Integrating the 40 Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas

by Dwonna Goldstone

"You name it, we can't do it." That was how one African American student at the University of Texas at Austin summed up his experiences in a 1960 newspaper article--some ten years after the beginning of court-mandated desegregation at the school. In this first full-length history of the university's desegregation, Dwonna Goldstone examines how, for decades, administrators only gradually undid the most visible signs of formal segregation while putting their greatest efforts into preventing true racial integration. In response to the 1956 Board of Regents decision to admit African American undergraduates, for example, the dean of students and the director of the student activities center stopped scheduling dances to prevent racial intermingling in a social setting.
Goldstone's coverage ranges from the 1950 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the University of Texas School of Law had to admit Heman Sweatt, an African American, through the 1994 Hopwood v. Texas decision, which ended affirmative action in the state's public institutions of higher education. She draws on oral histories, university documents, and newspaper accounts to detail how the university moved from open discrimination to foot-dragging acceptance to mixed successes in the integration of athletics, classrooms, dormitories, extracurricular activities, and student recruitment. Goldstone incorporates not only the perspectives of university administrators, students, alumni, and donors, but also voices from all sides of the civil rights movement at the local and national level. This instructive story of power, race, money, and politics remains relevant to the modern university and the continuing question about what it means to be integrated.

Genres: History

213 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2006

Reviews

[Jennifer Millspaugh Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this compelling chronology of University of Texas’ history of integration, author Dwonna Goldstone details the successes and defeats of the African Americans who helped pave the rocky path toward racial equality. Early in the book, Goldstone notes that road remains incomplete, and proceeds to share the stories that elucidate the continued resistance African Americans face in UT’s racial climate. Goldstone describes in painstaking detail and replete with thorough research from a multitude of sources the evolution of UT’s unwillingness to embrace diversity wholeheartedly.
The book proceeds mostly chronologically but author chose to organize the gains made categorically as well. Goldstone begins by contextualizing Texas’ participation in slavery, Jim Crow, and the implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. She further explains the role UT played in Texas politics and the delicate balance administrators felt they had to play as some Texans began to shift attitudes toward African Americans and others remained steadfast in their white supremacist beliefs. Much of each subsequent chapter refers back to this constant interplay between the generations of administrators, faculty, and students.
Chapter 1 provides a clear background for how African Americans first approached integration at UT, through the graduate law school, and how the Board of Regents attempted to delay this admission through a lengthy legal proceeding and compromises. Chapter 2 explains the measures taken to integrate the educational facilities of the campus. In Chapter 3, she focuses on the protests that took place off campus in attempt to desegregate the surrounding area as well, such as movie theaters and nearby restaurants. This chapter also covers the efforts of integration in Greek Life and the formation of black fraternities and sororities. Chapter 4 then describes the terrible living situations for most of UT’s African American students and the maddening “two steps forward, one step back” progression of dormitory integration. Chapter 5 features the begrudging and slow desegregation of UT’s athletic programs even though doing so is to their detriment, and particularly highlights this area and time as one where UT begins to fall behind other Texas and southern schools in their conference. The final chapter moves the reader through the gains from 1964 onward, as UT’s last remaining holdouts, the band and the faculty desegregate as well.
Goldstone weaves a powerful narrative of the lives of the first African American pioneers on to UT’s uncharted territory. Readers come to understand just how much determination the UT Board had to keep the institution segregated at all cost. Goldstone’s clear organization of the book allows her to move between the macro- and micro-levels of racism at the time and in the area. For instance, she frequently highlights the deeply embedded and pervasive fear that white Texans of miscegenation and the lengths to which the Board would go to avoid placing black men near white women. She also steps back from the happenings at UT to contextualize their role within the larger system of higher education, and notes that despite their reluctance, UT lead the pack with regard to many of their integrative measures. She also notes that many white students and professors allied themselves with the plight of African Americans and spoke quite boldly to the Board of Regents in their favor, providing an objective view of the campus climate at that time.
Notably, the book’s subtitle, The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas, may be a bit misleading. Although the book is written 50 years after the first African American applied for admission, Goldstone focuses most heavily on the years 1950-1964. Chapter 6, the shortest in the book, alone covers 1964 onward, and omits even a single mention of the 1980s. Further, as the author notes in the epilogue, the struggle for racial equality is not yet over, and suggests that the climate at UT remains tepid at best, steadfast in their goal to limit integration, to invite African Americans to their campus because they must, not because they welcome their presence. Capping the title at 50 years indicates that UT has reached racial equality, which by the author’s admission, it has not.
Goldstone states that UT must confront its racist past, and that until that happens, the racial climate will remain negative and continue to drive away students from the campus. This book opened my eyes to deep resistance and persistent racism that prevails at a university I have always believed to be welcoming and quite liberal. I hope that every Texas state legislator, every UT board member, administrator, faculty member, and student reads this book.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a sloppily researched book. Of course she got some things right, and where she actually interviewed people it is entertaining, but she got a lot of things wrong through pure carelessness. For instance, she says Lawrence Haskew was a regent, when he was, in fact, dean of the College of Education. She says Claude Allen was an African American graduate student and that he taught at Huston-Tillotson. In fact, he was white and was a teaching assistant at the University of Texas. She calls Maurice (Mo) Olian the Daily Texan editor, a post he never held (he was student body president). Oddly, on other pages she identified these people correctly (Olian on a page on which the reference to him is not indexed). Did she not read her own book? The editors at the University of Georgia Press maybe would not have noticed all her inconsistencies, but they are certainly responsible for this book's very bad index, which leaves out a number of references and puts some in that are not there. "Louis Iscoe," for example, gets two references in the index but does not appear on the referenced pages. I can only assume that this is supposed to be "Louise Iscoe" to whom references on the pages apply in the book's endnotes. This book is only a semi-reliable source.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars. I used this book in a seminar I taught on the history of UT. The students in my class, who were all very passionate about social justice issues, appreciated the facts and the history of reticence on the part of UT administration to integrate the campus fully, as well as the stories of activists on campus who fought for inclusion. As a professional historian reading the book, I found the historiography to be very thin (and therefore disappointing in a class in which I’m attempting to teach methods). As a reader, I found the prose a bit dry. That said this is an important history I’d my institution and Goldstone has done great work in bringing together insights and knowledge that had previously been known to few people outside of those who lived through it.

[Holly Herrera · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for a history of education and the integration at UT-Austin.