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I feel, as do hundreds of thousands of other Texans . . . that the Negro just don’t have a place in the same schools and colleges that were intended to be strictly white. . . . I intend to do my part, as father of two little girls and one boy, to fight integration to the end. Failure of any white college or school to keep the Negroes out of it or them, means to me, that I just won’t educate them in an integrated school or college. Every Southern White man and woman knows what the N.A.A.C.P.’s ultimate goal is[:] Intermarriage! —White Texan R. G. Hicks to the UT Board of Regents, March 10, 1956 The A.P. sent out a dispatch from Austin last week, to the effect that the Student Body of The University of Texas had voted to accept the Constitution of the United States and the Supreme Court’s decision of May 1954, accepting qualified Negro students to the University. If this is true, accept the congratulations of a son of a Confederate veteran. —White Texan J. C. Osborne to UT President Logan Wilson, March 16, 1956 2Desegregation of Educational Facilities In February 1951, Oliver Brown, an employee of the Santa Fe Railroad and an assistant pastor from Topeka, Kansas, filed suit against the Topeka Board of Education on behalf of his nine-year-old daughter, Linda. Brown’ssuitfocusedonthefactthatTopekasegregateditsschoolchildrenonthe basis of their race and that African American children, who had to cross railroad tracks and a main industrial street to catch the school bus, faced danger every day. In addition, Brown’s suit focused on “the humiliating fact of segregation.” Although a three-judge federal panel originally rejected Brown’s suit on the basis that Topeka’s black schools were equal to those for white students, the suit eventually reached the Supreme Court, and on May 17, 1954, the Court held unanimously that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. “To keep black children segregated solely on the basis of race,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education opinion, “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”1 At the time of the Brown decision, twenty-one states and the District of Col- Desegregation of Educational Facilities 37 umbia operated segregated school systems. Each state now had the task of deciding how to desegregate its public schools. Although some border states reluctantlyagreedtocomplywiththeCourt ’sdecision,inTexasandotherDeepSouth states, many white citizens called for diehard defiance because they believed that Brown, which in essence overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, opened the door for race mixing between blacks and whites. At North Texas State College (today the University of North Texas) in Denton, administrators “hesitatingly” accepted the first African American graduate student, Tennyson Miller, in the summer of 1954. Privately conceding that they would lose a court challenge, college administrators nevertheless decided that it would be better to explain to white parents that “the federal courts, not the college, were responsible for the intermingling on campus of Negroes with their sons and daughters.” Consequently, the first African American undergraduate there, Joe Louis Atkins, had to sue for admission with the help of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).2 Even with the knowledge that most white Texans did not want black students to attend the state’s flagship school, administrators at the University of Texas decided to admit qualified black undergraduates before any lawsuit went to court. No extant documents explain why university administrators or members of the Board of Regents chose not to maintain the policy of segregation until the courts explicitly ordered otherwise. Perhaps these university officials had already accepted that maintaining segregation was a lost cause and not worth a long fight. After all, another court battle would be expensive to the university in terms of both economics and reputation. But integrating the school would not be easy. A 1962 study of integration at the University of Texas by the Religious Workers Association found that “the basic problem of the Negro student is to break through the monolithic concept too many whites have of the Negro student.”3 Notsurprisingly,thisburdenrestedonblackstudents’shoulders.Yetthepolicies oftheBoardofRegentsanduniversityadministrators,coupledwiththeattitudes of many white students, insured that black UT students would have difficulty finding a comfortable space for themselves on...

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