Breaking Barriers

NAACP IN TEXAS

It’s no coincidence that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chose to pursue its legal struggle for racial integration in higher education in the state of Texas. The organization opened its first Texas branch in El Paso in 1915. By 1919, Texas had the highest NAACP membership of any state.¹ Membership grew with the support of national anti-lynching campaigner Mary B. Talbert, who traveled Texas organizing NAACP branches in nine cities. The Texas Attorney general tried to shut down the organization’s activities by targeting its office in Austin, subpoenaing all of its records.² John Shillady, the NAACP’s National Executive Secretary, a white man, traveled to Austin to speak with Texas officials about the matter. A gang of men, supported by the governor and including local officials, violently beat and ran Shillady out of Austin.³ This climate of racism and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan curtailed NAACP membership and activities in Texas by the mid-1920s.⁴

In the 1930s, the national NAACP in coordination with local branches made efforts to revive the organization’s presence in the state. In 1937, Antonio Maceo Smith, an NAACP activist in Dallas, convened the Texas State Conference of the NAACP and helped determine its primary objective: “to begin the fight to get Negros admitted to the University of Texas.”⁵ This Texas- based initiative was part of a long-term strategy to desegregate higher education in the nation. It kicked off by demanding infusions of state funding to send Black students out of state to study in graduate fields not available to them in Texas’ segregated universities. It also insisted on increased appropriations for Prairie View, the segregated state college.

The desegregation of higher education was also taken up by academics. Also in 1937, sociologist Henry Allen Bullock, a professor at Prairie View at the time, convened a state conference at the college called “The Availability of Public Education for Negroes in Texas,” to gather research as a basis for attacking the disparities in the funding of racially segregated education in Texas and across the South.

Meanwhile, UT clung to its segregationist policies as evidenced in the case of George L. Allen. Allen, who was of Creole descent and light-skinned, applied for and enrolled in a UT extension business course in 1938.⁶ Ten days later, upon learning that Allen was in fact Black, university officials cancelled his enrollment.

During the late 1930s and through the 1940s, the NAACP and the cause of civil rights continued to gather strength and numbers. Black women like Juanita Jewel Craft in Dallas, who helped to organize 182 chapters in eleven years, and Lulu Belle White of Houston, who became director of the state organization in 1949, led the way. A key victory was achieved in the Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision, ending white-only Democratic primaries in Texas. This had the effect of opening up voting to Black people in Texas, a state that suffered from one-party rule.

Bolstered by this and other successes, the NAACP laid plans for a lawsuit against The University of Texas in 1945. Thurgood Marshall, an NAACP attorney, worked closely with activist Antonio Maceo Smith, Attorney William Joseph Durham, and Newspaperman Carter Wesley to plan the legal action. For more than a year the Texas NAACP, led by then Houston executive secretary Lulu Belle White, prepared and raised funds for the suit. They also searched for a suitable plaintiff with the requisite qualifications that could stay the course in a long legal fight. White, a friend of the Sweatt family, found their plaintiff in Heman Marion Sweatt.

Footnotes

1. Michael Lowery Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas, 1937-1957” (The University of Texas at Austin, 1984), 2. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. “White Secretary Negro Society Chased out of the City,” The Statesman, August 22, 1919. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 2–4. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 39. ↩︎
6. Listen to George Allen share his experience about registering at UT. https://exhibits.library.unt.edu/black-living-legends/politics/ ↩︎

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