Fair Ways: How Six Black Golfers Won Civil Rights in Beaumont, Texas

Epilogue

Epilogue Six months after winning the desegregation of Central and Tyrrell Parks, lawyers Theo Johns and Elmo Willard returned to the court of Judge Lamar Cecil and renewed their attack on the southern caste system. This time they went after a bigger prize—the desegregation of Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas. Lamar then was an all-white institution offering both academic and vocational programs. Founded in 1923 as a junior college, Lamar became a four-year state college with a separate board of regents in 1949. Enabling legislation conformed the college to the rules and customs of the caste system, designating Lamar as “a co-educational institution of higher learning for the white youth of this State.”1 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, African Americans in Beaumont worked to improve education opportunities and attempted to desegregate Lamar College, an effort that resulted in the opening of a black branch of the college on the Charlton-Pollard High School campus. But the branch was short-lived, and the needs and desires of the black community were not satisfied. In 1952 James Briscoe, a graduate of Charlton-Pollard High, tried to enroll at Lamar but was refused. During July and August of 1955, local NAACP leaders renewed the Lamar desegregation campaign, an effort detailed and discussed by Amilcar Shabazz in Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas (2004). In the new campaign, NAACP leaders initiated a three-step program: petitioning for change, attempting to enroll, and filing suit. As noted earlier, EPILOGUE 165 D. A. Davis, a white minister from Port Arthur, as well as Dr. Sprott, Theo Johns, and other local black leaders appeared at a board of regents’ meeting on August 23, 1955, and asked for admission of seven black students. College president F. L. McDonald, speaking on behalf of the regents, denied their request, citing the whitesonly provision of the enabling legislation and the overcrowded conditions on the campus. Known then as “Lamar Tech,” the college enrolled about five thousand students. Publicly rebuffed by college officials, the NAACP group at the same time accomplished another important task. Several of the prospective black students, including Versie Jackson and James Anthony Cormier, attempted to register for the fall semester; they filled out applications, provided high school transcripts, and offered tuition fees. College registrar Celeste Kitchen rejected their applications, sending them letters and citing the same reasons outlined by Dr. McDonald. The exclusion of Jackson and Cormier because of color alone laid the essential groundwork for a federal lawsuit, a lawsuit in which black Beaumonters would attempt to use federal judicial power to attack the state laws and customs of the caste system and to break the color line at Lamar Tech.2 Like the golf course case, the litigation campaign to desegregate Lamar Tech was a team effort involving black plaintiffs, black lawyers , and black leaders in the local and state offices of the NAACP. Versie Jackson and James Anthony Cormier, the two students who tried to register, became classic Joe Doakes plaintiffs as described by Thurgood Marshall. They believed in their cause, they put their names on the line, and they went in harm’s way. Versie Jackson was a twenty-six-year-old woman who had graduated from a Beaumont high school in 1948 and had already completed about thirty hours of college work at Texas Southern University in Houston. Anthony Cormier, a recent graduate of Blessed Sacrament High School, wanted to attend Lamar to study electrical engineering. He was the son of Wesley and Viola Cormier, both active members of the local NAACP chapter. The selection of young Cormier as a plaintiff shows the close involvement of the NAACP, a group led by Dr. Ed Sprott, Jr., Pauline Brackeen, O. C. Hebert, Marion Lewis, Maudry Plummer, Rev. G. W. Daniels, Rev. William N. McCarty, and others. The team included the same lawyers who had handled the golf course case: Theo Johns and Elmo Willard 166 EPILOGUE from Beaumont and U. Simpson Tate, the NAACP lawyer from Dallas. Tate played a prominent role in this case too, demonstrating the continuing influence of the Legal Defense Fund of the Texas NAACP.3 The black attorneys drafted a lawsuit against Lamar Tech, naming Versie Jackson and Anthony Cormier as plaintiffs and, as defendants, F. L. McDonald, Celeste Kitchen, and all members...