Confronting Jim Crow
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Volume 8 • Number 1 • fall 2010 CONFRONTING JIM CROW CENTER FOR PUBLIC HISTORY I remember a family of blacks stepping down for me when I Letter From the Editor: was a boy. I had been taught to be respectful of my elders, and Confronting Jim Crow this was an important lesson that race trumped even age in the order of things under Jim Crow. Only decades later, as I raised As a white boy with working my own child, did I reflect on the pain and humiliation it had to class parents, racism was in the cause parents to practice such subservience in front of their own air I breathed in my youth. Jim children. Crow touched every part of my A division grew steadily between my parents and me. They life. Racial attitudes handed held to the uncompromising racism of the rural South, while down by poor whites in the I absorbed new perspectives from a more open world amid an South for generations remained expanding national culture that reached into all of our lives. In pervasive and unrelenting in this world, sports were an obsession. My sports heroes were my world in the 1950s and early three fiercely successful competitors, the basketball player 1960s. The underlying real- Bill Russell, the baseball pitcher Bob Gibson, and the football ity was stark: We did not have player Jim Brown. All three were black and proud. Courtesy of much else in life, but we did my older brother, I heard Delta Blues singers like Jimmy Reed. have our white skin. Jim Crow Dr. Joseph Pratt The music of Little Richard and Chuck Berry was in the air on laws embodied these attitudes, the Beaumont radio station, as was the amazing sound of Ray while providing the legal means to enforce them. Charles. At the movies I watched Sidney Pottier in A Patch of Port Neches, Texas, was a strange battleground in the war Blue, and cheered the newsreel of Floyd Patterson, an African over segregation. A refinery town in “mid-county” of Jefferson American, reclaiming the heavyweight championship by demol- County, it had grown up as a place for white refinery workers to ishing the Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson. When I began to live. In Houston, deed restrictions segregated neighborhoods by choose my own books to read, I admired the dignity and strength assuring that blacks could not buy houses. We took it one step of “Nigger Jim” in Huckleberry Finn, enjoyed the sarcastic further. Our town was covered by one overarching, unwritten observations about the defense of segregation in New Orleans in deed restriction: No blacks were allowed in Port Neches. My John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and was strangely moved mom worked for a time at “Van’s Frosty,” a family-owned burger by the little book Black Like Me, which recounted the “adven- joint down the street from our home. In keeping with Jim Crow tures” of a white man passing for black in our Jim Crow world. tradition, it had a separate window marked “Colored” around on The pivotal media message in my personal confrontation the side. Surely that window was never opened. Blacks who lived with Jim Crow was the television coverage of the demonstra- in the neighboring cities of Port Arthur and Beaumont drove tions in Birmingham in May of 1963. I watched Bull Connor use through mid-county only out of necessity. They did not take his fire hoses and dogs to protect me—and states rights and the leisurely stops at Van’s Frosty for a burger, shake, and fries. Southern Way of Life—from the communist menace presented Yet even without blacks, we were obsessed with race. Our by dignified, orderly protestors demanding their Constitutional Southern Baptist preacher felt compelled to tell us that the Bible rights as American citizens. And the question arose: “Which endorsed slavery and white superiority. Our politicians, unions, side am I on?” The answer was easy: “The one standing up to and newspapers reinforced Jim Crow attitudes. Our teachers Bull Connor.” The harder questions came later, with the growing remained silent on the subject, even after the civil rights move- realization that I was breaking ranks with my parents and almost ment began to deliver “teachable moments.” Although some in everyone else who had helped raise me in the village that was our town did not preach or practice racism, few if any voiced Port Neches, which in addition to being a good place to come of opposition. Adults around us used racist language considered so age was also racist to the core. vile today that people substitute such phrases as “the N-word” for My parents made clear their position: “Joe, this is how we the historically-correct word that embodied Jim Crow attitudes were raised. You are not going to change our minds. If you can’t and power relationships. Whites took this racially charged word accept that, then leave our house.” I left at seventeen when I as a common name for their black dogs, and they used it to refer moved away to college. By the luck of the draw, as a freshman at to black people as regularly and as matter-of-factly as they said Rice I was the suitemate of the first black undergraduate there, “Hello.” Charles Freeman. That year, my education began in earnest with But racism in Port Neches seemed tame in comparison to exposure to ideas and people from outside the South and with that in rural Texas. On my dad’s weekends off, we often drove daily contact with my suitemate. For the first time, I came to back into the late nineteenth century to Hemphill, Texas, some know a black person as an individual, not a political or cultural hundred miles to the north. This was the county seat of Sabine abstraction. County in East Texas, where my parents had grown up. Here Like the vast majority of white Southerners, I gradually poor white and black subsistence farmers and tenant farmers adjusted to a better world, one without Jim Crow. I finally came lived together, and Jim Crow lines were more clearly drawn and to rest in a teaching job at the University of Houston, which has more enthusiastically enforced. Small dramas of black subservi- enjoyed one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation since ence played out daily on the town square. Black men addressed its desegregation in the early 1960s. The world of UH is so far whites with eyes deflected and often with a short “Yesuh,” or removed from the world of my youth that at times I smile in won- “Nosuh,” in response to a question. If whites and blacks met on derment—and wish that my mom and dad could have lived to see the sidewalk of the square, blacks stepped down and allowed this new world and the place I have made for myself in it. d whites to pass. Just beneath the surface of such encounters lay the threat of violence and the shared memory of violence. TABLE OF CONTENTS Guardians Against Change: The Ku Klux Klan in Houston and Harris County, 1920-1925 By Casey Greene Page 2 Volume 8 • Number 1 Fall 2010 Illinois Jacquet: Integrating Houston Jazz CONFRONTING Audiences . Lands Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy JIM CROW Gillespie in Jail By Aimee L’Heureux Page 6 EDITORIAL STAFF Joseph A. Pratt, Editor-in-Chief William S. Holland: A Mighty Lion at Yates Debbie Harwell, Managing Editor High School By Debbie Z. Harwell Page 9 Aimee L’Heureux, Associate Editor Kristin Deville, Program Coordinator Natalie Garza, Oral History Director Marsha Van Horn, Designer The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing By Carroll Parrott Blue Page 14 ADVISORY BOARD Kathleen Brosnan Steven Fenberg Martin Melosi Betty Trapp Chapman William Kellar Jim Saye Barbara Eaves Fred Korge Zinetta Burney: Crossing Alabama Street EDITORIAL POLICY By J. R. Wilson Page 17 Houston History is published three times a year by the Center for Public History in the History Department at the University of Houston. We welcome manuscripts, interviews, and photographic essays on the history and culture of the Houston The University of Houston and Texas Southern region, broadly defined, as well as ideas for topical issues. All University: Perpetuating “Separate but Equal” correspondence should be sent to Houston History, University in the Face of Brown v. Board of Education of Houston, Center for Public History, 547 Agnes Arnold By Andrew Joseph Pegoda Page 19 Texas University of Houston Hall, Houston, TX 77204-3007 (713-743-3123), or emailed to: Southern [email protected]. University Subscriptions are $10 per year for students, $15 per year for Afro-Americans for Black Liberation and the Fight individuals, and $25 per year for institutions. Single issues and for Civil Rights at the University of Houston back issues are available for $10. By Robinson Block Page 24 Visit www.history.uh.edu/houstonhistory for additional information. © 2010 by the Center for Public History. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this issue or any portion of it is expressly When There Were Wards: A Series Page 29 prohibited without written permission of the publisher. The Center for Public History disclaims responsibility for statements of fact and opinions of contributors. A System of Government Where Business POSTMASTER send address changes to: Ruled Page 30 University of Houston By Betty Trapp Chapman Center for Public History Houston’s First Ward—Producing Food from 547 Agnes Arnold Hall Farm to Counter By Betty Trapp Chapman Page 34 Houston, TX 77204-3007 From Das Zweiter to El Segundo, A Brief History of Houston’s Second Ward Cover Photo: Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald walk into the By Thomas McWhorter Page 38 Houston Police Station after being arrested in between sets at the Book Reviews By Joe Pratt Page 43 Music Hall.