Advancing Democracy
African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas
Publication Year: 2014
Shabazz begins with the creation of the Texas University Movement in the 1880s to lobby for equal access to the full range of graduate and professional education through a first-class university for African Americans. He traces the philosophical, legal, and grassroots components of the later campaign to open all Texas colleges and universities to black students, showing the complex range of strategies and the diversity of ideology and methodology on the part of black activists and intellectuals working to promote educational equality. Shabazz credits the efforts of blacks who fought for change by demanding better resources for segregated black colleges in the years before Brown, showing how crucial groundwork for nationwide desegregation was laid in the state of Texas.
Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
Cover
Title page, Copyright, Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
How good and how pleasant it is to give thanks and praise to the many who have helped enable me to complete this work. Almost fifteen years ago I picked up and read a book James Anderson had written about the history of African American education. I was hooked. His work inspired...
Introduction
When the incisive wit of Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger warms my heart, I recall my hopes and dreams in 1976 as a young American who happened to be of color. I had no limits. My vision was to become the first black to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas, perhaps...
1. As Separate as the Fingers: Higher Education in Texas from Promise to Problem, 1865–1940
Before black Texans had their own history, schools, churches, warriors, martyrs, and women and men of big affairs, they had Juneteenth. It may not have looked like much in the eyes of an arrogant world, but it was everything black Texans had, and they each loved and cherished...
2. The All-Out War for Democracy in Education: Ideological Struggle and the Texas University Movement
After 1940, higher education policy and racial politics in the United States began to collide, and from their collision came one of the most significant fronts in the battle for black democratic rights and the dismantling of America’s version of apartheid. Texas became the...
3. Lift the Seventy-Five-Year-Old Color Ban and Raise UT’s Standards: University Students for Democracy before Sweatt
Money and numbers are the language of politics, and the Texas NAACP expanded rapidly in both categories with victory in the Smith Democratic primary case. As never before in its history, the association suddenly became a player in the raucous arena of Texas politics. Statewide...
4. This Is White Civilization’s Last Stand: University Desegregation before Brown
Bringing law to the side of desegregation represented a landmark achievement, but it was also an empty glove without the flesh and blood experience of the individuals who crossed the line to make the legal victory a lived reality. The women and men who breathed life into...
5. Democracy Is on the March in Texas: Black Equality versus White Power, 1955–1957
Through Brown, the civil rights movement gave the United States a new and radical interpretation of its Constitution—so much for that. Almost two years after the ruling, Thurgood Marshall, the attorney who presented the school desegregation cases before the Supreme Court...
6. Plowing around Africans on Aryan Plantations: Access without Equity at Texas Universities, 1958–1965
In the aftermath of the state’s assault on civil liberties, Texas white supremacists began to realize that sanctions against the democratic movement for racial integration could only slow the pace of change; it could not reverse its direction. By disrupting the work of the NAACP, the attorney...
Coda
By 1965, in order to secure greater access to educational opportunities for themselves and their children, Negroes had, as James Baldwin wrote in his book The Fire Next Time, stuffed ‘‘their pride in their pockets’’ to the point that they began to burst. Even as African Americans...
E-ISBN-13: 9781469619699
E-ISBN-10: 1469619695
Print-ISBN-13: 9780807828335
Page Count: 320
Publication Year: 2014
OCLC Number: 62312861
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Advancing Democracy
