March! The Fight for Civil Rights in a Land of Fear

By Stephen Delear

In 1929, the white citizens of Nacogdoches, Texas drove their African-American neighbors into a ghetto at the edge of town. The aftereffects of this event haunted the community for more than four decades. As the civil rights movement swept the country, Nacogdoches remained largely untouched. The first major challenge to segregation in Nacogdoches came in 1968 when students from Stephen F. Austin State University began marching for desegregation. In May of 1970, the student campaign culminated with the appearance of an armed white mob prepared to shoot student demonstrators. In the days and years after the May riot an alliance of students, African-Americans and organized labor succeeded in a campaign of litigation bringing the leaders of Nacogdoches to task in Federal Court.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Delear
• Release date: Aug 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983883012

Stephen Delear

Stephen D. Delear holds a double major in History and Anthropology from Texas State University, a Juris Doctor from Tulane School of Law and a Master’s of Arts in Public History from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. In the past, the author has worked as both a civil rights litigator and a real estate attorney.

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March! The Fight For Civil Rights In a Land of Fear

Stephen D. Delear

Copyright 2011 by Stephen D. Delear

Travis Lake Publishing, LLC

College Station, Tx

ISBN-13: 978-0-9838830-1-2

Smashwords Edition

Cover Image: Civil Rights March on May 27, 1970 in Nacogdoches, Texas. Official Photograph, Nacogdoches Police Department.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE – A Time of Terror

CHAPTER TWO – The Meanest Part of the State

CHAPTER THREE – The Logic of Fear

CHAPTER FOUR – Two Riots in Nacogdoches

CHAPTER FIVE – An Alliance

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SOURCE NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to Arthur Weaver, Helena Patton, Mickey McGuire and Frank Robinson.

INTRODUCTION

Nacogdoches today appears a sleepy town deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas. The oldest permanent Anglo-American settlement in Texas, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left the town with a wealth of Queen Anne and Tudor style homes. The home of Stephen F. Austin State University, the town today boasts a population just over thirty thousand. Set in a rural landscape, agriculture, tourism and the university provide major sources of income for the area. While race relations remain a difficult subject for the community, legal segregation ended decades ago. Like many towns in the South, Nacogdoches has a history of racism and segregation many wish to forget. Unlike many small towns in the South, the involvement of the University in documenting this period and testimony from several federal lawsuits has preserved a record of the community during segregation.

Nacogdoches demonstrates the means by which racist interests took and maintained structural control of an American community. Structure as used here refers to the law, custom, tradition, and various institutions found within the community. The racist structures found in Nacogdoches during segregation are both unique and ubiquitous. No two communities experienced racism in exactly the same manner. The rural Mississippi of Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi shares the same pervasive racism found in Nacogdoches. Unlike Mississippi, police rather than extralegal organizations became the vanguard of racial violence in Nacogdoches. While details vary, the power structures found in Nacogdoches—the local newspaper, minor judicial offices, and control of local employment among others—remain common in almost all communities in the rural South.

This work follows a narrative style. Public decision makers represent part of the desired audience. African-American leaders are currently engaged in a drive to preserve buildings and physical structures associated with their community during segregation and the civil rights era. Prior to this work, no large-scale overview of the civil rights movement in Nacogdoches existed. By providing a history of the civil rights era in Nacogdoches, this work will aid in the preservation effort undertaken by the African-American community. With this goal in mind, the use of a presentation style seen as credible by both academics and public decision makers becomes imperative.

Many public decision makers possess legal training. This common background requires a narrative presentation. For a lawyer, narrative confirms fact. A flaw in a narrative structure indicates a defect of proof: non-narrative presentation indicates an attempt to hide the factual weaknesses of a case. This need for narrative has recently been elevated to a constitutional requirement. In Walmart Stores Inc. v. Dukes, the United States Supreme Court limited class action status—lawsuits brought by a large number of plaintiffs—to groups susceptible to a common narrative. Dukes revolved around claim of systematic sex discrimination by the largest retailer in America. In dismissing the suit the court found that that [w]ithout some glue [i.e., narrative] holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions [not to promote women] together, it will be impossible to . . . produce a common answer. Further, the court found detailed statistical analysis and sociological studies non-credible and insufficient to prove facts without an accompanying narrative. The outcome of Dukes argues strongly that any work seeking to influence figures of public importance follow a narrative style.

The Role of Oral History

Oral histories form a critical aspect of this narrative approach. Evaluating the racial history of Nacogdoches requires the reading of documents against the grain. The postmodernist observation that historical texts reflect the dominant narrative at the time of their creation and not an objective truth forms an important element in such reading. Oral history provides a classic means for disempowered minority groups to record their history. Oral sources from minority groups exist largely outside of the dominant narrative. Oral histories represent a sign post pointing toward additional documentation that may only take on significance when paired with oral accounts.

Oral history presents a source at least as accurate, if not more so, than official accounts of race relations in Nacogdoches. All source material possesses its own set of biases and flaws. Official records concerning race in Nacogdoches during segregation take on a particularly suspect quality. During the 1970s, the town's newspaper, the Daily Sentinel, admitted to censoring civil rights related news and also found itself forced to issue a retraction for inaccurate civil rights reporting. When dealing with racial discrimination at the Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA) campus, federal court documents as well as contemporary archival documents from members of the African-American community contradict claims made in official university documents. Oral history represents an opportunity to locate and explore flaws in the official record.

Oral history presents high-quality information. Oral history sources recount events that made notable impacts on their lives. Compared to the forced recollection of a witness in a legal setting, oral histories offer a highly detailed recounting of events. This should not imply that interviews of African-Americans in Nacogdoches avoid many of the classic problems of oral history. Informants find themselves unable to remember exact numbers or dates. Often memory follows thematic, not chronological, reference points. Hearsay statements show that a thing was said, but often err in the truth of the matter asserted. A source may remember things of personal import clearly but forget related details. Further, unsophisticated sources may frame correct information in a manner that seems unreliable. None of these flaws represent a drawback that cannot be overcome by correlating oral histories with the available, though at times flawed, contemporary documents.

Overview of Chapters

This work covers the period between two outbursts of violent racism. The first, the forced segregation of the City of Nacogdoches in 1929. The second took place in 1970 when white residents of the town armed themselves and prepared to shoot civil rights demonstrators. The five chapters of this work describe the time between these two events as well as the aftermath of the violence in 1970.

Chapter One chronicles the forced segregation of Nacogdoches African-Americans in the Orton Hill area. In 1929 the white community of Nacogdoches forced their African-American neighbors from the area around Church Street. Both economic and political motives fueled the displacement. The events of 1929 clouded the title to a portion of the town’s real estate for the next thirty years thus requiring white elites to maintain tight control over the court system in the coming decades.

Chapter Two examines the prevailing society of Nacogdoches during the 1950s and early 1960s. Coming out of the Depression, non-elite whites offered nearly unstinting support for segregation. This support arose from the desire to use African-Americans as a buffer between non-elite whites and the ruling elite. African-Americans in Nacogdoches attempted to resist the abuse to which this exposed them. White elites used their control of the local court system to suppress these attempts at resistance.

Chapter Three examines the effects of segregation on both the local media and Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA). Local reporting portrayed segregation as an unassailable intuition. Academics at SFA feared violence if the school questioned segregation. Fear of violence stifled the development of campus-based civil rights activism until after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.

Chapter Four describes the outbreak of violence that arose from a student civil rights march in the spring of 1970. It also analyzes the pressures in the community that caused white residents of Nacogdoches to respond to peaceful civil rights marchers with armed violence.

Chapter Five details the role of the AFL-CIO in bringing about the eventual desegregation of Nacogdoches. Alliance between Nacogdoches African-Americans and the union brought access to outside courts. These challenges resulted in a series of legal defeats that, eventually, broke the hold of the ruling elite over the community.

Epilogue, a brief Epilogue brings events in Nacogdoches to 2011.

CHAPTER ONE – A Time of Terror

Civil rights marchers met police just west of Church Street. The May 13, 1970 march in Nacogdoches, Texas marked the culmination of long simmering racial conflict in the town. The May march and following rioting, in many ways, had its origin in events happening decades before. What happened on Church Street in 1929 inspired Arthur Weaver, the de facto leader of the civil rights movement in Nacogdoches, to a lifetime of activism. For Police Chief M. C. Roebuck, the simmering racial animus after 1929 helped launch a career in the public sphere. The May march from the Orton Hill neighborhood to downtown Nacogdoches set off two days of rioting in Nacogdoches. The story of the march, and of the forces that would compel white town residents to take up arms and prepare to massacre civil rights demonstrators on the town square, begins decades before 1970.

The twentieth century saw a long reign of terror directed against African-Americans in Nacogdoches. Early in 1929, the white population of Nacogdoches drove their African-American neighbors into a ghetto. The Orton Hill neighborhood, the center of the ghetto, sprawls from a patch of high ground east of downtown Nacogdoches across LaNana Bayou, a muddy and slow moving ditch. No crime or outrage, either real or imagined, provoked the removal. Instead, members of the white community sought to secure valuable property. The removal culminated years of violence directed at Nacogdoches African-Americans and set the stage for decades of further repression.

Church Street

Church Street represents part of the hidden history of civil rights in Nacogdoches. While shame may partially explain the desire to forget the event, more practical matters also came into play. At its heart, what happened on Church Street and the area around resulted from a land grab by white elites. Acquisition by violence voids title to real estate. Only thirty years of adverse possession—uninterrupted occupation of the property without legal challenge—cures the defect. Documenting the removal risked creating evidence that could one day come back to haunt the acquirers of the property. Church Street quickly fell out of the memory of the white community. Keeping the memory of Church Street alive became part of the life’s work of Arthur Weaver, the long time president of the Nacogdoches NAACP.

Not all events leading up to the displacement went unrecorded. Stephen F. Austin State Teacher's College opened in Nacogdoches in 1923. The school offered the promise of outside money to a largely rural and agricultural community. In August of 1924, L. W. Smith placed a proposition before the Nacogdoches City Council calling for moving of all Negros from North Nacogdoches into a ghetto on the south side of town. The Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel, one of the town's two newspapers, eagerly took up the call. The Sentinel offered mercenary justification for the removal. According to the Sentinel as property values change there is an ever increasing difficulty in making changes in one's city and our College is over there, and this would make it essential that all the available space be reserved for white residents. Such a removal would keep the white and colored children from having to criss cross [sic] each others' trails as they go and return from school. Left unspoken, though certainly implied, such forced segregation would result in African-Americans selling property rising rapidly in value to white elites.

Forced segregation shut down a vibrant African-American business district. Like many Southern towns, the Nacogdoches commercial district centered on a main street. A thriving group of African-American owned businesses existed in back of the white commercial district. This area carried the colloquial