ustxtxb_obs_1966_10_28_50_00003-00000_000.pdf

believed still out of work. 35 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also expressed concern about the problem. Questioning these reports, however, was the head of the Negro Teachers State Association of Texas, Dr. Vernon McDaniel, who said fewer than 30 Negro teachers were without jobs in the state at that time. He said he was, in fact, quite encouraged about the integration of Texas faculties and the additional numin the state compared to the year before. 36 Tending to support Dr. McDaniel’s view was a report of the U.S. Office of Education that 100 Negro teachers were on formerly all-white faculties in Texas during 1964-’65 and 500 Negroes in 1965’66. And a United Press International story surveying Texas public school desegregation this fall termed teacher desegregation “widespread.” 37 Since the U.S. Office of Education announcement last spring that integration of faculties is a major concern of the federal guidelines, 38 reports of Negro educators being out of jobs have hardly been heard at all in Texas. Last month the T.S.A.T. disbanded after having had on its rolls at one time some 10,000 Negro teachers, who have now been encouraged to join the formerly all-white Texas State Teachers Associa AT THE HIGHER EDUCATION level, desegregation has also progressed in the last two and one-half years. The experience of the University of Texas is especially instructive. In May, 1964, the University of Texas hired its first Negro faculty member, Ervin S. Perry, described as a leading scholar in the U.T. engineering graduate school. He was the first Negro on the faculty of any formerly all-white Southern university. 39 Student housing has posed a basic problem in desegregating colleges in the state. In the fall of 1961 the first sit-in by Negroes at a segregated U.T. dormitory occurred;” two and one-half years later, on May 16, 1964, the Board of Regents decided to end housing discrimination, by then the last vestige of formal segregation at the schoo1. 41 All dormitories, accommodating some 3,000 students, were immediately opened to all races, and, though some subtle symptoms of the former days are still present today \(such as assigning Negroes to rooms by themselves, with no roommate, or to rooms with other Neopen. The difficulty of the university’s transition was personified in W. W. Heath, chairman of the university’s Board of Regents during much of the critical period and a one-time segregationist from the backwoods of East Texas. Heath in 1965 spoke candidly of the difficulties he faced within himself in bringing integration to the university and its associated institutions. “Hardest thing I had to reconcile myself to was the integration of the tion, which in 1964 dropped racial bars to membership. All the foregoing discussion of school desegregation ignores what, in Texas, is a sizeable problem of discrimination. Thousands of Latin American students suffer segregation as damaging as any the Negro ever endured, largely because of segregated housing and an unwillingness to contend for their rights in the Anglo world but also because federal attention is riveted on the Negro’s plight. “We’re blind to any colors but black and white,” a U.S. Office of Education official is said to have told a South Texas school superintendent. Brown doesn’t register, evidently, on the federal retina. Only lately has language become of concern in districts with large populations of Latins; Latin youngsters entering school usually have not spoken any language but Spari. ish. Steadily they fall behind , in the English-speaking schools. Some progress has been made in teaching English to incoming first graders the summer before they begin school; Head Start also has been helpful very much so, many educators believe in surmounting the language barrier. In Laredo an experiment is under way in teaching English as a second language to Latin children and Spanish to Anglo students. girls’ dorms, where girls receive their dates and have their social activities,” Heath told Houston -Chronicle reporter Bo Byers. Heath went on: “The thing I’m proudest of and I’m proud in a way of Incorporating the State Observer and the East Texas Democrat, which in turn incorported the State Week and Austin ForumAdvocate. We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of detnocracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. Editor and General Manager, Ronnie Dugger. Partner, Mrs. R. D. Randolph. Associate Editor, Greg Olds. Business Manager, Sarah Payne. Associate Manager, C. R. Olofson. Contributing Editors, Elroy Bode, Bill Brammer, Larry Goodwyn, Harris Green, Dave Hickey, Franklin Jones, Lyman Jones, Larry L. King, Georgia Earnest Klipple, Al Melinger, Robert L. Montgomery, Willie Morris, James Presley, Charles Ramsdell, Roger Shattuck, Robert Sherrill, Dan Strawn, Tom Sutherland, Charles Alan Wright. Staff Artist, Charles Erickson. Contributing Photographer, Russell Lee. The editor has exclusive control over the editorial policies and contents of the Observer. None of . the other people who are associated with the enterprise shares this responsibility with him. Writers are responsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not them integration is that we did what we had to do and should have done in the matter of ,human rights and that sort of thing. . . . Our integration was reasonably orderly, without provoking incidents. With the vast majority of the faculty and the students saying we should integrate completely and immediately, at the same time a vast majority of all the people of Texas and of the legislature were saying we were going too fast. It was like being on a tightrope. The fact we were able to do it without violence, without bloodshed, without federal marshals that is the thing I’m proudest of because it undoubtedly is the hardest thing we’ve gone through. I speak as one who started out opposed to integration and who still has some misgivings on the subject, but I still think what we did was right, not just on a legal basis. “I know deep in my heart it was right. As a man who tries to subscribe to Christian principles, even though I have my prejudices, I think we did right. Certainly the human rights have to be protected.” 42 In the fall of 1964 the university ceased requiring its students who live off-campus to reside in housing approved by the administration. This apparently was a step taken to ‘retain the school’s eligibility for federal funds. Otherwise the university would have had to require that landlords of approved privately-owned dormitories and rooming and boarding houses be integrated. 43 That same year students began preparing their own “approved list,” including places that didn’t discriminate because of race or national origin.” Response of landlords who were ap selves written, and in publishing them the editor does not necessarily imply that he agrees with them, because this is a journal of free voices. Subscription Representatives: Arlington, George N. Green, 416 Summit, Apt. 41, CR 70080; Austin, Mrs. Helen C. Spear, 2615 Pecos, HO 5-1805; Corpus Christi, Penny Dudley, 12241/2 Second St., TU4-1460; Dallas, Mrs. Cordye Hall, 5835 Ellsworth, TA 1-1205; Denton, Fred Lusk, Box 8134 NTS; Fort Worth, Dolores Jacobsen, 3025 Greene Ave., WA 4-9655; Houston, Mrs. Shirley Jay, 10306 Cliffwood Dr., PA 3-8682; Lubbock, Doris Blaisdell, 2515 24th St., Midland, Eva Dennis, 4306 Douglas, OX 4-2825; Odessa, Enid Turner, 1706 Glenwood, EM 6-2269; San Antonio, Mrs. Mae B. Tuggle, 531 Elmhurst, TA 6-3583; Cambridge; Mass., Victor Emanuel, Adams House C112. The Observer is published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd., biweekly from Austin, Texas. Entered as second-class matter April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. Second class postage paid at Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $6.00 a year; two years, $11.00; three years, $15.00. Foreign rates on request. Single copies 25c; prices for ten or more for students, or bulk orders, on request. Editorial and Business Offices: The Texas Observer, 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas 78705. Telephone GR 7-0746. Change of Address: Please give old and new address and allow three weeks. The Colleges Are Adapting THE TEXAS OBSERVER Texas Observer Co., Ltd. 1966 A Journal of Free Voices A Window to the South 60th YEAR ESTABLISHED 1906 Vol. 58, No. 20 October 28, 1966