Desegreagating Fort Worth's
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COWTOWN AND THE COLOR LINE: DESEGREGATING FORT WORTH’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS by TINA NICOLE CANNON Bachelor of Arts, 1999 University of Texas Austin, Texas Master of Arts, 2001 Baylor University Waco, Texas Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2009 Copyright by Tina Nicole Cannon 2009 Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been written without the guidance and support of many people. My dissertation advisor, Dr. Gregg Cantrell, challenged and encouraged me throughout TCU’s Ph.D. program. Gregg devoted countless hours of his already busy life to reading, editing, and directing this dissertation. I am grateful for his patient counsel and his unrivaled enthusiasm for Texas history. Dr. Don Coerver, Dr. Mark Gilderhus, Dr. Susan Ramirez, and Dr. Kenneth Stevens served as dissertation committee members. I value Dr. Coerver’s vast knowledge of Texas border history and his meticulous nature. Dr. Gilderhus’s voracious appetite for the written word and his jovial personality made meetings with him an absolute joy. Dr. Ramirez has mastered the ability to extract the very best work from her students with grace, kindness, and encouragement. She serves as an invaluable model of behavior for a female academic in a male-dominated field. Dr. Stevens added his remarkable knowledge of Constitutional history to my dissertation committee. I appreciate his invaluable advice and his encouraging me to explore the impact of Supreme Court cases on Fort Worth. Much to my regret, a fellowship at Vanderbilt University prevented Dr. Juan Floyd-Thomas from joining my committee. Dr. Floyd-Thomas encouraged me to study the battle for integration in Texas and opened my eyes to the cultural aspects of the civil rights movement. Thank you also to the TCU history department faculty and staff and the Center for Texas Studies for the support and grants necessary to complete research fieldwork. ii In order to fully examine this topic, I spent Christmas breaks and summer vacations reading through the NAACP files at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. National Archive Research Room employees Jennifer, Joe, Leah, and Patrick helped me navigate the massive collection. They shared their advice on the most efficient means of researching and also provided good company. Thank you to my aunt and uncle, Beth and Wayne Gibbens, who supplied me with room and board during those research trips and invited me to celebrate holidays with them during my stay in Washington. Working on a local topic meant that most of my research took place in Texas. Dr. James SoRelle of Baylor University suggested reading materials and research avenues, in addition to sharing his counsel and friendship. The efficient staff at the University of Texas’s Center for American History, Benson Latin American Collection, and Perry- Castañeda Library provided helpful information. The Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society (TCBHGS) graciously donated their materials to the Fort Worth Central Public Library. Archivist Tom Kellam and librarian Jabari Jones at the public library guided me through the TCBHGS materials and shared their vast knowledge of local history with me. Thankfully, Fort Worth also houses the National Archives Southwest Region, where archivists introduced me to local court cases concerning school desegregation. A large portion of my research took place at the Fort Worth Independent School District’s Billy W. Sills Center for Archive. iii Billy Sills, once a Fort Worth social studies teacher, saved newspaper clippings, memos, yearbooks, and myriad materials during his tenure with the public schools. His foresight spawned the creation of the archive center, where Sills’s widow, Barbara, and his former colleagues Lawrence Maynard, Leon Mitchell, Jr., and Ann Cotton continue Sills’s archival vision. Their candor and enthusiasm made working at the Sills Center a pleasure. Researching local history means that sometimes sources become friends and friends become sources. I met with Fort Worth Star-Telegram editor Bob Ray Sanders to discuss his childhood in a Jim Crow Fort Worth and left his office with a new friend. Bob Ray’s honest optimism changed my perspective on desegregation in Fort Worth. Dr. Steve Sherwood at the TCU Center for Writing met with me several times to save me from editing mistakes, for which I am truly grateful, and helped me to again enjoy working on this dissertation. My friends and neighbors shared their remembrances of either teaching in or attending public schools under during the federal court’s changing mandates in Flax. In addition to sharing their recollections and opinions, several friends organized research, read over chapters, and shared their stories. Thank you, friends, for your support and prayers, and especially to Bekah Weatherford for her profound friendship. I don’t know how to thank someone who would organize innumerable boxes of documents while eight months pregnant or sit with me at a table for countless hours so that I would not have to work alone. Additionally, I am appreciative of my family, who provided encouragement and much-needed distractions. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction………………………………………………………………………...4 II. Public School Education in Fort Worth from Its Inception to 1954……………..28 III. Black Activism in Fort Worth Before 1954…………………………………….54 IV. Responses to the Brown Decision……………………………………………….75 V. Flax v. Potts Filed ………………………………………………………………108 VI. Desegregating Fort Worth’s Institutions and Public Places……………………133 VII. Busing Begins…………………………………………………………………157 VIII. Fort Worth ISD Declared “Unitary”………………………………………….191 IX. Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 222 X. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….236 XI. Special Pages…………………………………………………………………...256 Vita…………………………………………………………………………..256 Abstract……………………………………………………………………...257 v Introduction Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the ”Letter from the Birmingham Jail” in 1963, sharing his disappointment that "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice.”1 This dissertation is a study of one such community - Fort Worth, Texas - that prized order over justice. Fort Worth began in 1849 when the United States Army commissioned a line of forts on the Texas frontier. A year later, nearly six hundred white residents, along with sixty-five enslaved African Americans, lived in Fort Worth. Despite the presence of slavery from the town’s beginning, Fort Worth residents gradually identified themselves with the western frontier rather than the legacies of the Deep South. Much of this identity stemmed from Fort Worth’s hosting of cattlemen, cattle drives, and cowboys. In the 1860s, Texas cowboys began driving cattle from regions in Texas along the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, where workers loaded cattle onto trains and shipped them to markets in the eastern United States. The Chisholm Trail ran from Austin, Texas, through Fort Worth towards Kansas. Because of its location on the Chisholm Trail, Fort Worth became a major destination for cattle drives, earning the moniker “Cowtown.” A railroad company established the Texas and Pacific Railway station in Fort Worth in 1876. The railway station and later slaughterhouses cemented Fort Worth’s reputation as the cattle capital of the United States and fostered the city’s identity as “where the West begins.” Cowtown’s history allowed Fort Worth residents to 1 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 12 April 1963, (San Francisco: Harper, 1994). 1 2 view themselves as different from those in other Texas cities and claim a more western than southern identity. Despite its claims to a frontier heritage, Fort Worth functioned under the traditional southern institutions of segregation and racism, particularly when it came to educating minority students. Fort Worth identified itself as “western” rather than “southern,” and especially prided itself on providing “equal” educational opportunities for white and black children. Although Fort Worth schools were a marked improvement over other Deep South schools, the educational facilities and scholastic systems provided for white and black students were by no means equal. Cowtown’s dueling and inconsistent heritage - western in self-definition but southern in regard to race relations – makes Fort Worth simultaneously anomalous as a western city yet also a microcosm of the impact of various Supreme Court integration decisions on a Jim Crow metropolis. Despite Fort Worth’s curious civil rights history, historians have yet to explore the city’s integration of its public schools. Early students of traditional civil rights history, which generally covers the years following World War II until the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and focuses on school and public place desegregation, typically have examined the movement in Deep South regions, ignoring areas that saw less violent battles over Jim Crow restrictions. The presence of photographers and reporters at civil rights voting drives, protests, and sit-ins brought the Civil Rights Movement to the attention of both Americans and the world. Television stations all over the world broadcast pictures of