CHAPTER 2

TWO CITIES RACIAL SEGREGATION

ALONG THE BAYOU AND HOUSTON’S
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
BEFORE BROWN

When the Supreme Court ruled, in 1954, that racially segregated pub-
lic schools violated the Constitution, Houston was operating the largest
racially segregated public school system in the United States. The schools
always had been segregated institutions and, in fact, had provided the pat-
tern upon which residents established the city’s Jim Crow laws during the
early years of the twentieth century. Therefore, in order to appreciate what
the notion of “school desegregation” in Houston entailed, it is important
first to examine how these segregated schools developed, how they oper-
ated, and to what extent they provided “impartial provision” for both the
“white and colored children” of the Bayou City.
The earliest school for whites in Houston, a private school, seems to
have been opened in November 1837, less than one year after the founding
of the city. A newspaper story about a local artist, A. E. Andrews, men-
tioned that his wife intended to open a school in their home to provide
rudimentary education for young ladies and possibly for a few boys under
the age of twelve.1
Houston, the capital of the Republic of Texas from 1837 to 1839, grew
rapidly, as did its school-age population. Consequently, two additional pri-
vate schools opened in 1838, and local citizens began eƒorts to establish pub-
lic schools that same year. The city, along with assistance provided by the
Lone Star Lodge of Odd Fellows, constructed a two-story schoolhouse in
the heart of town. However, the school could not open immediately, due to
a controversy over the deed to the land upon which the building had been
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

located. Apparently, during the initial surveying of the Allen brothers’ pro-
posed capital city, o¥cials set aside one block as “School House Square.”
The Allens also had donated an adjoining half-block to the Methodist
Church. Unfortunately, city o¥cials had forgotten about the donation to
the church and had utilized a newer version of the map while planning the
school construction, a map that misidentified the Methodist Church’s plot
as “school reserve.”
The Methodist minister, the Reverend Littleton Fowler, had the one
document that could have clarified the issue, the deed to the property, but
he had ventured oƒ into central Texas. This left city o¥cials and the church
elders to negotiate a settlement that divided the disputed property and per-
mitted the school to remain where it had been erected, on the site now

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 22 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

occupied by the Houston Chronicle. Finally, on February 11, 1839, 104 stu-
dents attended the opening of the school.2
It is interesting to note that, at its very inception, controversy plagued
public education in Houston, a situation that has been modus operandi for
the public school system until the present. The historical sources fail, in
some cases, to resolve controversies regarding many of these early schools,
confusing names, dates of establishment, and which of these institutions,
if any, provided free education for the children of Houston. It is clear that
most of the city’s early schools operated on a tuition basis. Evidence sug-
gests that, by 1841, several schools, including the Male and Female City
School, Houston Female Seminary, Classical School, and the Houston
Academy fell into this category.3
Houston’s first parochial school, operated by Saint Vincent de Paul
Catholic Church, opened at Franklin and Caroline streets in 1842. Two
years later, H. F. Gillett established a school which he named the Houston
Academy, located in the Houston Telegraph building at Main and Preston
streets. Later that year, W. J. Thurber opened yet another private school in
the Dibble Building, two blocks down Main Street from Gillett’s school.
Antebellum Houston, then, oƒered a variety of schools and courses of
study from which students could choose, provided that the prospective
scholar happened to be white and had parents who could aƒord tuition.
Gillett charged two dollars per month for reading, writing, and orthogra-
phy (spelling); three dollars per month for arithmetic, currency, geogra-
phy, and grammar; and four dollars per month for Latin, Greek, and other
advanced, college preparatory classes. Thurber oƒered a standard curricu-
lum and provided evening classes in English grammar as well. Students at-
tending the Houston Male/Female Academy in 1856 paid three dollars per
month for spelling, reading, geography, and arithmetic classes; and six
dollars per month for “Senior Courses” in reading, rhetoric, philosophy,
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chemistry, and trigonometry.4

Although the Congress had authorized funding for free public schools
in the Republic of Texas, it never provided the capital necessary to imple-
ment its own education policy. Nearly a decade after being annexed by the
United States, the State of Texas established a statewide school system that
began operation on January 31, 1854. However, this should not be confused
with the more familiar public school system established after the Civil War.
The antebellum school system provided tuition subsidies for the children
of indigent parents in Texas’s counties. In November 1856, the Tri-Weekly
Telegraph noted that the state had appropriated $1,900 to Harris County for
this purpose.5

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 T WO CIT IES 23

Previously, in 1847, Mrs. N. J. Longley, described as a “prominent church-

woman,” organized a free school at the Presbyterian Church. The over-
crowded facility continued as the site of what might have been Houston’s
only free school, while citizens took up the crusade for state-funded, free
public schools, and the newspapers advocated a tax levy for that purpose.
Many wealthy Houstonians objected, worried that “charity” would mean
an inappropriate mixing of social groups in the public schools. They sent
their own children to schools located in other states and even Canada. Ul-
timately, the city’s public school advocates prevailed, and some state fund-
ing began to flow in November 1856.6
In 1857, one James H. Stevens left an endowment of five thousand dol-
lars to the city to help fund the construction of a new school building.
Houstonians raised an additional fifteen thousand dollars, which helped
underwrite the construction of a two-story brick structure for the Hous-
ton Academy. The new building could house four hundred students, with
separate rooms for boys and girls. The city appointed Ashbel Smith super-
intendent, at an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars. The school opened
with a faculty of five teachers and 140 students. It remained open until the
summer of 1864, when Confederate troops seized the building and trans-
formed it into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Houston’s other schools re-
mained open during the Civil War, but enrollment dropped to one-fourth
of the school-age children. Only whites could enroll at these racially seg-
regated facilities.7
Education for the city’s African Americans also dates back to the ante-
bellum period. The Tri-Weekly Telegraph of November 17, 1858, reported
that Mrs. M. L. Capshaw planned to “resume” classes at the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, the forerunner of Trinity Methodist Episco-
pal Church, on the following Monday. However, since Houston had an or-
dinance that prohibited most free blacks from living in the city, one might
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

conclude that this school provided some rudimentary form of education

to Houston’s slave population. Unlike many of the southern states, Texas
never proscribed educating slaves. It is plausible, then, considering the rel-
atively unrestricted mobility of slaves in Houston before the Civil War,
that Capshaw taught mostly bondsmen and their families.8
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, the Evening Star created a stir
when it reported that a white schoolmistress was directing a school for
emancipated blacks in the city. The Freedmen’s Bureau and the American
Missionary Association opened three other small schools and began hold-
ing classes in “basic literacy and arithmetic skills” for black adults in Hous-
ton. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided funds, the American Missionary

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 24 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

Association sent white teachers from the North to provide instruction,

and three black churches—Antioch Baptist, Mount Zion Baptist, and
Trinity Methodist Episcopal—provided facilities for these schools.9
These schools proposed to “uplift” former slaves through a curriculum
of “the three Rs” and a strong emphasis upon character development
through practical or industrial education. Following the pattern of northern
public schools, the various freedpersons’ aid societies and the Freedmen’s
Bureau contributed to the stability of the South during Reconstruction
by establishing school curricula focusing on order, morality, middle-class
values, and preparation for citizenship. Northern missionaries and other
freedpersons’ aid groups came to the South to educate the former slaves,
inspired by lofty ideals but exhibiting a condescending, parental attitude
toward their intended beneficiaries. Their sense of racial superiority and
their emphasis on “civilizing” former slaves oƒended many blacks and con-
tributed to the reluctance of the freedpersons in some parts of the South
to relinquish control of their own schools or to attend schools sponsored
by the Freedmen’s Bureau.10
Nevertheless, the success of these early institutions prompted the state
legislature, in 1870, to look into establishing public schools for African
Americans in the cities of Texas.11 One of the initial steps in this direction
involved the Gregory Institute in Houston. The Freedman’s Bureau ini-
tially established the school in 1866 to train black teachers. The founders
named the school in honor of Edgar M. Gregory, a New York colonel who
had served in the Union army during the Civil War and later had been as-
sistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas. He had appropri-
ated land for the school. Eventually the school moved into a four-room
brick building on Jeƒerson Avenue between Louisiana and Smith streets in
Freedmen’s Town. Freedmen’s Town was the community established by
emancipated slaves shortly after the Civil War. The Gregory school, built
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

at a cost of eight thousand dollars, seems to have been the first school for
black students in Texas to have had its own building.12
The Gregory Institute began operating as a tuition-based school in 1870,
under the direction of several leading black citizens, including Elias Dibble,
pastor of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, and Richard Allen, a local
African American businessman and the city’s first black state representa-
tive. Allen, born into slavery in Virginia in 1826, developed proficiency as a
carpenter and eventually became a bridge builder in Houston following
the Civil War. In 1869, Houstonians elected Allen to the state legislature,
where, as one of his first o¥cial acts, he introduced a bill to incorporate the
Gregory Institute of Harris County.
In 1872, the Freedmen’s Bureau schools closed, and the students trans-

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 T WO CIT IES 25

ferred to Gregory Institute. The school then operated as a private facility

that taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and history to black adults and
children who paid $2.50 per month tuition to attend classes. Eventually,
black teachers replaced white teachers, and in 1876 the school hired its first
black principal, H. C. Hardy.13
Because of the financial ruin caused by the Civil War, neither the State
of Texas nor the City of Houston had su¥cient funds to support public
schools. During the early 1870s, the Peabody Educational Fund indicated
that it would provide money to subsidize free public education in Texas. In
the meantime, Houstonians sought legislative approval to establish a free
public school system in the city early in 1870. This initial attempt failed.
However, indigent students did have the option of attending state-funded
county schools. In 1873, twenty-four of these schools operated in Harris
County (in which Houston is located ) and provided rudimentary educa-
tion, sometimes for terms of only two or four months, for 1,561 students.14
Events during 1876 proved to be important for public school education
in Texas and in Houston. The state adopted the Constitution of 1876, which
required separate schools and “impartial provision” for both black and white
children. Coincidentally, the City of Houston began operating a free pub-
lic school system of sorts in March 1876. However, a local newspaper called
the eƒort a “farce.”15
In August, the state legislature enacted a law that provided for the es-
tablishment of free public schools in Houston. The law permitted the city
to assume control of all private schools within the city limits, and to re-
ceive a share of state education funds to help maintain and operate the
system. The statute required a local election before the city could assume
control of its schools. On December 5, 1876, Houstonians voted in favor of
authorizing the city to proceed with the public school plan.16
According to the law, the mayor appointed a three-member board of ex-
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

aminers, a three-member board of trustees, and a superintendent, all of

whom had to be confirmed by the city council. The superintendent re-
ceived a salary of $2,000 per year, appropriated out of a $15,000 budget from
the city treasury. The Peabody Fund contributed $2,000 per year to the
city’s schools from 1877 through 1880 and slightly less during 1881–82. All
children between ages eight and fourteen could attend school for the
eight-month term that began in October.17
The Gregory Institute became a part of this newly created Houston
Public School System in 1876 and eventually became known as the Fourth
Ward school. By 1879, Houston had established five schools for black chil-
dren, one in each of the city’s five wards, with a total enrollment of 716 stu-
dents. In 1882, the State Board of Education established a Normal Institute

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 26 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

or teacher’s college in the Gregory Building to train black teachers.18 There

is some controversy about the exact nature of these “normal” schools and
about what one historian describes as a “fundamental ideological conflict”
that arose regarding the black education movement of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.19
In the years following the Civil War, African Americans in the South
and in Texas quickly found themselves facing a new kind of slavery. The
southern economy desperately needed an inexpensive source of menial la-
borers. White southerners worked quickly to establish a postbellum social
structure, based on a racial caste system, that would keep blacks in subor-
dinate roles as unskilled laborers. In espousing what became known as the
industrial, or “Hampton,” philosophy of education for African Americans,
Northern whites supported this New South.
Southerners initially established “industrial” or “normal schools” mainly
to train black teachers. Supported by northern philanthropists, the schools’
curricula were based on the vocational and industrial model of the Hamp-
ton Institute in Virginia and, later, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. These
new teachers then would fan out across the South and “educate” black
southerners to accept a future as laborers and as second-class citizens.
Conflict over this theory of black education developed in both black
and white communities. One element of the white southern plantation
class completely opposed the notion of universal education, believing that
it would inflate the economic and political aspirations of their African
American workers. In other words, education would spoil good field hands.
Others of the “landed class” believed that properly controlled education—
a kind of “brainwashing”—could be helpful by training blacks in the
“dignity of manual labor” and by “teaching” the freedpeople to accept a
subordinate role in society and to follow the Hampton philosophy.
Both these views were contrary to the assumptions underlying the edu-
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

cation movement that African Americans already had begun in some areas
of the South even before the end of the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War,
some planters had organized slave schools to provide basic education that
in turn would promote greater production by their slaves. As soon as re-
gions of the South came under Union control during the war, ex-slaves or-
ganized schools for themselves and their children. Some of these early
schools emphasized basic academic skills and some focused on vocational
training, but all constituted eƒorts by the newly emancipated African
Americans to prepare for their new lives.
During the Reconstruction era, black politicians played an important
role in advocating universal education for all children at southern state
constitutional conventions. This is important to note, because the roles of

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 T WO CIT IES 27

African Americans, as well as the roles of northern philanthropists and lib-

eral reformers in their crusades for universal public education in the South,
frequently are misunderstood or misrepresented.
Although most white southerners continued to oppose educating African
Americans, as regards black education in the South during the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, the key conflicts were between
advocates of the Hampton-Tuskegee model of “industrial education” and
proponents of a formal, New England–style, academic education. Ulti-
mately, both the industrial and the liberal arts traditions were pursued
simultaneously in the South, albeit not without discord.20
The significance of black education during the era of Jim Crow segre-
gation in the South and in Houston, then, lies not in its potential for inte-
grating blacks into white society, but rather in its short- and long-term
influences on black individuals and their communities. The schools pro-
vided basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with in-
struction in vocational skills. Normal schools oƒered a “high school”
education and often served as bridges to college. Despite the intentions of
many proponents, black education, including the “industrial” schools,
helped to produce a substantial number of educated African Americans.
Many of these educated black people became the religious, educational,
and professional figures who helped to lead the civil rights movement. In
this way the eƒects of formal education significantly aƒected the long-term
group status of blacks.21
Houston’s public schools emphasized industrial education for both white
and black students, with white schools generally receiving supplies and
facilities before black schools did. Mamie E. Gearing, the supervisor of
domestic science, informed Superintendent P. W. Horn in a 1910 report
that the school system had “complete equipment for sewing and cooking in
ten white schools and two colored. Only five white schools remain un-
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

equipped.” She also noted that “great interest is manifested in the work in
the colored schools, and there are constant requests for its extension.” Boys’
industrial education boasted even greater progress. E. M. Wyatt, the di-
rector of manual training, included these comments in his report to Su-
perintendent Horn: “A new school center for white children has been
established at the Jones School. Two new colored centers have also been es-
tablished—Luckie and Bruce. These centers make it so that every boy—
white or colored—in the Houston Public Schools, above the Third Grade,
has one and one-half hours of manual training per week. I know of no other
school system in the Southwest that is so thoroughly equipped for manual
training.”22
Superficially, it appears (aside from the designation “colored” for its black

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 28 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

schools) that the city school system made an earnest eƒort to fulfill the
constitutional mandate of “equal provision” for its white and black stu-
dents. However, a careful examination of the superintendent’s Annual
Report illustrates the racial bias of school o¥cials in providing supplies,
equipment, and teachers for African American students. For the fifty white
students attending a new “manual training” facility at the Jones School,
the city spent $420 (an average of $8.40 per student) on equipment.
O¥cials allotted $405 for equipment at Luckie School, which had ninety-
eight “colored” students enrolled, and $200 at Bruce School, which had
seventy-eight black students (an average of $3.44 per black student).23
Salaries and pupil-teacher ratios also reflect race-based disparities. The
public school system paid white teachers a starting wage of $45 per month
or $405 per year, with the opportunity of receiving, after nine years of ser-
vice, a maximum salary of $85 per month or $765 per year. In contrast, a be-
ginning “colored” teacher received $40 per month or $360 per year, and
“topped out” after seven years of service at $60 per month or $540 per
annum. A white high school principal received a maximum of $2,200 per
year in 1910, but an African American with similar qualifications and expe-
rience at the Colored High School (the city had only one high school for
black students in 1910) received an annual salary of $1,000.
Pupil-teacher ratios showed similar disparities. Houston public schools
enrolled 12,151 pupils, 8,586 whites and 3,565 designated as “colored.” The
faculty numbered 296 teachers, 222 whites and 74 blacks. Thus, in the school
system as a whole, the pupil-teacher ratio was 41 students per teacher.
However, under Jim Crow segregation, white teachers taught white chil-
dren, and black teachers taught black children. The pupil-teacher ratio for
whites, 38.6 students per teacher, contrasts with 48 students per black
teacher. In other words, based on the total enrollment and the total num-
ber of teachers in the Houston public schools in the 1909–10 school year,
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

black teachers had responsibility for 25 percent more students, on average,

than white teachers, yet they received 30 percent less pay.24
Given this information, Superintendent Horn still felt the need to jus-
tify the city’s expenditures on the colored schools. “So many and so varied
opinions are held on the subject of the education of the [ N]egro, that the
public is entitled to have clear report as to the results being obtained from
it,” he wrote.25 Horn then proceeded to relate several “true stories of the
work done in our colored schools” to demonstrate the wonderful successes
they had achieved. He first told of Nicodemus, a twelve-year-old “incorri-
gible thief and jail-bird” who had been converted into “an industrious,
hard-working [ N]egro boy” by dedicated teachers at Booker T. Washing-
ton School, who had taken an interest in the child. Horn concluded that, if

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 T WO CIT IES 29

Houston’s “colored schools” could have such an impact on a juvenile delin-

quent like Nicodemus, who seemed “too young to send to the penitentiary
and too bad to leave out of it,” clearly they merited all the funding they
received “and more.”
He also relayed comments in a personal letter he had received from a
“Houston lady of culture and refinement” and remarks from an encounter
with another “Houston lady” who stopped him on the street. In both cases,
these ladies praised the domestic skills of their young “colored girls” and
indicated that, if Houston’s colored schools could continue to “turn up some
more” like these students, they would perform “a wonderful service, not
only for the [ N]egroes, but also for the white people of the city.” No men-
tion is made of academic achievements or of the potential for future con-
tributions to the community by its talented African American students.
In addition to these backhanded compliments concerning the accom-
plishments of the colored schools, the superintendent made the following
disparaging remarks about some of the black teachers: “Of course, there is
another side to this picture. Not all of our [ N]egro teachers are as intelli-
gent or as faithful as those mentioned.” He did state, “It is my firm opin-
ion that our [ N]egro teachers, working under many adverse circumstances,
are doing faithful, earnest work, are making an honest eƒort to help their
race and are reaching results that are abundantly worth all that is paid for
their schools.” Horn expressed the desire to expand the industrial program
to all of the colored schools, noting the importance of providing the op-
portunity for all girls “to learn cooking, plain sewing, and laundry work”
and for all boys to learn “some form of useful hand work.”26
Although Houston may have provided its black students with the best
schools in the South, they fell far short of the constitutionally mandated
“impartial provision.” The color line not only divided the Bayou City into
two unequal societies, but also it divided unequally the meager available
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

educational resources. Consequently, African American education contin-

ued to suƒer from the eƒects of racial prejudice. Overcrowding, lack of funds,
and a general state of disrepair plagued black schools. During the early
1920s, Houston’s black leaders and black press began to express dismay at
the shameful conditions of the city’s African American schools. The In-
former published a series of articles and photographs of Houston’s black
schools and criticized o¥cials for allowing those facilities to deteriorate
into “fire traps, health menaces and abominations in the sight of both man
and God!”27
Lack of adequate city services, too, had an adverse eƒect on black schools.
Many of the streets in black neighborhoods, streets along which children
walked to get to school, remained unpaved. These streets became muddy

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 30 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

quagmires during Houston’s frequent rainstorms, hazardous for adults and

nearly impossible for children to traverse. Fourth Ward residents took mat-
ters into their own hands, literally, and paved several streets, brick by brick,
on their own. Some of those historic brick streets still remain, memorials
to the initiative of the African American community of Freedmen’s Town.
Racial bias played a significant role in state funding for children in the
school district. In 1918, the State of Texas provided $9.06 for each white
student enrolled in the Houston Public School District. However, the dis-
trict received only $6.90 for each black child attending its schools. These
unbalanced appropriations contributed to the overcrowded, inferior facil-
ities for black students. For example, some one thousand students enrolled
during 1923 at the Colored High School, still the only high school for African
Americans in Houston, but the school had seats for only five hundred
pupils.28
State funding was not the sole cause of disparities in Houston’s segre-
gated public schools. Local o¥cials provided only minimal resources for
the “colored” schools and ignored both the glaring needs of black students
and black leaders’ urgent pleas for equitable facilities. Although the city
approved a series of bond issues during the early 1920s, o¥cials never allo-
cated funds in a manner that corresponded proportionally to the size of
the black community. For example, in 1924, of the funds allocated for equip-
ment and buildings, o¥cials budgeted 7 percent to the city’s black schools,
yet blacks comprised 25 percent of Houston’s population. Occasionally,
school o¥cials constructed a new school or updated aging facilities, but
these endeavors proved ineƒectual at best. They represented an attempt to
mollify loud criticism from the black community rather than a serious eƒort
to eliminate disparate conditions.29
Some positive changes began to take place during the 1920s, changes
that included Houston’s black schools. In 1923, the state legislature autho-
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

rized the city to conduct an election to decide if the school system should
become independent of city government. After considerable debate on the
question, Houstonians agreed to the creation of the Houston Independent
School District ( HISD). In 1924, the schools began to function as an inde-
pendent school district, under the direction of an elected school board.30
The school board hired a new superintendent, Dr. Edison E. Oberholt-
zer, a native of Pennsylvania and a former superintendent in North Car-
olina. With his arrival, black schools began to improve. First Oberholtzer
initiated a double shift at the Colored High School in an attempt to pro-
vide some relief from overcrowding. Then he formed a committee which
carefully evaluated the needs of black schools. Finally, the HISD began a

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 T WO CIT IES 31

construction and remodeling program. In 1925, the district announced plans

to build a new high school for African American students in the Third
Ward. HISD appropriated $70,000, out of a recently approved $3 million
bond issue, for construction of the school. An outraged Clifton Richard-
son, editor of the Informer, charged that the district should provide ten
times that amount, which then would be proportional to the size of the
black community in Houston. In response to this criticism, HISD proposed
yet another bond issue, for $4 million, of which $500,000 would be desig-
nated to build schools and refurbish seventeen existing structures in the
black community. A skeptical Richardson endorsed the proposal and en-
couraged Houston’s black voters to support the bond at the polls. The bond
issue passed.31
Between 1924 and 1929, the building capacity of African American
schools in Houston more than tripled. A new high school, Jack Yates Col-
ored High School, opened at 2610 Elgin Street in Houston’s Third Ward,
on February 8, 1926. O¥cials named this school to honor the Reverend John
Henry “Jack” Yates. From 1868 until his death in 1897, Yates had served as a
Baptist minister and civic leader, and had played a major role in the devel-
opment of the Freedman’s Town community. Years later, in 1958, the school
district built a new and much improved facility for Jack Yates High School
on nearby Sampson Street. They converted the old building on Elgin Street
to a junior high school and renamed it James D. Ryan Junior High. Ryan
had been a pioneer in education for blacks in Texas and a powerful business
and community leader during his lifetime. James D. Ryan served as prin-
cipal of the Colored High School and as the first principal of Yates High
School from the time it opened in 1926 until his death in 1940.
The original Yates High School on Elgin Street became the temporary
home of the Houston Colored Junior College in 1927. Clifton Richardson
proudly noted in an essay the following year that Houston had “the only
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

municipally owned and operated colored junior college in the entire world.”
In 1935, the school became the Houston College for Negroes. A compan-
ion school for whites, Houston Junior College, also opened in 1927, oƒer-
ing classes at San Jacinto High School. HISD operated both schools until
1934, when Houston Junior College became the University of Houston and
Oberholtzer became its first president.32
During 1926, o¥cials renamed the old Colored High School in honor of
the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” calling it Booker T. Washington Colored High
School. A third high school for black students opened in Houston’s Fifth
Ward, named after the young black poet of the American Revolution,
Phillis Wheatley. The enrollment of these schools continued to increase

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 32 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

rapidly. During the 1924–25 school year, the number of students matricu-
lating at Houston’s “colored” schools was 8,293. By the 1929–30 school year,
the count had jumped to 12,217.33
During the 1920s, education for blacks in Houston improved dramati-
cally. By 1930, Lorenzo J. Greene, an associate of famed African American
educator Carter G. Woodson, proclaimed that Houston had “the best
Negro school system in the South.” The city could boast that it provided
its “colored” population with a junior college, three high schools, one junior
high, seventeen elementary schools, and more than four hundred teachers,
“the largest colored teaching personnel of any city in the entire South.”
The situation had improved to such an extent that Clifton Richardson pro-
claimed that Houston’s 222 graduates in the Class of 1928 comprised the
“largest number of colored high school graduates ever turned out by any
city in the United States at one commencement.” He believed that these
graduates would find greater opportunities in Houston than in any other
southern city for “industrial employment and commercial and professional
activity.” Still, the new school construction and the designation “colored”
on the dedication stones assured that school segregation would continue
to be a matter both of fact and of law in “Heavenly Houston.”34
For African Americans, life in Houston during the years before World
War II remained far from “heavenly,” but it did not become “hellish” as life
did for blacks in the Deep South in that era. In Houston, the eƒects of the
Depression and the influx of people during the war years heightened the
disparities between the public schools on either side of the color line. Pre-
dictably, the massive flood of humanity pouring into Houston severely
strained the resources of the city’s public and private institutions, includ-
ing its public school system (see table 2.1).
Although most of the district’s schools suƒered from overcrowding dur-
ing the 1940s, black Houstonians found their schools literally bursting at
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

the seams. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that HISD had not
constructed any junior high schools for black students. In 1940, all three of
the African American high schools in fact served as combination junior
and senior highs, increasing the total enrollments in those buildings. The
school district combined white junior high students with elementary school
pupils at five schools, but this supplemented the ten facilities designated
solely as white junior high schools.35
In addition to overcrowding, HISD neglected other needs of the black
schools during the 1930s and 1940s. The district oƒered advanced courses
and special programs only at white schools. Black students could take only
two years of foreign language, and black schools oƒered no advanced math
and science courses. In addition, their libraries were ill equipped, and fre-

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 T WO CIT IES 33

TABLE 2.1
ENROLLMENT IN HOUSTON’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, 1900–50

Percent
Year Total White* Black Black

1900 6,380 NA NA NA
1910 12,151 8,586 3,565 29.3
1920 26,015 19,495 6,520 25.0
1930 56,612 44,193 12,419 21.9
1940 65,198 51,050** 14,148** 21.7**
1950 84,866 66,196** 18,167** 22.0**

Source: HISD Pupil Accounting

*HISD counted Hispanic students as “white” until 1970.
**HISD estimate

quently they had to make do with worn, out-of-date textbooks. White stu-
dents had the opportunity to participate in many sports activities, such as
tennis, archery, and golf, while black students found their choices limited
mostly to football, basketball, and track. The school system provided no
facilities for swimming, unless the school originally had been a white fa-
cility; in that case, a pool would have been part of a building later con-
verted to a school for African American students.
Under the segregated system, blacks and whites did not compete against
each other. However, one of the greatest rivalries in high school sports de-
veloped between Jack Yates High School and Phillis Wheatley High School,
two of the African American schools in HISD. For many years, the Yates-
Wheatley football game was known as one of the “biggest” high school
football games in the country. Despite the attention accorded these con-
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

tests, the black schools had to play their games on weeknights, while the
white schools played in prime Friday night slots.36
The district’s enrollment continued to swell. In 1951, Houston had only
three high schools for African American students, and two of them, Booker
T. Washington and Jack Yates, operated as combined junior and senior
high schools. By February 1951, on the occasion of its Silver Anniversary,
Jack Yates High School in the Third Ward had been remodeled and en-
larged slightly, but still it suƒered from overcrowding, with 2,100 students.
In March 1954, the enrollment exploded, with over 3,000 pupils crammed
into a facility built to accommodate 1,600; in addition, nearby Blackshear
Elementary had over 2,000 children.37 While the school board argued over
how to remedy the overcrowding, Yates High School lost its accreditation

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.
 34 MAKE HA STE SLOW LY

by the Southern Association of Secondary Schools because of the terrible

conditions. It would take four years of wrangling over location, land ac-
quisition, and funding before the district would construct a new Jack Yates
High School to alleviate overcrowding in the Third Ward.38
Teachers in black schools had a di¥cult time obtaining textbooks and
supplies. Not until HISD teachers’ meetings became integrated and black
and white teachers mingled, did black teachers learn how much, in terms of
supplies and resources, they could request from the school district. Part of
the problem lay with some black principals who ran their schools like to-
talitarian states and who, responding to “hints” from white administrators,
believed that the less they requested from the school district, the better
they would fare at evaluation time.39
The many problems plaguing Houston’s black schools became so over-
whelming that in March 1953 the Harris County Council of Organizations
( HCCO) took the issue to the HISD school board. Describing them as
“Houston’s horrible schools,” group spokesman Sid Hilliard, a community
leader and a member of the Greater Third Ward Citizen’s League, identi-
fied improper heating, inconvenient restrooms, improper drainage, and
unsanitary cafeterias as major concerns in the Negro schools. Thus, one
year before Brown, black Houstonians continued to fight for “impartial
provision” for their children’s education.40
Houston’s oldest segregated institution, its public schools, had been seg-
regated from the beginning. Although Houston provided one of the better
school systems for blacks in the South, conditions appear never to have
reached the constitutionally mandated level of “impartial provision.” Just
as the situation had begun to improve somewhat during the late 1920s, the
Depression wrought havoc with the city’s school system. While the entire
school district felt the eƒects of the financial crash, racial discrimination
played a role in the allocation of constrained education funds. African
Copyright © 1999. Texas A&M University Press. All rights reserved.

American schools bore a disproportionate share of the burden.

During World War II, however, the first signs of change appeared, as
black educators boldly took one of the first steps to break through the wall
of Jim Crow segregation, the color line that separated Houston’s two cities
along the bayou.

Kellar, William H.. Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston, Texas A&M University
Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rice/detail.action?docID=3037710.
Created from rice on 2024-08-29 18:34:42.