Story Experience: 1955 – 1980
In its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory segregation in public schools in 21 states was unconstitutional. Segregation continued in other public facilities, including hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and hospitals, but a spark had been lit as African Americans continued their long fight to end the era of Jim Crow.
In March 1961, Houston Medical Forum members posted bond for students arrested during sit-ins. (Printed in Forward Times, March 4, 1961.)
In the early 1960s, students from Texas Southern University (TSU) joined the protest efforts of other African Americans by staging sit-ins to protest segregation at various public facilities in Houston. As in other southern cities, the students turned to African-American professionals and businessmen to provide the financial support for their efforts. The physicians of the Houston Medical Forum eagerly participated, paying bail to secure the release of protesters who had been arrested.
In the decades following Brown v. Board of Education, the United States made great strides in the integration of it medical and educational institutions, although the changes were rarely uncontested or complete. As they continued to care for their patients, Houston’s African-American physicians often stood at the forefront of these transformative efforts.
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- Brown v. Board of Education
In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (347 U.S. 483), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional because it deprives students of equal educational opportunities. This decision directly countered the doctrine of “separate but equal” established in 1896 with the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537). By 1954, seventeen, mostly southern states had laws requiring racial segregation in schools. Four other states, including Kansas, allowed local school districts to segregate schools if they so chose to do so.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a major force in the civil rights movement in the United States, focused on legal cases to compel the integration of American society in the 1930s. Its initial strategy involved forcing universities to admit black students. The NAACP secured an early victory in Murray v. Pearson (182 A. 590) in 1935, when the Maryland Supreme Court ruled that the University of Maryland could not deny access to its law program based on race. However, before 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy still stood as the law of the land and many states continued to segregate educational facilities.
By the 1950s the NAACP began to look for cases involving elementary school students. It filed five cases in different parts of the country with several common elements: all involved elementary school children, all involved school districts where black schools were inferior to white ones, and each suit claimed that the “separate but equal” doctrine violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In 1952 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the five cases collectively—a major victory because it showed that school segregation was a national problem and not simply a southern issue. Ultimately, the Court’s members recognized that they were divided and decided to rehear arguments.
In the interim, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed California Governor Earl Warren as the new Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren and the other eight justices knew that racial unrest was likely to follow their ruling no matter what they decided. Therefore, Warren concluded that unanimity was necessary to make a strong statement regarding segregation. To insure that the court’s decision would be enforced throughout the country, Warren worked hard to achieve this end. On May 17, 1954, Warren read the unanimous opinion holding statutory school segregation unconstitutional.
The next step in desegregating schools was to determine the manner in which integration should take place. On May 31, 1955 Warren read the ruling now known as Brown II (349 U.S. 294) which directed states to move with “all deliberate speed” to end segregation in the classroom.
Resistance to the Brown decision followed. The governor of Virginia closed public schools to thousands of students rather than submit to desegregation. Three massmarches on Washington and a prayer pilgrimage in favor of integration took place.
In 1956, nineteen U.S. senators and seventy-seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the South prepared the Southern Manifesto. This document accused the Supreme Court of abusing its power and opposed judicially enforced racial integration of public places. The three southern senators who did not sign the document were Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Al Gore, Sr., and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.
In Arkansas in 1957, President Eisenhower ordered National Guard troops to escorted black students to formerly all-white schools. Some southern states took more than twenty years to integrate public schools, and some commentators believe that complete integration has yet to occur.
- Jim Crow
Reconstruction (1863-1877) marked the federal government’s attempt to resolve the aftermath of the American Civil War, including among other things, the re-admission of secessionist southern states in the Union and the legal and constitutional status of freedmen. By the late 1870s, it became clear that the full integration of African Americans into the political, economic, and social systems in the South in particular and the nation in general.
Increasingly, southern states enacted laws and initiated customs designed to keep African Americans as second-class citizens at best. The most significant “Jim Crow” laws required that public schools, public facilities, and public transportation maintain separate facilities for whites and blacks. Many southern states passed laws that effectively precluded African Americans from voting or serving on juries, which were among the most basic rights of citizenships. For example, poll taxes or literacy tests were applied unfairly to black residents.
Jim Crow laws helped create a racial caste system in the American South where social customs limited educational, political, legal, and economic opportunities for blacks and dictated how they needed to conduct themselves in society. If an African American violated such customs, he or she risked jail, violence, and even death.
Most historians agree that the name Jim Crow is derived from a minstrel show character. The Jim Crow Era finally drew to a close with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, although social, political, and economic inequities persist.
- Texas Southern University
In 1947, Herman Sweatt, a black man, applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law. In an effort to thwart Sweat’s lawsuit while it was still within the Texas court system, the state legislature established in the City of Houston the Texas State University for Negroes as a “separate but equal” institution of higher education.
To create the new university, the state legislature purchased the Houston College for Negroes from the Houston Independent School District. At a cost of $2,000,000, the state also established a law school as part of the new university.
In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt’s favor, concluding that the newly created separate school was inadequate because of quantitative differences in the facilities and intangible factors such as from most of the future lawyers with whom graduates would interact. The decision in Sweatt v. Painter (339 U.S. 629 (1950)) represented a successful challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
The Texas State University for Negroes was renamed Texas Southern University in 1951. Twenty-five years later, its law school was renamed for Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s lead lawyer who argued Sweatt’s case and later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
During the 1960s, Texas Southern University students vigorously protested Houston’s racial policies, staging peaceful sit-ins at segregated facilities across the city. In May 1967, following the arrest of a Texas Southern University student but also as a result of ongoing racial tension, students staged a night-long protest. The Houston police attempted to brutally repress the demonstration. In the ensuing riot, a police officer dies, two officers and two students were wounded, and some 500 students were arrested.
Today, some 9,000 students, faculty, and staff make up the Texas Southern University community, with a mix of ethnicities represented. Located on 145 acres in Houston’s Third Ward, Texas Southern University attract students because of its legacy of empowerment and its important research centers as the Mickey Leland Center on World Hunger and Peace, the Minority Cancer Education Center, and the Center for Transportation Training and Research.
For more information visit the Texas Southern University website.
- Houston Medical Forum
- The Houston Medical Forum was founded in 1958 as an association for black doctors. Today it exists as a component society of the National Medical Association, Inc. and a branch of the Lone Star Medical Association. Its members consist predominantly of African American physicians and surgeons as well as residents and medical students.
