African Americans in South Texas History

Divided We Stand

Divided We stand Jim Crow Education inVictoria,Texas, 1901–1966 EDWArD ByErly1 iN 1849, BENJAMIN rOBErTs, A BlACK rEsIDENT of Boston, Massachusetts, brought suit against the city’s public school committee on grounds that his daughter, sarah, had been denied equal access to public schooling because of her race. sarah roberts walked past no fewer than five primary schools on her way to the city’s lone black school in 1849, and her father argued that the school committee’s refusal to allow his daughter to attend a school closer to home violated state law. Famed abolitionist and future senator Charles sumner argued roberts’s case before the Massachusetts supreme Court,but the Court ruled against sumner,finding that sarah roberts had not been denied access to public schooling as she was quite free to enroll in the city’s schools for black children. In ruling against her, the Court effectively conceded to the school district power to classify students by race,religion,or national origin,and assign them to schools accordingly. In years to come, Roberts v. the City of Boston would be cited by state courts throughout the country, and in 1896 it served as principal test case in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that established the federal “separate but equal” standard.2 In Texas, lawmakers laid a foundation for public school segregation in the state constitution of 1876.Article seven, section seven stipulated that “[s]eparate schools shall be provided for the white and colored children, and impartial provision shall be made for both.”Though the constitution required an impartial provision of resources among black and white schools, it did not expressly forbid black children from attending white schools.In order to establish a more concrete expression of segregation, in 1879 the state enacted a civil statute that specifically ฀ 177฀ 178 EDWArD ByErly prohibited black and white children from attending the same school.3 Thus by 1896, when the federal courts affirmed the separate but equal doctrine, Jim Crow school laws had been on the books in Texas for almost two decades. up to that time, black schools typically had been administered as pay schools by humanitarian and religious organizations and were largely independent of public oversight.4 That was certainly the case inVictoria,Texas, where members of the Palestine Baptist Church and the local chapter of the united Brothers of Friendship organized schools for black children in the years immediately after the Civil War. In 1898, two years after the Plessy decision, civic leaders in Victoria initiated a consolidation movement designed to create a citywide public school district.TheVictoria Independent school District (VIsD) was born.The first board of trustees consisted of prominent citizens including J. M. Brownson (president), F. B. lander (secretary), J. D. Mitchell, G. H. Hauschild, and C. s.Thurmond. state law placed both white and black schools under the board’s administrative authority , meaning that it now assumed responsibility for overseeing a segregated school system.5 located in the heart of a thriving agricultural region that catered especially to cattle ranching,Victoria was a city that relied heavily on black and Mexican residents for labor.ranchers and local businessmen employed workers in a variety of different capacities, and it was critical that the new public school system mold young people into competent yet compliant workers. shaping the community’s black youth, however, posed special challenges. It had been more than thirty years since the end of slavery and a new generation of blackVictorians was coming of age.To this new generation, slavery was a relic of the past, one they knew only through stories they heard told among their elders . Protocols including deference to whites were worth challenging as a growing sense of intellectual independence gave them strength. The new-found sense of intellectual independence, however, posed a threat to long-standing social order in the community, and among the city’s white patriarchs, control of the school district’s black students came at a critical time in the city’s history.African American education was an issue that certainly concerned young leopold Morris, editor of Divided฀we฀Stand฀ 179฀ the Victoria Advocate. Purchased by George Henry French in 1901, the Advocate had served as a voice of stability in preserving the city’s social order since 1846. like many white southerners Morris feared that a literate black citizenry would bring a demise of southern society. In a March 1903...