Seeking Inalienable Rights: Texans and Their Quests for Justice

Acknowledgments

The contributors owe a tremendous debt to their dissertation advisor, mentor, former colleague, and friend, Robert A. “Bob” Calvert (1933–2000). He held strong opinions about the road to equal rights and justice, and his convictions proved inspirational. Through his teaching, writing, advising, and personal friendship, he helped steer contributors Patricia Gower, David Chrisman, James Seymour, and Debra Reid through coursework at Texas A&M University and toward careers in academia. Bob’s friendship and intellectual sparring sustained Alwyn Barr and George Green. Steve Wilson and Brian Behnken address topics that Bob lived through and fought for—the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Bob Calvert’s memory, and to his wife, Donna HannahCalvert , and to Bob’s extended family, we dedicate this anthology. Bob was born in Stephenville, Texas, on October 18, 1933, and he pursued higher education with conviction. Bob attended Southern Methodist University and North Texas State University before he entered the U.S. Army in 1954. After discharge, he completed his BA (1957) and MA (1960) in history at North Texas, and then he taught in Denton, Texas, public schools and at Nicholls State College in Thibodaux, Louisiana, before earning a PhD in history at the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at Texas A&M University in 1965 and 1966 then accepted a tenure-track position at North Texas State University in 1967, where he attained the rank of associate professor. He rejoined the history faculty at Texas A&M University in 1975. At the time of his death on November 30, 2000, Bob coordinated graduate studies in the Department of History at Texas A&M and served the Texas State Historical Association, the Texas A&M University Press, and his colleagues and students tirelessly. During his nearly forty-year teaching career, Bob Calvert worked to put scholarly treatment of minorities in the hands of university students. His Acknowledgments x = acknowledgments earliest efforts gathered writings on Mexican Americans from a variety of disciplines. He edited, along with Renato Rosaldo and Gustav L. Seligmann Jr., Chicano: The Beginnings of Bronze Power, originally published in 1973, because “never have the Mexican Americans been included as an integral part of the American past. Seldom have scholars viewed Mexican Americans as an active force in the socio-historical picture.” Robert E. Kreiger Publishing issued a second edition, titled Chicano: The Evolution of a People, in 1982. Bob then strove to make Texas history more accessible to college students . He and coeditor Robert Wooster selected eighteen articles from the Southwestern Historical Quarterly that addressed a “broad range of Texas history from the earliest Spanish exploration to the present.” Texas Vistas first appeared in 1980 and remains in print, and the third edition was issued in 2006. Minority Texas history likewise benefited from his efforts. In 1981, Bob and his friend Alwyn Barr coedited Black Leaders: Texans for Their Times, a collection of nine essays that focused on individuals not otherwise treated in full biographical studies. The essays, written by scholars at various stages of their careers, addressed black Texans’ contributions from the Spanish-Mexican era through slavery and Reconstruction and during the century between the First and Second Reconstructions. Then in 1988, in an effort to influence the writing of Texas history even more, Calvert, with the support of his colleagues at Texas A&M University and other noted Texas historians, met to discuss Texas historiography. Calvert and Walter Buenger, a friend and colleague , coedited the anthology that resulted, Texas through Time: Evolving Interpretations, in 1991. The essays helped graduate students recognize the avenues open to them for new research in Texas history. Most contributors to this volume benefited from these publications and have taken this opportunity to return the favor. Seeking Inalienable Rights evolved out of conference papers delivered by several of Bob Calvert’s former PhD students at the 2007 conference of the Texas State Historical Association. All the speakers studied with Calvert , and he either served on their committees or advised their dissertations: David K. Chrisman, Ricky Floyd Dobbs, Patricia E. Gower, Debra A. Reid, and James B. Seymour. Two of Calvert’s friends and colleagues, Randolph “Mike” Campbell and Walter Buenger, chaired and commented on the papers . Mary Lenn Dixon, editor-in-chief at Texas A&M University Press, expressed interest in the project at that time, and without her enthusiasm this anthology would not have materialized. Practical assistance came from across the nation. Nancy Lurkins, a graduate student at Eastern Illinois University, read through the anthology at an early stage and identi...