In
the history of the civil rights movement, many events that set precedents and
gained national attention were surrounded in, or followed by, violence. In a 1967 article, Alan Scott documented the
public sentiment of Texans with relation to the civil rights movement and
remarked,
“The participation of the people
of Texas in the struggles related to the civil-rights movement has elicited few
headlines in the nation’s press. There
has been no equivalent to the events in Selma, Little Rock, Bogalusa, and
Prince Edward County, or on the University of Mississippi campus.”[1]
These statements are true because
in Texas during the 1960s there was no comparable civil rights event, or
coverage of an event, to the movements that were occurring in many other
southern states. These statements reflect
the legacy of the civil rights movement to end segregation in Houston. In Houston during the 1960s, the fight over
desegregation was the top issue, but there was no coverage of this event by the
Houston media. Civil rights action that
occurred in many Texas cities during the early 1960s did not receive much
coverage from the media. The civil
rights events that were surrounded in conflict received national coverage, and
as a result, many civil rights events, which did not involve a high level of violence,
are often overshadowed. A majority of
the civil rights activity in Texas is not widely studied by scholars, and, in
particular, Houston has been understudied as a mark of progress in the civil
rights movements. In this paper, I plan
to investigate the process of desegregation in Houston and examine the role of
local civil rights organizers, the media, and the white power elite. I will examine the influences and effects of
the media blackout in Houston and explore how the threat of civil conflict affects
the balance of power. The desegregation
process in Houston is complex, and it involved participation from a number of
groups. Houston is a unique case study,
in the civil rights movement, of how the threat of civil demonstrations led
differing groups of people to work towards the peaceful, immediate
desegregation of public facilities.
Civil rights reformers in Houston struggled against a system of
segregation based on deeply embedded norms.
The desegregation process of Houston offers an example of the, often
times, hidden interaction between different power structures within a city and
its effects on civil rights reforms. I
will begin by looking at the social atmosphere of Houston prior to
desegregation; secondly, I will examine the Houston system of segregation based
on deeply embedded norms and the effects it had on African Americans, and then
I will examine the events of desegregation, in chronological order, to
establish the changing roles of the participants.
In
order to understand the influences on the desegregation process in Houston, it
is necessary to understand the type of environment in which this social change
was born. Specifically, attention must be given to major events sparked by
racism that occurred prior to the 1960s in Houston and also the level of
pre-existing racial tension in the city.
In 1917 at Camp Logan, Texas, a black military policeman complained to
two white police officers regarding their use of force when they arrested a
black woman. The two police officers
pistol whipped the black MP and took him into custody along with the
woman. Another black military policeman
entered the situation and was also brutally beaten and arrested. When black troops from Camp Logan found out
what occurred, they stole rifles from an ammunition storage room and marched
towards the police station in Houston.
Approximately sixty-five black troops encountered a group of off-duty
policemen and national guardsmen and an all night gun battle took place in the
city. By morning, 12 whites were dead
and 14 wounded while one soldier was dead and four injured.[2] Professor Thomas R. Cole, biographer of
Houston civil rights activist Eldrewey Stearns, notes, “Memories of that awful
night left black and white Houstonians over the age of forty with a palpable
fear of a race war.”[3] This incident left a mark on the remembrances
of many older people who lived in Houston during the 1960s. Race relations would stabilize in Houston
during the period from the 1920s to the late 1950s, but this incident would stay
fresh in the minds of many of the older white power elite and civil rights
organizers, gravely affecting their outlook on upsetting the racial status
quo. Many older Houstonians would
retain a constant fear of any situation that would be prone to causing racial
strife. Their fears will be reflected in
their discussions of the events pertaining to desegregation.
The
level of pre-existing racial tension in Houston must also be examined if one is
to understand the type of atmosphere that posed a barrier to, and eventually
incited, unprecedented social change.
Professor Thomas R. Cole states that an “unwritten code of civility”
guided the behavior of the general public in racial matters, which white
Houstonians had grown accustomed to from the “quiet moderation and legal
strategies of most older black leaders.”[4] The older affluent black population in
Houston did not participate in public demonstrations to achieve social reform,
and this situation created an outward sense of complacency in race relations. Eldrewey Stearns, a black Texas Southern
University (TSU) law student, was driving home when he was pulled over by
policemen on the morning of August 23, 1959.
The officers told him he was under arrest because he did not have proper
identification.[5] Stearns claimed he was brutally mistreated by
the arresting officers, and also suffered beatings while he was in
confinement. In August 1959, Stearns
vehemently reported his mistreatment at a Houston City Council meeting, and he
received much press coverage from the Houston media and was subsequently
interviewed by a young Houston journalist, Dan Rather.[6] Professor Thomas R. Cole argues that this
event magnified race relations in Houston, which at the time was the largest
city containing the largest African American population in the South.[7] The event received more coverage than usual
because Stearns’ accusations of police brutality threatened the implied
segregationist situation. The complacent
race relations situation that had been established in Houston over a period of
three decades was suddenly disrupted.
The sit-in protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, which involved
African American college students, rapidly influenced the impetus for social
change throughout the nation.[8] Professor Thomas R. Cole states that these
sit-ins “silently broke through the old code of civility in race relations,
which prized peace and goodwill while suppressing rage at indignities of
segregation and second-class citizenship.”[9] The civil rights activity in the South
created a new avenue for African Americans to demand social change. This direct action form of protest would
eventually reach Houston and become the tool of civil rights reformers to
inevitably threaten the balance of power of the affluent groups and political
figures in the city.
While
sit-in demonstrations were becoming a highly visible instrument for social
change in the early 1960s in other Southern states, Houston was experiencing
civil rights action from conservative civil rights organizations. The efforts of these adult-led organizations achieved
victories but would eventually stir up feelings of rebellion among young
African Americans. Professor Thomas R.
Cole described the system of segregation, known as Jim Crow, in Houston:
“More by custom than by law,
blacks were segregated within or barred from white establishments such as
hotels, theaters, restaurants, public schools, colleges, parks, jails, and
hospitals. In downtown Houston, a black
man bleeding in the street could not get service from the driver of a white
ambulance.”[10]
African Americans in Houston worked
within their chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) and implemented litigation to fight this highly visible, yet
implicit system of segregation throughout the 1940s. In the 1940s, the Houston chapter of the
NAACP won a legal battle in Smith v.
Allwright. In this case, the United
States Supreme Court banned the all-white democratic primary in Texas. The NAACP also achieved another victory in
1946 with Sweatt v. Painter, in which
the United States Supreme Court banned segregation at the University of Texas
Law School.[11] Eldrewey Stearns tried to enroll at the
University of Texas Law School after graduating from Michigan State in 1957,
but he was denied admission. Stearns
enrolled at the law school at TSU and met many other African American students
that were becoming increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of social change
in Houston. Professor Thomas R. Cole
cites that “they (the students) began to see the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as an
organization that provided a handful of comfortable jobs for lawyers but few
practical benefits to the larger community.”[12] The legal victories were few and far between
in the eyes of the students. They did
not believe the legal tactics of the black conservative adult leadership were
moving the desegregation process fast enough.
With sit-in demonstrations occurring daily in southern states during the
1960s, and a group of restless college students aggravated by the
non-confrontational approach used by conservative blacks, these combined
factors lead to the fight for the desegregation of Houston’s public facilities.
The
roles of the media, black adult leaders, and white power structure would change
significantly from the first civil rights demonstration to occur in 1960
through later ones that would occur up to 1963.
The Texas Southern University (TSU) students channeled their energy and
planned to arrange their first sit-in demonstration on March 4, 1960 at Weingarten’s
Store, a local supermarket. Eldrewey
Stearns planned to call local radio and television stations to inform them of
the protest and also the major white newspapers: the Houston Post, Houston
Chronicle, and Houston Press. Stearns also planned to contact the police
about the protest. On the evening before
the sit-in, the TSU students went to the Baptist Student Center to see if
Reverend Bill Lawson would give them nonviolent instruction. Lawson was very critical of their plan to
have a sit-in and tried to dissuade them from having the protest. The TSU students left the Baptist Student
Center vowing to move ahead with the sit-in no matter what would stand in their
way. The first sit-in demonstration in
Houston occurred in March 1960. The TSU
students sat down at the Weingarten lunch counter in the white section and
asked for service. The store manager
quickly closed the lunch counter, and the students waited to be served until
finally the store manager locked the doors at closing time. The police officers on the scene did not
interfere with the protest, and no violence occurred during the first sit-in
demonstration in Houston. The local
television and radio news programs reported the event that evening.[13]
The second sit-in
occurred the next morning. Curtis
Graves, a TSU student, drove protestors to the Mading’s Drug Store. When the students sat down at the lunch
counter, the manager immediately closed the counter. The students were confronted by whites who
started to taunt them. The police and
the press showed up at that moment and the incident was dissolved. Prior to the demonstration, Police Chief Carl
Shuptrine had taken extra precautions to prevent the chance of violence and
made the decision not to arrest the protestors.
Uniformed and undercover police officers had been set in place during
the demonstration and police cars were ordered to stay close in the area but
out of sight.[14] Police Chief Shuptrine called Dr. Samuel
Nabrit, president of TSU, to inform him that the students would not be arrested
since he believed no laws had been broken and the students did not provoke any
violence. A few days after the first
sit-ins, Dr. Nabrit made a speech to a general assembly of students and faculty
and indicated that he would not try to stop the sit-in protests, and he
indirectly stated his support for the students.[15] The first sit-ins in Houston ran smoothly,
but the changing roles of the participants in the desegregation process would
greatly affect future sit-ins.
The
initial sit-ins established the starting roles for the participants in the
Houston desegregation process. The TSU
students took a direct action approach to fight against discrimination, black
leaders in the Houston community took both a conservative and neutral stance on
the actions of the students, the media provided coverage of the events, and the
police took extensive precautions to prevent violence and made no attempt to
interfere with the protests. With these
initial victories and publicity for the direct action student-led protests,
pressure ensued from political figures and conservative blacks. On March 14, 1960, Houston Mayor Lewis Cutrer
visited the TSU campus and brought a police convoy with him in an attempt to
intimidate the students and discourage them from engaging in further acts of
civil protest. The students were not
frightened by this display. As part of
an agreement to ease tensions, TSU President Samuel Nabrit asked the dean of
students, Dr. J.B. Jones, to set up a meeting at City Hall between the TSU students
and Mayor Cutrer. The students came to
the meeting looking to compromise, but Mayor Cutrer ignored their
concerns. He warned the students that
they would be subject to arrest in future protests if they refused to comply
with store managers who ordered them to leave the premises. Despite the Mayor’s uncompromising attitude,
Dr. J.B. Jones tried to persuade the students to stay in the meeting to reach
some kind of agreement, but they left as soon as they realized Mayor Cutrer was
not going to listen to their input. That
evening, TSU administrator Dr. B.A. Turner invited the students to his house
for dinner. The students, still wary
from the meeting with Jones and Mayor Cutrer, sensed this invitation had an
agenda behind it. After dinner, Turner
stated, “You guys have done a magnificent job…Now it’s time you young people
step back and let us negotiators move in and handle it.”[16] The students refused his suggestions and
affirmed that they would continue to protest until desegregation was
complete. The success of the first
sit-ins garnered a slightly negative response from conservative blacks, who
wanted to handle it their way, and from Mayor Cutrer, who wanted to maintain
order in the city.
The
threat of violence would have an increasing influence on participants of
Houston desegregation. On March 25,
1960, Eldrewey Stearns assembled a large mass of students and they all marched
to the City Hall cafeteria. When the
students arrived, white patrons left the cafeteria, and the manager did not
know whether to serve them. Houston
Councilman Louie Welch ordered the manager to serve the students because the
city cafeteria had no right to refuse service to citizens. The students were served food and the Houston
media ran the story on the front page.
No violence occurred, but City Hall received a large amount of angry
phone calls due to this event.[17] With growing apprehension, the Retail
Merchants’ Association (RMA), a group of white business owners, issued a
statement to retail merchants throughout Houston urging them to participate in
meetings of “Houstonians who are concerned that our community continue to grow
and prosper free of the disorder and violence which took their toll on business
and community life in Little Rock.”[18] The fears of many people in Houston were
sensing that the longer these protests took place, the more chance there would
be for violence. Bob Dundas, vice
president of Foley’s department store in downtown Houston, watched the events
that the students participated in very closely.
Professor Thomas R. Cole describes Dundas as a “hard-bitten,
old-fashioned political fixer and lobbyist who played for keeps and worked
faithfully with the city’s ruling elite.”[19] Dundas was a teenager when the Camp Logan
riot occurred in 1917, and his father had been called by a telephone operator
to help protect the city. Dundas later
went to the morgue and saw the bodies of the people who had been killed in that
shootout. The protests of the students
and the possibility of violence rekindled old memories of the racial conflict
for Dundas. After much effort, he got
local downtown merchants to agree to desegregate their lunch counters all
simultaneously on the condition that there would be no press coverage of the
event. Dundas got together with John T. Jones,
publisher of the Houston Chronicle
and president of Houston Endowment, and they worked to make sure that the event
would not receive any news coverage.
Oveta Culp Hobby, owner of the Houston
Post, agreed to their plan, and under threats to pull Foley’s advertising
from the Houston Press, Editor George
Carmack also agreed to Dundas and Jones’ plan.
They secured an agreement between local newspapers and radio stations to
remain silent on the event for ten days.[20] On August 25, 1960, seventy Houston lunch
counters quietly integrated and Dundas greeted the TSU students when they
arrived at Foley’s lunch counter and asked for service.[21] The growing fears of racial violence led the
white power elite to voluntarily desegregate and the result was a peaceful,
relatively unnoticed social change in Houston.
The
national press soon criticized the Houston media for censoring coverage of the
event. On September 2, 1960, an article
in the Texas Observer stated,
“We are still blinking our
eyes—we can’t believe it! The entire
Houston press—newspapers, radio, and TV—entering into an overt conspiracy to
suppress a major news development they had covered fully up to the time of its
climax! … Inflammatory reporting is one thing, but truthful reporting is
another…”[22]
A scathing critique of the Houston
media’s actions was also made in an article titled “Blackout in Houston” in the
September 12th issue of Time
magazine. The article reported the
comment that one unnamed Houston media official gave on why the stores decided
to go along with the secret plan: “The stores wanted to integrate the lunch
counters at the least possible cost.
They wanted to lose neither Negro nor white business. They felt that not publicizing the event was
their safest course of action.”[23] Both economic and safety concerns were influences
in the desegregation process and also motivated the Houston media
blackout. The adult black leadership and
the TSU students were all involved in this act of desegregation in Houston. Despite the criticisms of the national media,
the voluntary desegregation of seventy lunch counters in Houston went virtually
unnoticed by the general public.
The
black conservative adult leadership in Houston played a hidden role in many of
the events in the desegregation process.
In February of 1961, TSU students staged an attempt to get service at
the Union Train Station cafeteria, which served interstate travelers. The students were trying to take advantage of
the 1960 Supreme Court case, Boynton v.
Virginia, which prohibited segregation in waiting rooms and restaurants
that served interstate travelers. When
the students arrived, the manager called the police. The police charged the students with
loitering and took them to jail. The
students’ lawyer, George Washington, Jr., paid their bail with money donated
from the Harris County Council of Organizations, a group of affluent black
businessmen.[24] In 1957, the Houston Sports Association (HSA)
led a campaign to bring a major league baseball franchise to the city. The city needed to build a stadium in order
to get a franchise and Harris County Judge Roy Hofheinz was in charge of
gathering support for voters to approve a public bond to build the world’s
first domed stadium. He asked Quentin
Mease, South Central YMCA director, to gather support among African American voters
for the bond issue. Mease and other
affluent black businessmen agreed to campaign for the bond issue only on the
condition that the new stadium be a fully integrated facility when it opened. Hofheinz accepted the agreement and with the
support of African American voters, in 1958 the bond issue passed and the
stadium was built. This event led to the desegregation of Houston’s convention
hotels. Hofheinz did not want the city
embarrassed by having African American baseball players stay in segregated
hotels, so along with John T. Jones, who had played a critical part in
desegregating Houston lunch counters two years earlier, he convinced hotels to
desegregate in April of 1962. This event
marked the second time in the Houston desegregation process that a media
blackout occurred.[25] The affluent black leaders used their
monetary stature and influence in the city to make great contributions to the
desegregation process playing a behind-the-scenes role.
One
of the last major demonstrations in the desegregation process of Houston never
happened. This event relied on the
participation of an extensive network of people with differing interests. Houston planned to have a nationally
televised parade to honor astronaut Gordon Cooper on May 23, 1963. Reverend Bill Lawson, who had first
criticized the TSU students for planning sit-ins, was now working with
them. Reverend Lawson, along with other
TSU students, planned to use the parade as a way to desegregate movie theaters
and restaurants. They told Quentin Mease
that all the students were going to block the parade route in front of national
television cameras. Mease organized the
protest so that it could be used as a form of leverage in desegregation
negations. Mease contacted African
American businessman Hobart Taylor.
Taylor had extensive ties to the white elite and set up a meeting to
persuade theater and restaurant owners to desegregate their
establishments. John T. Jones and Bob
Dundas again played a critical part in convincing theater and restaurant owners
to desegregate. Mease informed Jones and
Dundas that if they were unable to convince the theater and restaurant owners
to desegregate, TSU students would block the parade route and embarrass the
city in front of a national audience.
The fail-safe point to call off the protest was eleven A.M. on the day
of the parade. This time marked the last
point at which TSU students would call Mease to find out whether the protest
would take place. On the day of the parade, Jones and Dundas finally convinced
the theater and restaurant owners to desegregate on the condition that there
would be no media coverage of the event.
The TSU students were contacted at ten thirty A.M. and the parade went
ahead as scheduled with no interruption.
This event led to the third and final media blackout in the Houston
desegregation process.[26] The negotiating power was in the hands of the
adult black leaders and the TSU students.
Houston experienced another monumental social change without any
awareness of what happened that day beyond the people involved in that event.
Meaningful
change did happen in Houston during the 1960s.
The desegregation process in Houston included a significant amount of
participants. It forced people, with
differing interests at times, to interact with each other. A major racial conflict that occurred almost
four decades before the sit-in protests in Houston fueled the fears of many
people and led them to ultimately advocate desegregation rather than the
possibility of violence. African
Americans in Houston battled their way out of an implicit yet highly visible
form of segregation, and the combined power of influence and prosperity wielded
by conservative black adults, and the threat of civil protest posed by young
college activists guided the progress of desegregation. Members of the white power elite avoided what
they saw as a potential racial conflict, and they implemented media
blackouts. These blackouts resulted in
the peaceful desegregation of public facilities at a time when violence was
prevalent in the struggle for desegregation in many other Southern states. As in many smaller civil rights movements, we
are not always aware of the influences that led up to, or the people that
played a part in, certain events. The
desegregation process of Houston is a vivid example of the different roles that
power structures played in the civil rights movement, and the unseen work and
efforts of people that participated in this complex social change.
Works Cited
Beeth, H., and Wintz, C. D.,
eds. Black Dixie: Afro‑Texan History and Culture in Houston. College
Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press 1992.
“Blackout in Houston.” Time.
(1960, September 12): 68.
Cole, T. R. No Color Is My
Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston. Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press 1997.
Cole, T. R. (Producer), &
Berman, D. (Director). (1998). The Strange Demise of Jim Crow [Motion
picture]. United States: California Newsreel.
Scott, A. “Twenty‑Five Years
of Opinion on Integration in Texas.” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly
48(2) (1967, September): 155‑163.
“Unbelievable.” The Texas
Observer. (1960, September
2) 52(22).
University of Houston. “Untold Stories: The Strange Demise
of Jim Crow in Houston.” Published
online at http://www.coe.uh.edu/untold_stories/index.html [cited June 30, 2005].
[1] A. Scott, “Twenty‑Five Years of Opinion on Integration
in Texas.” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 48(2) (1967, September), 155.
[2] University of Houston. “Untold Stories: The Strange
Demise of Jim Crow in Houston.” Published
online at http://www.coe.uh.edu/untold_stories/index.html [cited June 30,
2005].
[3] T. R. Cole, No Color Is My Kind: The Life of
Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston. Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press 1997, 25.
[4] Cole, No
Color Is My Kind, 17.
[5] Cole, No
Color Is My Kind, 14.
[6] Ibid,
15-16.
[7] Ibid, 19.
[8] H. Beeth and C. D. Wintz, eds. Black Dixie: Afro‑Texan
History and Culture in Houston. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University
Press 1992, 213.
[9] Cole, No
Color Is My Kind, 22.
[10]Cole, No
Color Is My Kind, 23.
[12]Ibid,
25.
[15]Ibid,
33-34.
[18] Ibid,
43.
[19] Ibid,
54.
[21]Cole, T. R. (Producer), & Berman, D. (Director).
(1998). The Strange Demise of Jim Crow [Motion picture]. United States:
California Newsreel.
[22]
“Unbelievable.” The Texas Observer.
(1960, September 2) 52(22).
[23]
“Blackout in Houston.” Time. (1960, September 12), 68.
[25] Cole, No
Color Is My Kind, 78-79.
