Race in Texas

I digress from blogs about my travels to tell you something I learned when I first met Wally, but about which I did not realize the full significance until 50 years later, when I bought Bob Schaefer’s book about his experiences as a reporter.

Bob is moderator on CBS “Face the Nation” on Sunday mornings. I probably gave away his book, “This Just In”, when I chucked out a lot of things before moving from my house to this small retirement apartment. I can’t quote exactly, but I remember the first chapter is about the riots when James Meredith enrolled as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

Schaefer went to Mississippi to cover the events as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He said he was more frightened by those gun-toting Southern zealots than he was later as CBS newsman in Vietnam during Vietcom attacks.

Like me, Bob grew up in Fort Worth and attended public schools. Then he went to TCU. In his book he claimed, “I never went to a segregated school.”

I wrote to him, “Bob, you are wrong. You did attend a school with black students. You just didn’t know it.”

I met Wally while he was taking classes at TCU at night under a program sponsored by the Air Force. Wally was from Chicago. He was shocked that in 1951 his black buddies from the air base could not go into a restaurant in Fort Worth. He told me, “There are black fellows going to TCU at night.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “TCU is an all-white school.” (This was not the first time I was positive about something and proved to be wrong. It makes me more tolerant of other people’s follies, even Republicans.)

I worked at the Fort Worth Press. I went to our city editor and said, “I hear black airmen are enrolled in TCU.”

“That’s true,” Dave Hall said. “They’ve been going there for a couple of years. The Air Force said they would not pay tuition for the white guys unless they accepted black airmen, too. TCU wanted the money. I talked it over with the editor of the Star-Telegram, and we agreed not to print anything about it until someone protested. No one has.”

No white mothers rushed down to the newspaper and screamed objection to their lily white daughters sitting in class next to a young black fellow.

In Mississippi the white “Citizens Council” brought out their guns and created a riot over one black man enrolling in the university. Television and print reporters came from all over the U.S. and from foreign countries to film the mayhem. In Fort Worth the media published nothing, and young black men went quietly to class, working towards their college degrees.

I used to think this was an example of how the media can inflame the public. Surely we saw examples of that in the last election. On the other hand, I now wonder if there was a difference in attitudes towards race in these two Southern states, Mississippi and Texas. A few years after the airmen started attending TCU, Fort Worth public schools were integrated without incident.