful on the subject of black education or the demise of Jim Crow.

50 “Problem Not Important in the Valley,” Brownsville Herald, 17 May 1954. On the history of Texas Southmost see Donald W. Whisenhunt, The Encyclopedia of Texas Colleges and Universities: An Historical Profile (Austin: Eakin Press, 1986), 153; June Rayfield Welch, The Colleges of Texas (Dallas: GLA Press, 1981), 202; and Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-55 (Dallas: A. H. Belo, 1954-87), 420. On Cameron County see ibid., 527-28.On Cameron County as an “Anglo county,” see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicanos in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 244-52. Minutes of the college’s board of trustees are housed at the Rio Grande Valley Historical Collection of the main library of the University of Texas at Brownsville. I must thank the collection’s archivist, Yolanda Gonzales, for her generous assistance in going through the haystacks.

51 “Court Strikes Down South’s Traditional Segregation,” Brownsville Herald, 18 May 1954, 4. See Statistical Summary of School Segregation-Desegregation in Southern and Border States (Nashville: Southern Education Reporting Service, November 1961), 39-40, where it lists Brownsville, Harlingen, LaFeria, and San Benito as desegregated districts. The study cites the year of Texas Southmost’s desegregation as 1955.

52 San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” 134. Mexican American parents followed Delgado et al. v. Bastrop Independent School District et al. (1948) with six other lawsuits aimed at eradicating the segregation of their children into inferior schools. The last of these until the late 1960s, Hernández v. Driscoll Consolidated Independent School District, won a favorable decision in 1957 but did not result in the desired change in local school practices. Mexican Americans, like African Americans, ran into a wide variety of evasions and gradualist schemes that enabled local school districts to maintain segregated schools.

53 Scorpio, 1956, 1958, and 1968; Sessia Wyche, interview by author, 24 July 1995. Wyche, who became an assistant professor of mathematics in 1988, probably became the second black faculty member at UT-Brownsville and the first in the math department, followed a year later by Deloria Nanze-Davis. Also, Harlingen was the only Cameron County town to have a chapter of the NAACP in the 1940s and early 1950s. It is not clear how much of a role, if any, it may have played in the desegregation of Texas Southmost.

54 Guzman, ed., Negro Year Book, 240; “Howard County Junior College Accepts Negroes,” HI, 8 September 1951; “Texas: Test Suit Filed,” SSN, October 1954, 13. On the junior college’s history, see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 64; and on the county, see Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-55, 566.

55 McKinney v. Blankenship, 282 S.W.2d 691; “Integration Settlement Due Soon,” Austin American Statesmen, 4 October 1955; “More Than 60 Texas Districts Opening with Mixed Classes,” SSN, September 1955, 9; “Texas Supreme Court Knocks Out School Segregation Law,” SSN, November 1955, 6.

56 A. Maceo Smith to Hines, 20 October 1950, Texas v. NAACP Papers; on Amarillo College see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 5; and on the college and Potter County, see Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-55, 418, 596.

57 Quoted in “College in Texas Long Integrated,” NYT, 10 October 1954; on the first blacks to enroll, see Guzman, ed., Negro Year Book, 242.

58 “More Than 60 Texas Districts Opening,” 9; on Dr. Wyatt, see “Texas: Other Developments,” SSN, April 1955, 15.

59 On Nueces County see Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-55, 591- 92; on Garza and LULAC and García and the G.I. Forum and the problem of school segregation see San Miguel, “Let Them All Take Heed,” 67-86, 113-34.

60 “Answers NAACP Letter: School Board Cites Program for Improving Negro Schools,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, 31 July 1949; “Adult and Vocational Department Trains 868 City Adults,” Foghorn, 5 March 1948; Cruiser, 1947, 1948. The Foghorn was the student newspaper and the Cruiser was the yearbook of Del Mar, or Corpus Christi Junior College, as it was formerly known as. The 1947 Cruiser had a photograph of a classroom of black students listening to a “pronoun lecture.” In the 1948 yearbook three photographs of night school English classes showed two large classes of Mexican American students and one small group of black students. In both pictures of black classes there appear to be black instructors.

61 “Regents Vote to Admit Negroes at Lamar [sic] Jr. College,” HI, 26 July 1952. Although Glen E. Kost’s article, “50 Years: Del Mar Recalls Its Colorful Past in This Half-Century Birthday Year,” in Voyageur, Fall 1984, 6-7, contained several inaccuracies such as 1954 as the year of Del Mar’s desegregation and that black students enrolled in night classes “at Del Mar” in 1948, it is also informative. Kost apparently interviewed Dean Grady St. Clair and retired insurance executive V. G. Woolsey, two of the three members of the board’s site investigations committee who returned with the $300,000 figure. St. Clair stated that Harper’s and Life sent reporters to “do a story on the integration issue but there was no conflict so they did not print it.”

62 Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-55, 418; Cruiser, 1953, 1954; Kost, “50 Years,” 6-7; “1954-1971: 17 Years Later,” Corpus Christi Schools- Desegregation, 1970-71, Vertical Files, Del Mar College Library, Corpus Christi, Tex. Many thanks are extended to Noe M. Guerra, head of public services at Del Mar College, for assisting me in the college’s library and in meeting Glen Kost, director of development and executive director of Del Mar College Foundation, who is working on a history of the college. On how women in Corpus Christi played an instrumental role in Del Mar’s desegregation, see Ruthe Winegarten, Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 252-53. She inaccurately states that the college was the first institution in the South to desegregate and did so “even before the law was changed,” but she interestingly observes that interracial “lines of understanding dated back to the organization of the local YWCA in 1945 by a diverse group of black and white women working together.”

63 U. S. Tate to Branch Officers, 1 August 1952, Texas v. NAACP Papers.

64 Annual Report, NAACP Southwestern Regional Office, 1 October 1954, NAACP Papers. The junior colleges that desegregated immediately after Brown were Frank Phillips College, in Borger City; Odessa Junior College; Pan-American College, in Edinburg; Victoria Junior College; Wharton County Junior College; San Antonio College; and Hardin Junior College/Midwestern University, in Wichita Falls.

65 On Clark’s admission and on other white private educational institutions in the South admitting blacks by 1951, see Guzman, ed., Negro Yearbook, 241-42. On Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 11; on the school and on Presbyterian sects in Texas, see Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 418, 433. On Trinity University, see Donald E. Everett, Trinity University: A Record of One Hundred Years (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1968), 190. On McKinnon see Guzman, ed., Negro Yearbook, 242; and the photograph and caption in HI, 16 June 1951.

66 “Jarvis and Sam Houston Grads Admitted to SMU,” HI, 20 January 1951.

67 On the Southern Baptist Convention and the racial policies of its seminaries, see “Seminary Ends Negro Ban,” NYT, 16 March 1951; and on Southwestern Baptist Seminary see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 129.

68 On Maston see John W. Storey, Texas Baptist Leadership and Social Christianity, 1900-1980 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), chs. 4 and 5.

69 Ibid., 119-21, 124-27, 132-35, 139. For a description of SWBTS extension classes in Southeast Texas, interracial Bible conferences, and Southern Baptist paternalism toward black Texans, see Storey, Texas Baptist Leadership, and Ronald C. Ellison, Southern Baptists of Southeast Texas, A Centennial History, 1888-1988 (Beaumont: Golden Triangle Baptist, 1988), 135-38, 160-61. Our interpretive differences to one side, I am grateful to Storey for sharing with me his research and contacts on Texas Baptists.

70 “To Do Right,” Time, 18 June 1951.

71 Guzman, ed., Negro Year Book, 242; first quote is from “First Negro Pupil Has Been Admitted to Wayland College,” HC, 1 June 1951; second quote is from “Wayland Accepts Four for Summer, Expects Many More for Fall,” HI, 14 July 1951.

72 “The Private Colleges,” HI, 16 June 1951.

73 On Brite and TCU see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 146; and on Jarvis see Michael R. Heintze, Private Black Colleges in Texas, 1865-1954 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 39-40.

74 Quoted in “James L. Clairborne to Enter Brites Seminary,” HI, 13 September 1952.

75 Meyer Weinberg, A Chance to Learn: A History of Race and Education in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 300.

1 Norman Pearson, “Lashes out at Critics: Attorney Says High Court ‘Has Spoken,” ’ Springfield New-Sun, 15 April 1956.

2 Quoted in Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 291. Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, essentially confirms Warren’s recollection in his own memoirs, but he defends the chief executive against the chief justice’s charge that his statement was meant to influence his decision in Brown: “As best as I can reconstruct the scene at the dinner, Ike had expressed his personal sympathy for the mothers of young white children in the South who had been reared in a segregated society and feared the unknown—the arrival of a time when the public schools would be desegregated.” Brownell states that Eisenhower was infuriated when Warren went public with the conversation because he felt strongly that his stag dinner conversations were entirely “off the record.” This explanation hardly disproves that Eisenhower’s remarks were not intended to sway Warren in some way (Herbert Brownell, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993], 174). See also, Robert F. Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 142.

3 Price Daniel, “Supreme Court on Separate Schools,” Congressional Record, 18 May 1954, 2.

4 Daniel, “Supreme Court on Separate Schools,” 7-8. For a representation of the South in chaos from black domination during the Reconstruction era, see the original fiction work by Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); and for a cogently argued secondary source, see Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36-43.

5 All quotations are from Carter Wesley, “Ram’s Horn,” HI, 7 August 1954; see also Sam Kinch and Stuart Long, Allan Shivers: The Pied Piper of Texas Politics (Austin: Shoal Creek Publishers, 1973), 159-60, where Allan Shivers himself lambastes Ralph Yarborough as the “captive candidate of the CIO and NAACP”; on Yarborough’s eleventh-hour statement opposing the “forced commingling of our races in our public schools,” see “Texas,” SSN, September 1954, 11.

6 David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 62.

7 Ulysses S. Tate, NAACP southwestern regional counsel, filed the case of Battle et al. v. Wichita Fall Junior College District et al. on behalf of Battle and a group of black students in the Wichita Falls Division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on 4 September 1951. In November of that year, the court ruled in favor of the petitioners, but the defendants appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals at New Orleans, where the lower court’s decision was affirmed. On further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the university’s writ for certiorari was denied on 24 May 1954, a week after the Brown decision. By the fall semester, more than forty black students were enrolled at Midwestern University. Through the period of the lawsuit, the school is referred to as Hardin, or Wichita Falls, Junior College, the name of the lower division unit from which the senior college evolved. See Annual Report, NAACP Southwestern Regional Office, 1 October 1954, 11, NAACP Papers.

8 My study of how Brown changed race relations in Texas differs in significant ways and arrives at different conclusions than Michael J. Klarman, in “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American History 81 (June 1994), 81-118. He made no attempt to look at Texas, but since his historiographical essay is derived purely from secondary source material, this oversight is understandable as no study exists on massive resistance and civil rights in the state. The Texas experience, however, shows that Klarman’s argument that Brown had a minimal direct impact on school desegregation cannot be sustained. He contends that the ruling’s only significance lies in an indirect effect it had, namely, the fomenting of a racist white backlash that decimated the ranks of racial moderates in the South and later brutally suppressed civil rights demonstrations. This suppression, he says, produced a national consensus that got civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s, and those new laws are what brought about genuine social change. The Texas story did not work as he suggests. Black activists did draw inspiration from Brown. The major repression of civil liberties in the 1950s had as much to do with race as with McCarthyism or anticommunism, and the Court’s decree ultimately did more to build racial moderation than to polarize the state into racial fanatics and radical integrationists.

9 On Edgar’s edict, see “Texas,” SSN, September 1954, 11; on collegiate desegregation in 1954, see “Texas,” SSN, October 1954, 13, and Annual Report, NAACP Southwestern Regional Office, 1 October 1954, 12, NAACP Papers.

10 Alan Scott, “Twenty-Five Years of Opinion on Integration in Texas,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 48 (September 1967), 159.

11 Chief Lon Bleaton is quoted in “NAACP Seeks Protection for Victim of Terror,” HI, 24 July 1954, and “Texas: Only One Incident,” SSN, September 1954; the statements of unidentified officials and individuals in Sulphur Springs are quoted in “Texas: Negro Couple Flees,” SSN, November 1954. For Hopkins County’s and Sulphur Springs’ 1950 population figures, see Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-1955 (Dallas: Belo, 1953), 565.

12 The Handbook of Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952), s.v. “Kilgore, Texas.”

13 Annual Report, NAACP Southwestern Regional Office, 1 October 1954, 11, NAACP Papers; Annual Report, Edwin C. Washington, 1 October 1955, 3N162, Texas v. NAACP Papers; see also transcripts of testimony of NAACP branch president I. S. White and parents of various students of the Kilgore Junior College District case in 3N158, folder 6, Texas v. NAACP Papers. The Statistical Summary of School Segregation-Desegregation in Southern and Border States (Nashville: Southern Education Reporting Service, November 1961), 40, listed the junior colleges in Kilgore, Alvin, Blinn, Henderson County, Lee, Panola County, Ranger, San Jacinto, and Texarkana and the black and white junior colleges in Tyler as segregated in 1961.

14 Quoted in “Editor Faces Quiz in Negro’s Slaying,” Austin-American Statesman, 28 January 1956. The editorial “Good Will in East Texas Needed in Tense Times,” Daily Texan, 9 November 1955, noted that Sutherland appealed for “a more thorough investigation of the outbreaks in East Texas, and the influence—if any—the so-called Citizens’ Councils have played on them.” It ended with the hope that the council encourages “neither racial violence nor ill-treatment, as they have in Mississippi.”

15 Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 104-5. For Phillips’s quote, see “Texas: Questionnaires Distributed,” SSN, October 1954, 13.

16 Thomas S. Sutherland, as told to Hart Stilwell, “I’m Proud of Texas,” Coronet (February 1956): 50-51. Other sources on Masters include Joe F. Taylor, The AC Story: Journal of a College (Canyon: Stacked Plains Press, 1979), 4-26, which describes his six years as president of Amarillo College; and McMillen, Citizens’ Council , 104-5, 310, which provides some information on the council leader. See also Basil Earl Masters, “A History of Early Education in Northeast Texas” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1929). Although sometimes referred to as “Dr.,” Masters never earned a doctoral degree.

17 Sutherland, “I’m Proud of Texas,” 50-51.

18 Battle et al. v. Wichita Falls Junior College District et al., 101 F. Supplement, 82-83. Midwestern University was a four-year municipal college that only a year before used to be Hardin Junior College (which became the name of the university’s lower-division unit). The blacks who broke down segregation at Midwestern have not been properly acknowledged in previous studies. Other writers have cited Texas Western College, North Texas State College, or the University of Texas as the first public senior colleges that dropped the race bar at the undergraduate level but forget that the Wichita Falls battle led the way. Partly this has been the result of the different names of the school used in the legal record and press accounts. Nonetheless, the Battle lawsuit opened all of Midwestern University, not only the junior college division. Sources on the history of the university include Donald W. Whisenhunt, The Encyclopedia of Texas Colleges and Universities: An Historical Profile (Austin: Eakin Press, 1986), 87, and Billy Richard Gray, “The Growth and Development of Midwestern University, 1922-1957” (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1959).

19 Battle et al. v. Wichita Falls Junior College District et al., 86. Judge William Atwell, known for his unpredictability, ruled against the desegregation of the Dallas public schools in his decision in Albert Bell, a Minor, by His Stepfather and Next Friend, Theodore D. Dorsey, et al. v. Dr. Edwin L. Rippy, as President of the Board of Trustees of the Dallas Independent School District, Dallas County, Texas, et al., U.S.D.Ct., Northern District, Texas, 19 December 1956, 146 F. Supp. 485. The decision with commentary is reprinted in “The Dallas Case: Text of Atwell Decision Challenging High Court,” SSN, January 1957, 10.

20 See “MU Board Decides to Appeal Court Decision,” Wichita Falls Daily Times, 19 December 1951; “MU Files Appeal on Negro Issue,” Wichita Falls Record News, 22 December 1951.

21 Quoted in “Five Negroes Enrolling at Hardin Junior College,” Wichita Falls Record News, 8 June 1954; see also “Negro Students Admitted to Hardin Junior College,” Wichita Falls Daily Times, 4 June 1954, and “Negro Students Admitted to Hardin Junior College,” Wichita Falls Record News, 6 June 1954.

22 Wai-Kun 1955, the MU annual, n.p. The Wai-Kun 1956 annual shows that a growing number of blacks were in the ROTC. There is also a picture of a black woman in a pottery class (p. 208) and a group picture with black student nurses Sonja Taylor, Olivia Fobbs, and Opal Sanders. The Wai-Kun 1957 annual indicates that blacks entered new groups: Clara Hale joined Eta Epsilon (p. 141); a picture of the Baptist Student Union shows blacks seated throughout the group (p. 6); and Patricia Ann Thomas of Cooper, Texas; Gertrude Pope from Calvert, Texas; and Joyce Munden of Munden, Virginia, were Roustabouts (pp. 101-2, 105). The staff of Moffett Library, especially Director Melba Harvill and librarian Billye W. Jeter, at Midwestern State University, greatly assisted me in finding several sources. I am especially grateful that they helped direct me to Gwendolyn Jackson.

23 Annual Report, NAACP Southwestern Regional Office, 1 October 1954, 11- 12, NAACP Papers. Michael G. Wade, in “From Reform to Massive Resistance: The Desegregation of the Louisiana State Colleges, 1954-1964” (Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Southern History Association, New Orleans, La., October 1995; copy in author’s possession), 1, 3-4, correctly observes that Louisiana lead the way in undergraduate state-supported college desegregation in Lafayette in 1954, but he might have mentioned that the older Wichita Falls case also helped blaze the trail.

24 Seventy percent of the people of the area lived in rural areas, and nearly a third lived in an urban environment with some industrial activity in sulphur, oil, and natural gas production, and a few other manufacturing enterprises.

25 For the presentation given by Smith, who was the only delegate present from Texas at the conference, see Report of Branches, Thirteenth Annual NAACP Conference, June 1922, NAACP Papers, 12-15; on Ennis Martin, see Wharton County Historical Commission, Wharton County Pictorial History, 1846-1946, vol. 1 (Austin: Eakin Press, 1993), 208. On other prominent Wharton blacks in the early 1900s, see Annie Lee Williams, A History of Wharton County, 1846-1961 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones Press, 1964), 115-16. On the idea of blacks in Fort Bend, a neighboring county of Wharton, along with state and national NAACP leaders, deeming it unwise to organize a branch of the association in the area, see Pauline Yelderman, The Jay Birds of Fort Bend County: A White Man’s Union (Waco: Texian Press, 1979), 201-2.

26 Jim Mousner, “In Classrooms There’s No Friction: Wharton, Victoria Junior Colleges Face Second Year of Desegregation,” HP, 7 August 1955, 9, 15; for biographical material on Thomas Lane Pink, see Wharton County Historical Commission, Wharton County Pictorial History, 141, 209 (photo of the Black Elks, a team for which Pink played).

27 Annie Lee Williams, History of Wharton County, 290.

28 Sources on the desegregation of WCJC include James O. Holley, “Wharton College Sticks to Desegregation Stand,” HP, 19 September 1954; “Negro Admissions at Junior College Discussed Publicly,” Wharton Spectator, 24 September 1954; Mousner, “Wharton, Victoria Junior Colleges,” 9, 15; and F. J. L. Blasingame interviewed by Joe Tom Davis, 15 June 1993, produced by ITVM Department, Wharton County Junior College. I am grateful to Patsy Norton, director of WCJC’s J. M. Hodges Library, for her assistance, especially in my obtaining a copy of Joe Tom Davis’s oral history interview with Dr. Blasingame. Also, I am indebted to E. Kelly Rogers, a native of Wharton, for significant research support.

29 Blasingame interview; Holley, “Wharton College Sticks”; “Negro Admissions.”

30 Holley, “Wharton College Sticks,” HP. None of the newspaper articles reports any women speaking on desegregation. Mary Lee Shannon Brown, editor of the Wharton Spectator and daughter of its publisher, gave some hints of her opinion on the matter in her editorial column, “Sincerely Mary.” On Friday, 17 September, the day before the public meeting, she opined: “We have all ‘held up our hands in horror’ about the problems that will confront us when the Supreme Court decision is integrated into our school system. If we all just go along as calmly as we can and not get excited and fly off the handle half-cocked, the problems may just sort of solve themselves as each detail of the matter is met and dealt with.” Her statement brings to mind the saying “The devil is in the detail.” That is to say, white supremacy can be most effectively reestablished not in an overt, ultimately futile fight against the court’s edict but in organizing white power to get what it wants in the details of policy formation and implementation. Experienced “school people,” free from the “interference” of “us bystanders” and “well meaning, no doubt, but blundering citizens trying to tell them what to do,” she felt, could best safeguard the interests of whites. Brown saw the coming of a single school system to educate both white and black children as inevitable and sought “a basis of reconstruction that will do the least harm to our colored and white children and to their parents.”

31 Holley, “Wharton College Sticks,” HP.

32 Mousner, “Wharton, Victoria Junior Colleges.” Malone was pictured as a member of the WCJC Art Club in the 1955 Pioneer Log, the student annual. Hank Allen is not in the basketball team’s group photo, but he is cited as a letterman from Glen Flora in the 1958 Pioneer Log, and he also appears in photos of the team in different issues of the Trailblazer, the student newspaper.

33 Quoted in Dawson Duncan, “Step Poses Problems for Texas,” DMN, 18 May 1954.

34 Quoted in ibid. On views regarding the state’s compliance with Brown, see also Richard Morehead, “No Rush Seen in Texas Shift,” DMN, 19 May 1954, and Richard Morehead, “Presidents of Negro Schools See Continued Need for Them,” DMN, 25 June 1954.

35 Henry Y. McCown to Marion G. Ford Jr., 23 July 1954, UTPOR; W. Byron Shipp to Logan Wilson, 25 August 1954, UTPOR. For UT’s modified policy on admission for graduate and professional work not offered at the state-supported black universities, see an excerpt of a letter from McCown to Ford reprinted in “Texas,” SSN, October 1954, p. 13. On the undergraduate desegregation of UT, see also Richard B. McCaslin, “Steadfast in His Intent: John W. Hargis and the Integration of the University of Texas at Austin,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 95 (July 1991): 20-41. McCaslin’s article draws upon a 1985 interview he conducted with Hargis (archived at UT’s Center for American History), as well as conversations with friends of the chemical engineer who graduated from UT in 1959. Hargis died in 1986, so McCaslin’s interview and article are valuable sources on his experience with UT. The article has several errors, including the statement that UT was “the first institution of higher education in the South to admit blacks to its graduate and professional degree programs” (p. 22) and that blacks did not successfully enter Lamar State College of Technology in 1956 and it “remained segregated through the end of the decade” (p. 32). In fact, several private and public southern institutions admitted black students years before UT opened its Galveston and Austin campuses. As discussed below, Lamar admitted blacks and conferred degrees on black students as early as 1958.

36 McCown quoted in SSN, October 1954, 13. On Ford’s life see Burt Levine, “Defying the Odds: Dr. Marion Ford Dances His Way Past Adversity,” Houston NewsPages, 4-10 May 1995, 10.

37 Quoted from “Negro Student Seeks Injunction,” Daily Texan, 24 September 1954; see also “NAACP Will Not Sue for Negro Admission,” Daily Texan, 6 December 1955, and “Test Suit Filed,” SSN, October 1954, p. 13. On the Austin NAACP branch and the case, see Rev. M. L. Cooper Jr. to U. Simpson Tate, 17 September 1954, 3N162, Texas v. NAACP Papers.

38 Quotation from McCaslin, “Steadfast in His Intent,” 26-31.

39 Quotation from Brown II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955), reprinted in the appendixes of Daniel M. Berman, It Is So Ordered: The Supreme Court Rules on School Segregation (New York: Norton, 1966), 148. On the UT regents’ action, see “Segregation Decision Due,” Summer Texan, 8 July 1955; J. C. Goulden, “Committee’s Agreement Is ‘Substantial”’ and “Thought, Not Haste Was Regents’ Criteria,” Daily Texan, 12 July 1955; McCaslin, “Steadfast in His Intent,” 29-30, 32-33; and “Maintain Policy,” SSN, August 1955, 2-3.

40 Rev. Emanuel Eugene Rice, “Request from Citizens Concerning Naming of New Elementary School,” 13 July 1977, Leon A. Morgan Papers, Rosenberg Library Archives Department, Galveston, Texas.

41 E. L. Wall, “Suit to Halt Integration at U.T. Filed,” HC, 15 September 1956; “Court Bars Suit U.T. Integration,” HC, 18 September 1956; “Fund Halt Denied,” SSN, October 1956, 14; and on Judge Edgar E. Townes, see photo caption in DMN, 14 July 1955.

42 A. Maceo Smith to M. C. Donnell, 20 September 1951, Texas v. NAACP Papers. On Nixon and the early history of the NAACP El Paso branch, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood: KTO Press, 1979), 72-75. On the history of TWC, see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 172-73, and Charles H. Martin and Rebecca M. Craver, eds., Diamond Days: An Oral History of the University of Texas at El Paso (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1991). I am grateful to Charles Martin for sharing his paper presented to the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association on 4 March 1994, “Integrating Undergraduate Studies in Texas: The Case of Texas Western College” (copy in author’s possession).

43 Minutes of the Executive Committee of the NAACP El Paso Branch, 7 March and 5 September 1954, in Texas v. NAACP Papers; “TWC Admittance Asked by Negro,” Daily Texan, 31 March 1955; for Thomason’s order in White v. Smith, United States District Court, Western District, Civ. No. 1616, 25 July 1955, see Race Relations Law Reporter (1956), 324-25.

44 “Legal Action,” SSN, August 1955, 2; “Order,” White v. Smith in Race Relations Law Reporter (1956), 324-25.

45 “University Ban Going Down,” SSN, February 1956, 9.

46 Biographical information on A. Tennyson Miller may be found in Vernon McDaniel, History of the Teachers State Association of Texas (Washington: National Education Association, 1977), 133. On page 153, McDaniel erroneously cited Miller’s entrance into NTSC as occurring in 1955.

47 A. Tennyson Miller to J. C. Matthews, June 1954 (no day indicated), JCMP. The primary source material on Miller’s enrollment and the general desegregation of NTSC is plentiful and easily accessible thanks to the excellent efforts of the library staff of the Willis Library at the University of North Texas, especially Richard Himmel, who was personally very helpful to my research work. Despite the good archival material, including several oral histories, secondary work on UNT and blacks is very limited. Ronald E. Marcello, “The Integration of Intercollegiate Athletics in Texas: North Texas State College as a Test Case, 1956,” Journal of Sport History 14 (Winter 1987): 286-316, is a worthy piece on one aspect of the college’s desegregation. Marcello was responsible for collecting the aforementioned oral interviews. Richard Himmel and Robert S. La Forte, Down the Corridor of Years: A Centennial History of the University of Texas in Photographs, 1890-1990 (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1990), 166-67, however, was not very serviceable. James L. Rogers, The Story of North Texas: From Texas Normal College, 1890, to North Texas State University, 1965 (Denton: North Texas State University Press, 1965), had nothing on the college’s desegregation. Rogers taught journalism at NTSU for many years.

48 “1st Negro Student Admitted at NTSC,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 20 July 1954; “North Texas State Admits First Negro Student in History,” Dallas Times Herald, 20 July 1954; “North Texas State Admits First Negro,” Dallas Times Herald, 21 July 1954. On Miller’s reputation with NTSC faculty members, see Matthews to Reverend Grady W. Metcalf, 17 September 1963, JCMP. The gradual desegregation plan is outlined in Matthews to Board of Regents, 2 December 1954, JCMP. Marcello, “Integration of Intercollegiate Athletics,” 289, cites the development of the plan as evidence that Matthews, far from being a “crude” racist, sought a deliberate, controlled path to desegregation. While a plausible interpretation, Marcello’s comments that civil rights activism had not achieved a high level of organizational strength and had placed no “direct pressure” on Matthews and the board to do anything is not accurate. Miller’s application represented the high state of consciousness and the high level of activism in the Denton area. Also, the city’s proximity to Dallas, which was a major political center of the Texas civil rights movement at that time, cannot be dismissed. NTSC officials recognized and acted in response to the reigning reality in Texas higher educational policy: college administrators were on their own in how they would handle black challenges to segregation at their campuses. The attorney general’s office and the state legislature had abdicated to local administrators the duty of upholding the segregationist constitutional articles and statutes.

49 “Order Denying Plaintiff’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction,” Joe L. Atkins, A Minor, by His Father and Next Friend, Willie Atkins, v. James Carl Matthews, President, North Texas State College, et al., U.S. District Court, Eastern District, Texas, Civ. No. 1104, 19 September 1955; “Negro Files Suit against NTSC after Denied Entry,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 11 August 1955; “NTSC Named in Suit Filed to Gain Entry,” DMN, 11 August 1955; “North Texas Faces Lawsuit: Dallas Negro Seeks Order for Admission,” Campus Chat, 12 August 1955.

50 “Memorandum Opinion,” Joe L. Atkins, A Minor, by His Father and Next Friend, Willie Atkins, v. James Carl Matthews, President, North Texas State College, et al., U.S. District Court, Eastern District, Texas, Civ. No. 1104 (59th Dist.), 8 December 1955; “Segregation at NT Abolished by Court: Atkins Case Ruled on in Sherman,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 2 December 1955. The Denton Record-Chronicle article, a front-page but brief piece with a large headline, had no post-trial comments from Matthews or any of the regents. “Bulletin,” Campus Chat, 2 December 1955, gave the issue even less consideration. Matthews attempted to minimize public attention given to NTSC’s desegregation and emphasized overcrowded conditions as the only reason Atkins had been refused admission in June; see “Integration Becomes Spring Possibility Following Injunction by District Court,” Campus Chat, 7 December 1955. On Matthews’s policy of “deliberately discouraging media coverage,” see Marcello, “Integration of Intercollegiate Athletics,” 288-90, and the oral history (OH) collections on James Rogers, former director of the NTSC News and Information Service, at the University of North Texas, “Oral Interview with James Rogers,” OH 519:3-5; and Matthews, OH 633:22.

51 On the court decision, see “Memorandum Opinion,” Atkins v. Matthews et al., 5-6; and “Segregation at NT Abolished by Court.” On Sheehy’s sympathetic disposition and the attorney general office’s opinion that an appeal would be futile, see Matthews to Board of Regents, 2 December 1955, JCMP. Regent B. E. Godfrey, an attorney in Fort Worth, felt that NTSC “would not be in good graces to appeal the Joe Atkins decision” (Godfrey to Matthews, 7 December 1955, JCMP). Other members felt the college should continue the fight against desegregation, irrespective of how futile it might be, but, in the end, the majority of the board went along with Matthews’s leadership on the issue.

52 “Negro Woman Set to Enroll at N. Texas,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 2 February 1956; “Fort Worth Negro Qualifies to Enter as Undergraduate,” Campus Chat, 3 February 1956; “Fort Worth Negro Woman Set to Enroll Today at NTSC,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 3 February 1956; “Mrs. Sephas Enrolls at North Texas,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 5 February 1956; quotations from “NTSC Attitude Is Direct Contrast to Alabama Case,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 7 February 1956. On the Lucy episode, see E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. chs. 3 and 4.

53 On the uneventful placement of Jackson and Thomas in a campus dormitory, see “Texas: In the Colleges,” SSN, July 1956, 6, and “NTSC Is Fully Integrated as Enrollment Nears 3,000,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 7 June 1956. Quotation is from Gwendolyn Jackson, telephone conversation with author, 2 May 1996; Jackson also discussed other aspects of her desegregation experience at NTSC during the interview. On the cross-burning, see “Cross Burned on NT Campus,” Denton Record-Chronicle, 8 August 1956. On Abner Haynes and Leon King and the influence of desegregated sports on the process of racial adjustment at NTSC, see Marcello, “Integration of Intercollegiate Athletics,” 291-98. For other sources on the desegregation of NTSC, see Matthews to Rev. Grady W. Metcalf, 17 September 1963, JCMP; Sue Connally, “Spotlight on N.T.S.C.: Integration without Tumult,” DMN, 20 April 1958; and Lewis Harris, “Nowhere for Negroes to Go: NTSU—‘Island of Integration,”’ DMN, 19 May 1963.

54 “Negro Veteran Seeks Admission: Law Says A&I Created for Whites,” Kingsville Record, 25 August 1954. I am deeply grateful to Dan Eggleston, who indexed and compiled the relevant articles from the Kingsville Record, and to Cecilia Hunter with the South Texas Oral History Collection of the John E. Conner Museum at Texas A&M University at Kingsville for pointing out this resource.

55 “Negro Seeking Admission to A&I Says Threat Letter May Be Prank,” Kingsville Record, 1 September 1954; “Negro Would Plead Case before Texas A&I College Board,” Kingsville Record, 8 September 1954; Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1954-55, 575-76.

56 “Negro Would Plead Case before Texas A&I College Board”; see also, in a small bulletin item in Kingsville Record, 15 September 1954, a quote from Hayes’s letter to the VA, in which he said if the VA could not help him that he would take his case to Congress. On Lynch and the board’s decision, see “A&I Directors Reject Negro’s Application,” Kingsville Record, 29 September 1954. On the VA’s answer to Hayes, see “V.A. Rejects Negro Veteran’s A&I Entry Plea,” Kingsville Record, 6 October 1954. This article also notes that a Houston publisher (perhaps Carter Wesley of the Informer) had notified Hayes to suspend his efforts to establish a paper in Kingsville and to relocate to Houston for a job on its staff. Hayes expressed great disappointment over his inability to launch a newspaper in his hometown and the VA’s inability to respond to his exclusion from A&I.

57 H. Boyd Hall quoted in “A&I College Remove Barriers to Negro Enrollment,” Kingsville Record, 23 May 1956; Ellen King Lambert and Irma Rebecca Summers are identified as the first black students at A&I in an item in Kingsville Record, 6 June 1956. On Hall’s opening of A&I, see “Report of U. Simpson Tate, Regional Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Southwest Region,” May 1956, NAACP Papers. Hall described himself as an “old fire horse” with his own “method of desegregating schools” in Hall to Roy Wilkins, 25 August 1959, III-C-148, NAACP Papers. See also Nancy M. Nelson interview by Gene Brooks, undated transcript, Black Community Project, South Texas Oral History & Folklore Collection, South Texas Archives, Texas A&M University at Kingsville, Texas. Pan American College at Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley, desegregated in the fall of 1954, was the second publicly supported senior college in Texas to admit blacks after Midwestern.

58 On the development of Lamar, see Ray Asbury, The South Park Story (Fort Worth: Evans Press, 1972), 41-42, and C. Robert Kemble, “Lamar in Perspective,” Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record 19 (November 1983): 24, 32. On the connection between Lamar and white supremacy, see Thomas E. Kroutter, “The Ku Klux Klan in Jefferson County, Texas, 1921-1924” (M.A. thesis, Lamar University, 1972), 160. For the Louis R. Pietzch quotation, see “Kiwanis Hears about College,” Beaumont Journal, 23 June 1923.

59 See Nancy Dailey, “History of the Beaumont, Texas, Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1918-1970” (M.A. thesis, Lamar University, 1971), 46; Robert B. Lee, “Black Schools Here Date Back More Than 100 Years,” Beaumont Enterprise, 9 November 1980; and “Efforts Pushed to Continue Operation of Negro College Now Part of Lamar Setup,” Beaumont Enterprise , 10 August 1951.

60 Kirkland C. Jones, “Writer Enumerates LU’s Black History,” University Press, Lamar University Sixtieth Anniversary Supplement, 16 September 1983, 29. Charlton-Pollard’s principal, Harvey Johnson, wrote a confidential letter to John Gray in support of Briscoe’s application to Lamar (see Lola Johnson, telephone interview by author, 29 November 1990). See also Edna Briscoe, interview by author, 3 August 1989.

61 “Negro Refused Admittance to Lamar College,” Beaumont Enterprise, 30 January 1951; Michael L. Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas, 1937-1957,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1984), 237.

62 Charles E. Sherman to Thurgood Marshall, 26 March 1952, and Mrs. T. C. Brackeen to James R. Briscoe, 1 March 1952, both in Texas v. NAACP Papers. See also Briscoe interview.

63 Edward Sprott quoted in Warren Breed, Beaumont, Texas: College Desegregation without Popular Support, no. 2, Field Reports on Desegregation in the South (New York: B’nai B’rith, 1957[?]), 5.

64 Juanita Jackson and Jean Wallace, A Directory of Black Businesses, Churches, Clubs, and Organizations in Beaumont, Texas (Beaumont Public Library, 1981), n.p., in author’s possession; Theodore Johns, interview by author, 16 June 1989; “Seven Negroes Apply for Admission to Lamar Tech,” Beaumont Journal, 28 July, 1955. See also “Lamar Negro Issue Is Left up to Regents,” Beaumont Journal, 1 August, 1955. By the time Tate actually filed the suit, only two students, Versie Jackson and James Anthony Cormier, actually became plaintiffs.

65 Letter from L. F. Chester et al. to Lamar Board of Regents, 19 August 1955, FLMP. Magnolia Refinery welders, clerks, office managers, and other workers comprise the majority of the list of names attached to this letter. The first signer L. F. Chester, however, was an attorney for First Federal Savings and Loan.

66 “Lamar Tech Hasn’t Room for Negroes, Regents Announce,” Baytown Sun, 24 August 1955; “Desegregation Foes Suspected: Cross Discovered Blazing on Campus at Lamar Tech,” Beaumont Journal, 23 August 1955. A week after the cross-burning at Lamar, Klansters fired up a cross at North Texas State College. One wonders whether the two incidents were related in any way. Quotations are from Board of Regents, Resolution, Lamar State College of Technology, 23 August 1955. For the enabling legislation that created Lamar as “a co-educational institution of higher learning for the white youth of this State,” see “Lamar State College of Technology: Chapter 403: H.B. No. 52,” in General and Special Laws of the State of Texas (Acts 1949, 51st Legislature), 751-54. The “white youth” clause was not repealed until 1971.

67 Mary Cecil, telephone interview by author, 14 July 1989. See also, Major T. Bell, “Lamar Cecil—The Days That Were His,” Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record, 12 (November 1976): 24. For a study that describes the characteristics of federal judges based on a quantitative study of the judicial behavior of twenty-eight districts in eleven states of the traditional South from May 1954 to October 1962, see Kenneth N. Vines, “Federal District Judges and Race Relations Cases in the South,” Journal of Politics 26 (1964): 337-57. The pioneer work along this line is Jack W. Peltason, Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Court Judges and School Desegregation (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961).

68 From “Defendants’ Reply to Complaint,” Jackson v. McDonald, quoted in Dailey, “History of the Beaumont, Texas Chapter of the NAACP,” 61. On John Ben Shepperd’s “pepper and salt” idea, see “Legal Action,” SSN, May 1956, 12.

69 Jim Krupnick, “Negro Admission to Lamar is Upheld,” Beaumont Journal, 30 July 1956; “Lamar Tech Appeal on Negroes Dismissed,” Beaumont Journal, 21 May 1957; letter from J. B. Morris to Horace Wimberly, FLMP. In “Report of U. Simpson Tate, Regional Counsel,” May 1956, NAACP Papers, the lawyer expressed his surprise that at a pretrial hearing before Cecil on 4 May, “some two-hundred-odd high school and college students with teachers and . . . the entire Board of Regents of the college” were present. He reported that “as a public demonstration for the benefit of the audience,” the judge had Theodore Johns, Elmo Willard, and himself argue the merits of his case. However, in rebuttal, the state-paid lawyers for the defendants “completely avoided the fact issues and went off on a wild goose chase in the field of irrelevance and pure viciousness.”

70 Quotations from Krupnick, “Negro Admission.” For a summary of Cecil’s ruling, see “Report of U. Simpson Tate, Regional Counsel,” June and July 1956, NAACP Papers; on the state’s appeal, see “State Will File Lamar Tech Appeal on Negroes,” Beaumont Enterprise, 26 September 1956. On a legal level, their case and subsequent appeals had no merit at all, did not delay the desegregation process, and had no appreciable influence on their white working-class compatriots, who had no use for symbolic gestures or statements for the record. See “Move to Suspend Integration at Lamar Denied,” Beaumont Enterprise, 30 October 1956, on Judge Cecil’s refusal of a motion to suspend execution of his order. On the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 21 May 1957 affirmance of Cecil’s desegregation order, see “Lamar Is a Major Force in Economy,” Beaumont Enterprise, 11 June 1989.

71 “Blazing Cross Found Burning at Lamar Tech,” Beaumont Enterprise, 2 August 1956; “At Lamar: Police Eye Students in Cross-Burning,” Beaumont Enterprise, 2 August 1956; “Burning Crosses Believed Work of Pranksters,” Beaumont Enterprise, 12 August 1956; Johns interview; Breed, College Desegregation, 16 (the “note” in parentheses is Breed’s; Breed also used letters in place of names in the interview, but Lightfoot was undoubtedly speaking of Sprott).

72 Statement submitted by Charles A. Howell to F. L. McDonald and the Board of Regents, 18 September 1956; letter from F. L. McDonald to W. R. Smith, 18 September 1956, FLMP. McDonald may have expressed some measure of class bias in calling the members of Howell’s group outsiders. Since Howell, Gertrude Carruth, and the two other women on the committee all resided in Beaumont, they must not have had children attending the college or appeared to be not very educated, urbane, or middle class. On the prosegregation referendum questions voted on in the 28 July party primary, see “Texans Approve 3 Issues,” SSN, August 1956, 14. Early returns reported the vote as 782,693 for continued school segregation and 227,479 against. The other questions, one on approving interposition against “federal encroachment on state authority” and the other on strengthening laws against interracial marriages, also won at the polls by a near four-to-one margin. Citizens’ Council backer Longview oilman Robert Cargill’s Texas Referendum Committee sponsored the proposals.

73 “State Will File Lamar Tech Appeal on Negroes,” Beaumont Enterprise, 26 September 1956; Petition to the President and Board of Regents (undated), Lamar State College of Technology, FLMP.

74 Letter from W. R. Smith to J. B. Morris, 30 March 1956, FLMP.

75 Robert Lasch, “Along the Border,” in With All Deliberate Speed, ed. Don Shoemaker (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 61-63; Wallace Westfeldt, in “Communities in Strife,” in ibid., 53, noted that advanced warning “does have an affect, but it can be taken either way.”

76 “State Will File Lamar Tech Appeal”; Sim Myers, “Picketers Escort Negro Students from Lamar,” Beaumont Enterprise, 2 October 1956; “5,455 Students Register at Lamar for All-Time High,” Beaumont Enterprise, 2 October 1956. F. L. McDonald, “Progress Report,” 6, in FLMP states that twenty-seven blacks had enrolled.

77 Letter from F. L. McDonald to Sheriff Charley Meyers, 11 September 1956, FLMP.

78 For descriptions of the picketers, see Myers, “Picketers Escort Negro Students from Lamar”; Ralph Wooster interview by author, 23 June 1989; and Breed, College Desegregation, 5-7.

79 F. L. McDonald, “Newsletter from the Office of the President” to the Board of Regents, 5 October 1956, FLMP.

80 “Lamar Tech Quiet as Pickets Observe Mayor Cokinos’ Ban,” Beaumont Enterprise , 6 October 1956; Patrick K. Graves, “Leaders Recall Time of Civil Rights Act,” Beaumont Enterprise, 2 July 1989; G. P. Cokinos, Letter to the Editor, Beaumont Enterprise, 15 July 1990. On violence against blacks, see “Vandalism at Office of Negro Attorney Probed,” Beaumont Journal, 9 October 1956, and Johns interview.

81 Quoted from “Statement: Mrs. Mercer Clarifies Picket Role,” Beaumont Journal , 16 October 1956. See also “Voluntary End of Picketing Comes at Lamar,” Beaumont Enterprise, 16 October 1956.

82 See “Citizens’ Council Plans Increase in Membership,” Beaumont Enterprise, 18 December 1956. Two weeks after the mass meeting, a Beaumont newspaper ran an article that reported that a “considerable number” of Beaumont police officers had joined the council. See “Other Texas Municipalities Forbid Such Membership: Beaumont Police Officers and Other City Employes [sic] Join White Citizens Council,” Beaumont Journal, 25 October 1956.

83 Breed, College Desegregation, 15-16.

84 Quotations are from Sarah Marstellar, “Violence Erupts at Lamar Tech; Picket Is Beaten,” HC, 4 October 1956. See also “Rangers Patrol at Lamar Tech; Pickets Halt 7,” HC, 3 October 1956; “Negro Cab Driver and White Picket Held after Rift,” Beaumont Journal, 4 October 1956; and Cynthia Pommier, “Segregation Is a Thing of the Past,” Beaumont Enterprise, 17 February 1990.

85 Quotation from Jones, “Writer Enumerates LU’s Black History,” 30. See also Alvin Randolph, interview by author, 22 June 1989.

86 On Lamar’s policy of “gradual integration,” see F. L. McDonald, “Ten Year Progress Report [1951-61],” an unpublished report prepared for the Board of Regents of Lamar State College of Technology, 6, FLMP. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools (Washington: GPO, 1967), v, noted how “racial isolation” in public schools persisted even after “formal segregation” had ended.

87 McDonald to Charles Howell, 26 December 1956, FLMP.

88 McDonald to Charles Butts, 8 October 1956, FLMP.

89 Breed, College Desegregation, 11-12.

90 Winona Frank, interview by author, 4 November 1990.

91 The Cardinal, Lamar State College of Technology annual, 1958.

92 Smith to Dr. and Mrs. A. H. A. Jones, 21 June 1948, NAACP Papers; quotation in Smith to J. L. Montgomery, 20 September 1948, NAACP Papers; Bruce et al. v. Stilwell et al., 206 F.2d 554; U. S. Tate, Annual Report, NAACP Southwestern Regional Office, 1 October 1954, 11, NAACP Papers.

93 “Memorandum Opinion,” Whitmore et al. v. Stilwell et al., U.S.D.Ct., Eastern District, Texas, Civ. No. 366, 2 November 1954, 2.

94 Tate, 1954 Annual Report, 12 (first quotation); “Memorandum Opinion,” Whitmore v. Stilwell, 3 (second quotation).

95 Tate, 1954 Annual Report, 12; “Memorandum Opinion,” Whitmore v. Stilwell, 3, 5-7; Whitmore v. Stilwell, U.S.Ct. of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, No. 15743, 23 November 1955, 227 F.2d 187 (Judge Hutcheson’s opinion is reprinted in Race Relations Law Reporter, February 1956, 1[1]:122); “Texas,” SSN, December 1954, 14; “Legal Action,” SSN, December 1955, p. 5. See also Gillette, “NAACP in Texas,” 217-18.

96 Quoted from “Race Tension Brings Gun Blast in Texarkana, Mob Clash in Kentucky,” HC, 7 September 1956. For Stilwell’s and Williams’s alleged role in blocking black students from entering TJC, see “Stilwell Hails Victory in Court over NAACP,” Texarkana Gazette, 28 September 1956.

97 Quoted from “Texarkana Crowd Turns away Two,” HC, 10 September 1956. See also “The Lonely Hostages of a South in Strife,” Life, 24 September 1956, 46-47. On the arrest of black youth, see “Texarkana Disorders,” SSN, October 1956, 14.

98 The description of the mob blockade at TJC is taken from “Lonely Hostages,” 47. The excerpted testimonies of the Grays and Postons to the court of inquiry on 26 September 1956 is from 3N158, Texas v. NAACP Papers. On the police officers intimidating Gray and Poston, see “Legal Action,” SSN, November 1956, p. 8.

99 A transcript of the federal hearing on the Motion to Intervene in Civil Action No. 366, Whitmore v. Stilwell, on 27 September 1956, is found in 3N158, Texas v. NAACP Papers. The state subpoenaed as witnesses A. Maceo Smith, Edwin C. Washington, and Tate, all from the NAACP southwestern regional office in Dallas. Tate unfortunately chose to go to Tyler on 26 September to try to persuade Sheehy to quash the subpoena against Smith because the officer who served him failed to tender to him his per diem and mileage fees as required by law. Saving Smith from having to testify under oath proved fruitless, unnecessary, and a diversion from where Tate really needed to have been, which was in Texarkana at the court of inquiry proceedings.

100 Transcript, Texas v. NAACP Papers; “Public Protests and Violence Accompany Desegregation Moves,” SSN, May 1964, 12. The NAACP held no malice against Gray, probably sympathizing with the state of duress the ordeal put her through. She went on to attend NTSC in the spring term of 1957 and received $100 from NAACP lawyer W. J. Durham to help her purchase her books. Dallas NAACP leader Juanita Craft helped her find housing, and, through the intercession of Thurgood Marshall, a 33rd degree Freemason, the Southern Jurisdiction’s United Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry contributed $200 toward her education. She expressed her gratitude to Marshall and all her supporters, stating, “I hope when I finish my college work to make a contribution to the cause that you [Marshall], Mr. Durham, and others have given so much for” (from Gray to Marshall, 25 February 1957, Group III: Box J5, “Misc-Jessalyn Gray” file, NAACP Papers). See also Gray to Marshall, 4 June 1957; Alice B. Stovall to Richard L. Plaut, 13 November 1956; Plaut to Gray, 14 November 1956; Gray to Marshall, 7 November 1956; Marshall to Hon. Louis W. Roy Sr., 30 October 1956; Marshall to Gray, 30 October 1956; and Roy to Marshall, 25 October 1956, all NAACP Papers. On Gray’s motivation for trying to enter TJC, see Gillette, “NAACP in Texas,” 308.

101 Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 213.

102 Following a violent episode at a high school in Mansfield, Texas, Shepperd and Shivers revealed how closely their views of the NAACP as “paid agitators” stirring up blacks against southern custom, especially segregated schools, coincided with the position of the Citizens’ Council. The federal courts in Jackson v. Rawdon opened the town’s white high school beginning in the fall of 1956 despite the district’s request for an additional year to prepare the local community to accept the decree. When the school year commenced, mob rule took over and Shivers intervened by sending in the Texas Rangers to keep the black students out and by requesting the trustees to transfer out of the district students whose presence might be likely to provoke violence. When Marshall criticized the governor’s action, Shivers and the attorney general countered with accusations that impugned the motives of the NAACP in its fight with Jim Crow. See “School Boards and Schoolmen,” SSN, October 1956, 14.

103 Memorandum from Sterling Fulmore Jr. to John Ben Shepperd, 11 September 1956, Texas v. NAACP Papers; Helen Thomas, “Individuals from Texas Reported as Having Been Affiliated with Communist-Front Organizations—As Compiled from Official Government Reports,” 1956, in Texas v. NAACP Papers. The CRC, created in 1946 and led by William Patterson, a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., since 1927, played a crucial national role in cultivating what historian Harold Cruse called the “new Negro leftwing integrationist elite” (Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1967), 177). On the CRC, see Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), s.v. “Civil Rights Congress,” and Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (Rutherford: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1987). On Dies and the Communist Control Act, see Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left, s.v. “House Committee on Un-American Activities, a.k.a. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).”

104 The state’s attack on the NAACP in Tyler is well documented in the archival collection Texas v. NAACP Papers. Michael L. Gillette’s dissertation, which created this collection, is also very useful; see Gillette, “NAACP in Texas,” ch. 8. Mark Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936- 1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 272-73, briefly discusses the case, tying it to the broader assault on civil rights lawyers, the NAACP, and the LDF. See also George Fuermann, Reluctant Empire (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 214- 16; American Jewish Congress, Assault Upon Freedom of Association: A Study of the Southern Attack on the National Association for the Advancement Colored People (New York: American Jewish Congress, 1957), 26; and Bartley, Massive Resistance, 216.

105 “NAACP Charges Undue Pressure by Attorney General in Investigation,” News Release, 21 September 1956, NAACP Papers. The attorney general clearly intended the presence of the troopers to intimidate and cow investigated persons into cooperating with the probe. Gillette, in “NAACP in Texas,” writes that “the use of police personnel by the attorney general’s office appears to have been somewhat routine, and there were no instances of heavy-handedness or overt attempts to instill fear” (289-90). He cites as his source for this evaluation the testimony of various state attorneys at the Tyler trial and subsequent interviews he held with some of the investigating attorneys some twenty-five years later. From the standpoint of the black and white communities where these investigations took place, however, he states that the troopers had an “upsetting” effect on branch officials and “cast a pall of suspicion over the NAACP.” When armed troopers and state attorneys took away a local NAACP official from his or her place of work, he says, “onlookers concluded that the Association was in trouble with the law.” This is an understatement: the NAACP was in trouble with the law, “the law” meaning the repressive authority of the state. Moreover, treating members like dangerous criminals and subversive radicals by using armed and uniformed state police and the legendary Texas Rangers as part of an inquiry into the actions—and not as part of arrests—of a corporation cannot be regarded as routine. In the popular mind the Texas Rangers were associated with Mexican “bandits” and Bonnie and Clyde-and John Dillinger-type outlaws.

106 Fletcher to Shepperd, “Investigation of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, Texas, Branches of the N.A.A.C.P.,” 19-20 September 1956, 5-6, Texas v. NAACP Papers. The attorney general’s staff first went into action at NAACP offices in Dallas and Houston on 13 September. For a newspaper account of the raids, see Bob Gray, “Shepperd Probing NAACP in Texas,” HP, 14 September 1956. The NAACP’s public relations office responded to the attacks with news releases that emphasized that the association was “a law-abiding organization”; see “Texans Probe NAACP Records: Membership Lists Withheld,” 20 September 1956, NAACP Papers. In 1962, Fletcher went to work as a staff attorney for the Texas Municipal League, from which he retired in 1987 at the age of seventy-five. Described as “the epitome of the Southern Gentleman,” he died 1 September 1998 in a “Care Center” in Granbury, Texas. See “In Memory of Riley Eugene Fletcher,” Texas Town & City, October 1998, 10.

107 Fletcher to Shepperd, “Investigation,” 10.

108 Ibid., 11. On Gray’s testimony, see “Hearing at Tyler in Recess,” Texarkana Daily News, 13 October 1956 (quotation), and “Jessalyn Gray Testifies at NAACP Trial,” Texarkana Gazette, 13 October 1956. On the contract between Sweatt and the NAACP, see Gillette, “NAACP in Texas,” 306 (see also 336 n. 24, where Gillette states that Judge Dunagan provided him with a copy of the contract in 1981); “Barratry, Sweatt Stipend Figure in NAACP Hearing,” Texas Observer, 3 October 1956; and “Produce Contract,” SSN, October 1956.

109 “Texas Solon Plans to Submit Two Anti-NAACP Bills to Legislature,” News Release, 28 December 1956, NAACP Papers (quotation); on Shivers’s segregation committee, see “Legislative Action,” SSN, October 1956; and on Rep. Jerry Sadler, see “Legislative Action,” SSN, January 1957, and George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 90, 94, 96. Sadler was at the end of his first term representing Anderson County, which was approximately one-third black in 1956 (see Dallas Morning News, Texas Almanac, 1958-1959, 363-64, 523).

110 See Fuermann, Reluctant Empire, 216-17, for the exchange between Huffman and Thurmond (which Fuermann spells “Thurman”). On the Marshall summit, see “Legislative Action,” SSN, January 1957, 10.

111 Gonzalez is pictured and quoted in “Legislative Action,” SSN, June 1957, 2; see also Stuart Long, “White Supremacy and the ‘Filibusteros,”’ The Reporter, 27 June 1957, 15, and Fuermann, Reluctant Empire, 218.

112 For the quotation by A. A. Lucas and material on the Methodist women’s group and state CIO council, see “What They Say,” SSN, January 1957, 13; on the involvement of the Texas Council of Churches, see Long, “White Supremacy,” 15.

113 Wilkins to Hall, 29 January 1958, NAACP Papers.

114 “The Law of Disorder,” New York Post, 24 September 1956.

1 Richard Morehead’s coverage of Texas education was a regular feature in SSN. A refreshingly honest and rare instance of reporting on the desegregation experience from the perspective of the black student appeared in SSN, December 1957, 5. Anthony Henry, a black student at UT, observed how he and other African Americans had to endure restrictions in regard to where they could live and eat and that in some cases they would receive a Negro “welcome treatment,” which they found as embarrassing as discrimination.

2 The A&M system consisted of four colleges and several other units (e.g., Forest Service and Rodent Control Service). The colleges included A&M, Prairie View A&M, Arlington State, and Tarleton State. The State Teachers College System consisted of East Texas at Commerce, Sam Houston at Huntsville, Southwest Texas at San Marcos, Stephen F. Austin at Nacogdoches, Sul Ross at Alpine, and West Texas at Canyon. See Texas Legislative Council, Higher Education Survey, Part I (Austin: Texas Legislative Council, 1951), 1-15, 37-48.

3 On the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, see Robert Frederick Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 204-26, and Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1991), 41-42.

4 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Equal Protection of the Laws in Public Higher Education, 1960 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1961), 64-68; “In the Colleges,” SSN, July 1955, 12; Donald W. Whisenhunt, The Encyclopedia of Texas Colleges and Universities: An Historical Profile (Austin: Eakin Press, 1986), 114-15.

5 Quoted in Homer Babbidge Jr. and Robert Rosenzweig, The Federal Interest in Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 175. Babbidge and Rosenzweig observe that the CRC split 3-3 on the question of withholding funds from private colleges, where the government has an even greater responsibility to uphold equal protection of the laws. Citizens denied their rights at a public college have recourse to the courts; those at private ones do not (183 n. 20). For the extent of desegregation in the South, see ibid., 169; and in the Deep South, see U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Equal Protection, 69.

6 The State Advisory Committees (on Civil Rights), The 50 States Report (Washington: GPO, 1961), 600. In addition to Mack H. Hannah and William B. Bates, the Texas committee was comprised of Thomas B. Ramey of Tyler (chair), Jerome K. Crossman of Dallas (secretary) , Robert Lee Bobbitt of San Antonio, J. S. Birdwell of Wichita Falls, Maurice R. Bullock of Fort Stockton, and Dr. M. E. Sadler of Fort Worth.

7 Quotation from Price Daniel to TSUN Board of Directors, 31 July 1948, II-B- 205, NAACP Papers; see also “NAACP Youth Council Protests Exclusion of Whites from Texas State University,” HI, 22 January 1949; “Resolution on Segregation in Education Adopted by the Youth Council, Houston Branch NAACP,” 9 January 1949, PD Papers, Box 56; and Youth Council, Houston Branch NAACP to Daniel, 12 January 1949, PD Papers, Box 56. Note that Schachtel’s name sometimes appears spelled as “Schachter.”

8 “Applies for Admission to T.S.U.: Churches Should Have Taken Integration Lead, Cleric Says,” HC, 8 September 1955.

9 On postponement of the board’s vote, see “Showdown Due on Segregation in Negro School,” HC, 8 September 1955, and “In the Colleges,” SSN, October 1955, 14. On the opening of TSU, see “T.S.U. Desegregates Students and Faculty,” HC, 11 January 1956; “TSU Board Votes 6-1 to Desegregate,” Houston Press, 11 January 1956; and “In the Colleges,” SSN, February 1956, p. 9; for quotations from Lee and the executive committee’s recommendation, see “Integration for TSU Is Voted by Directors,” HP, 11 January 1956. On whites who applied to TSU’s 1956 fall term, see “T.S.U. Admits White Students,” HC, 9 September 1956; and on Samuel M. Nabrit’s “special counseling,” see “No White Students Register at T.S.U.,” HC, 18 September 1956.

10 “Segregationist White Pastor Enters T.S.U.,” HC, 15 September 1958 (includes photograph); “White Pastor Finds Another on T.S.U. Rolls,” HC, 18 September 1958 (includes photographs); “Preacher Vows Court Fight as Entry at TSU Challenged,” HP, 18 September 1958. In the first of these articles TSU registrar E. O. Bell said that several white students had enrolled the previous year, but he refused to state how many and whether any remained or to identify them to the press.

11 First quote is in “Rev Munroe Enrolls at TSU; Tactics Hit by Bd Member,” HI, 20 September 1958; second quote is in “ ‘Object Lesson,’ ” SSN, October 1958, 14; and the third, “Pastor Hopes His Example Will Help,” HC, 18 September 1958. Reacting to McMahill’s enrollment, one of the board members of St. Thomas said: “This is a shock. I don’t approve of it myself.” My thanks to Berniece McBeth of Houston, past chair of the Archives and History Committee of the United Methodist Center (Texas Annual Conference), for helping me find out more about McMahill.

12 For quotations, see “In the Colleges,” SSN, March 1960, 10. Dooley’s order opening WTSC went into effect on 31 May 1960. Blacks had attempted to enter state teachers colleges at least as early as 1956; see “In the Colleges,” SSN, October 1956, 14. The last quotation is from Judge Joe Dooley’s summary judgment in Shipp v. White, U.S.D.Ct., Northern District, Texas, Amarillo Division, 1 March 1960, Civil Action 2789, in Race Relations Law Reporter 5 (Fall 1960): 740.

13 Minutes of the Texas State College for Women Executive Committee meeting, 1 April 1952, Executive Committee Folder, Integration File. My thanks to special collections librarian Kim Grover-Haskin at TWU for her help. On TWU’s history, see Whisenhunt, Encyclopedia, 156-57.

14 Excerpt from the Minutes of the Texas State College for Women Executive Committee meeting, 9 May 1955, in the “President’s Report to the Board of Regents on a Recommendation of the Executive Committee on the Subject of Segregation,” in the Minutes of the Board of Regents meeting, 14 January 1956, Integration File.

15 Minutes of the Texas State College for Women Executive Committee meeting, 14 May 1957, Executive Committee Folder, Integration File. See also Minutes of the Board of Regents meeting, 3 June 1957, for “Copy of Statement on Integration Policy,” Integration File. On John A. Guinn, see Frank C. Rigler, “Texas College for Women Has a New President,” Texas Outlook, August 1951, 17.

16 Minutes of the Board of Regents meeting, 24 August 1961, Integration File; on Dowells, see “Women’s University Becomes Biracial,” SSN, October 1961, 15, and Yvonne Barlow, “Integration at Texas Women’s University,” Daily Lasso, 19 November 1991.

17 “Negroes Enter Tech; Exact Number Unknown,” SSN, August 1961, 9; for Merrell T. Reed as having little help from the local NAACP branch in opening Tech and other places (e.g., Woolworths, Walgreen, the bus station, and area motels), see Reed to Clarence A. Laws, 16 December 1961, NAACP Papers, and Julius Amin, “Black Lubbock: 1955 to the Present,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book 65 (1989): 26.

18 On the early experience of blacks at Texas Tech, see Robert L. Foster and Alwyn Barr, “Black Lubbock,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book 54 (1978): 28-29, and Jane Gilmore Rushing and Kline A. Nall, Evolution of a University: Texas Tech’s First Fifty Years (Austin: Eakin Press, 1975), 122-24.

19 “Summer News Capsules,” Daily Cougar 29 (4 September 1962): 4.

20 Quoted in Meredith Trube, “Integrated over Summer: Ten Negro Students at UH—No Incidents,” Houston Press, probably September 1962, in clippings file at UH Special Collections, M. D. Anderson Library, Houston, Texas; see also Trube, “U. of Houston Integration Going Well,” Houston Press, 12 March 1963. For two small articles indicative of how editors gave desegregation as little attention as possible, see “Negroes Are in U.H. Classrooms,” HC, 2 October 1962, and “UH Enrolls 10 Negro Students,” HP, 3 October 1962.

21 Oral interview with Senator A. R. Schwartz (18 April 1985), part of the University of Houston Research Project, “The Campaign to Win Full State Support for the University of Houston, 1958-1963,” University of Houston Archives, M. D. Anderson Library. On Schwartz, see Ruthe Winegarten and Cathy Schechter, Deep in the Heart: The Lives and Legends of Texas Jews (Austin: Eakin Press, 1990), 180-81.

22 Quoted in Reinhard Friederich, “Integration Plans Indefinite as Yet,” Daily Cougar, 1 November 1962, 3. Jerry Wizig, Eat ’Em up, Cougars (Huntsville, Ala.: Strode Publishers, 1977), is a popular read on UH athletic desegregation, especially on the activities of star players like Warren McVea, Paul Gipson, Riley Odoms, Jerry Drones, Elmo Wright, Robert Newhouse, Charlie Hall, Wilson Whitley, and others (see 165-66, 206-12, 264-71, 287-90, and 327-30).

23 See Jim McClellan, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten,” October 1968, in the Rebel Theme Controversy Collection, UTAL.

24 The first quote is from Marion T. Harrington to Members of the [A&M System] Board of Directors, 11 July 1962, in the Black at UTA File, UTAL; for second quote, see a verbatim copy of “Integration Success at Arlington State,” Shorthorn, 21 September 1962, in ibid.; on the student center’s Confederate decor, see “UTA Still Feels Effects of Negroes’ Demand,” Fort Worth Press, 18 January 1970; and on black numbers at ASC in 1961 and 1962, see “70 Per Cent More Negroes Attend Desegregated Colleges This Year,” SSN, November 1963, 13. “In the Colleges,” SSN, September 1963, 7, noted that four blacks tried out and became “the first members of their race on the squad” of ASC’s football team in the fall semester of 1963.

25 Quote is from Tom Milligan, “Negroes Enter A&M without Incidents,” DMN, 5 June 1963. See also “A&M Enrolls Six Negroes,” Waco News-Tribune, 16 July 1963; “3 Negroes Enroll at Texas A&M,” SSN, July 1963, 3; and “6 Negroes Sign for Texas A&M Summer Session,” SSN, August 1963, 17. For an estimate of the number of blacks at A&M in 1962 and 1963, see “70 Per Cent More Negroes Attend Desegregated Colleges this Year,” SSN, November 1963, 13. For the names and backgrounds of the six students, see “6 Negroes, 2 of Them Women, Register at A&M,” HP, 16 July 1963.

26 See “Connally Cites ‘Tremendous’ Biracial Gains,” SSN, August 1963, 17. On the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and civil rights, see Mark Stern, Calculating Visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and Civil Rights (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For a glimpse of the Kennedy-Johnson attack on racial barriers through a contemporaneous news source, see Robert E. Baskin, “Kennedy Asks Business Group to Help Break Down Barriers,” DMN, 5 June 1963, and “Race Bars on Federal Work Hit,” in ibid.

27 The quotes are from Abelardo Baeza, “La Escuela Escondida: History of the Morgan School in Alpine, Texas, 1929-1954,” Journal of Big Bend Studies (January 1994): 96. See also Abelardo Baeza, “La Escuela del Barrio: A History of the Alpine Centennial School, 1939-1969,” Journal of Big Bend Studies (January 1992): 134. Sul Ross’s enabling act did not carry a “white students only” restriction. Certain general articles refer to the establishment of state normal schools for the training of “white teachers.” See Texas Laws 1917, 35th Legislature, ch. 197, and Texas Civil Statutes (Vernon, 1950 Supp.) Art. 2645-2647g. I am grateful to my friend Mark Saka, assistant professor of history at Sul Ross State University, for bringing the Baeza articles to my attention and for other generous assistance he extended.

28 Baeza, “La Escuela Escondida,” 94-95; Baeza, “La Escuela del Barrio,” 137.

29 See Dana Jean Smith, etc., et al. v. John Garland Flowers, etc., et al. U.S.D.Ct., Western District, Texas, Austin Division, 4 February 1963, Civil Action No. 1305, in Race Relations Law Reporter 8 (1963): 117-20. Flowers is quoted in SWT’s 1964 annual, no page numbers.

30 See “70 Per Cent More Negroes,” 13; for Prairie View’s announced desegregation and on the first whites to attend the college, see Edward Martin, dean of arts and sciences at Prairie View A&M University, conversation with author, 10 March 1994, Prairie View, Texas. Governor Connally pressured Tarleton to announce its desegregation policy; see Jim Mousner, “Connally: Our Colleges Open to All,” HP, 10 June 1964, and “Last State College Drops Racial Bars,” DMN, 10 June 1964. Prairie View’s president, E. B. Evans, faced great student unrest on the campus in 1963 over what they felt was his accommodation of segregation and his extreme authoritarianism. On the student group Students for Equality, Liberty and Freedom (SELF), which challenged Evans, see “Texas,” SSN, February 1964, 7.

31 State Teachers College Board of Regents, Minutes, Meeting of 12 August 1955, quoted in James Olson, ed., “Years of Anxiety and Change” (13 June 1991), part of an unpublished manuscript on the history of Sam Houston State University by a deceased member of the university faculty. I am thankful to Dr. Olson, chair of Sam Houston State University’s Department of History for generously sharing with me a draft copy of this manuscript, which he is revising for publication.

32 Rupert Koeninger quote is from “Racial Integration Problems Discussed,” Houston Press, 17 May 1955. For a local article that appeared around the time of the meeting charging that the fund organizer, James Dombrowski, was a former member of the Communist Party, see “Integration Unit Aides under Fire of Senate Group,” HC, 17 May 1955. On Koeninger’s firing and its aftermath, see Woodward, “Unreported Crisis,” 82; “Segregation Issue Involved in Board’s Firing of Professor,” SSN, June 1962, 2; “Dr. Koeninger Now Finds Academic Rights at TSU,” SSN, January 1963; and Olson “Years of Anxiety and Change.”

33 On the legal struggle with regents, see “2 Negroes Sue to Go to SHSTC,” HP, 6 June 1964; “All State Teachers’ Colleges,” SSN, July 1964; and State Teachers Colleges Board of Regents, Minutes, Meeting of 5-6 June 1964, quoted in Olson, “Years of Anxiety and Change.” On Connally’s announcement, see Mousner, “Connally,” HP, and Mousner, “Last State College,” DMN. For an earlier example of Connally’s attitude toward desegregation, see “Connally for Continued Voluntary Racial Effort,” HP, 23 June 1963.

34 Quotes are from Gayle McNutt, “First Negro Is Enrolled at SHSTC,” HP, 10 June 1964; and Olson, “Years of Anxiety and Change.”

35 On Nacogdoches as a “hard core” area, see William Harlow Jr., “Ralph W. Steen, 1905-1980, and the Business of Twentieth Century Texas Education” (Ph.D. dissertation, Texas A&M University, 1990), 139; on the East Texas area, see the classic discussion by D. W. Meinig, Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 92-95.

36 The quote is from an interview with Edwin Gaston Jr. in Harlow, “Ralph W. Steen,” 117. See also “All State Teachers’ Colleges.”

37 James Gee’s quote and other material on East Texas is from Debra Wilkison, “Eyewitness to Social Change: The Desegregation of East Texas State College,” (M.A. thesis, East Texas State University, 1990), 16, and “State Colleges Have Nonracial Policies,” SSN, August 1964, 3. I am very grateful to Wilkison for sending me a copy of her thesis and for other ideas she shared at a conference where we presented papers together. Her interview with Waters, especially, gleaned an important side of the story of East Texas’s transformation.

38 Wilkison, “Eyewitness to Social Change,” 16-18. Gee retired in 1965 after eighteen years as president. His departure sped up East Texas State’s adjustment to racial change. Enrollment at the college did not decline because of desegregation. In 1964 4,502 students were enrolled, and a year later that number increased to 5,330. See “At Least 51 Tax-Supported Colleges Are Desegregated,” SSN, November 1964, 2.

1 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 100. See also his “Faulkner and Desegregation,” in James Baldwin Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 209. Connecting Baldwin to the concerns of this book feels natural and is enriched by a reading of the work of Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

2 Vernon McDaniel, History of the Teachers State Association of Texas (Washington: National Education Association, 1977), 77-87.

3 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden, quoted in Constance Curry, Silver Rights (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), vii; see also Curry’s coming to think about the goal of freedom as the oppressed did (xxvii). See also Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Debate (Washington: Civitas, 1997).

4 Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh, 2000), 315.

5 Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, 317. My thanks to Rhoda Johnson for the gift of a copy of Armah’s book from her trip to Senegal and to Asa G. Hilliard III-Nana Baffour Amankwatia II for recommending she get me this particular one. Without it I might not have finished my book in its right season.