In midst of LISD attendance zone debate, race relations still riddle

A black boy’s education was not worth much in Longview in the 1950s, but the segregated schoolhouse did offer a cheap supply of ready labor.

“They’d come get us out of class,” recalls Al Jones, a 67-year-old Longview resident who attended all-black East Ward Elementary School.

On many school days, a dozen or so of Jones’ male classmates would pile into a pickup driven by the golf pro at Pinecrest Country Club.
The pro, a white man, would haul the boys down the road to the caddy shack and put them to work.

Like most 10- to 13-year-old children, Jones said, he and his friends were more than eager to ditch their schoolbooks for a chance to earn a little cash.

They pocketed $1.50 every time they toted a golfer’s equipment bag around the 18-hole course.

“We bought our school clothes with that money,” Jones said.

They also learned to golf.

“We’d get hold of one of the old golf clubs and hang around the caddy shack,” he said. “That’s how we picked up the game.”

If many of them missed out on an education along the way, well, that was life in those days.

‘Many-headed monster’

It’s been 45 years since the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places and the workforce. Nearly four decades have passed since a court order forced Longview schools to completely integrate, following a five-year trial run at voluntary integration.

Today, it seems, many white people are ready to change the subject.

White residentswho declined to comment for this story say they are weary of the hand-wringing over race relations, or they fear that speaking openly will offend their neighbors.

While declining to comment, one prominent white resident said every time he speaks publicly about race, white people think he’s lost his mind — and black people still think he’s racist. He’s learned to keep his mouth shut.

“We all know it’s such a many-headed monster, and it’s hard to grab hold of it in a way that will make a difference,” said Dr. Bob Terrell, a retired veterinarian and a member of the Longview Race Relations Committee.

The committee is a city sponsored organization that promotes racial dialogue. Terrell, who is white, said the problems simmering below the surface will never ease until people are willing to reach across racial divides, develop relationships and talk about their differences.

“A lot of members of the white race in Longview, Texas, don’t seem to be aware of any racial problems,” he said.

“What keeps racism alive is a lack of knowledge as to what is really happening. So it’s very easy to say, ‘Why don’t you leave it alone, and it will work itself out?’

“Once you get one group segregated in any way, it’s not going to happen.”

Racial exclusion

For Jones, the legacy of segregation in Longview is intertwined with his lifelong passion for golf, the game he discovered as a 10-year-old caddy on the oldest course in East Texas.

“We’d slip onto Pinecrest, but if they saw us playing they’d run us off,” he said. “We played in pastures and fields and made our own course at Broughton Park. We’d play all day and under the lights at night.”

Pinecrest was an easy walk from Jones’s childhood home on El Paso Street, but it represented a world beyond his reach.

“Really, I didn’t have any interactions with white people except through the golf course,” he said. “I thought all white people were rich, because all I saw were the ones hanging out at the country club.”

Exclusion was a fact of life.

“We accepted it,” he said. “We didn’t question it.”

Jones’ father knew not to buck the system. Over the years, he worked on the lawn maintenance crew at what is now LeTourneau University, sold jewelry, raised hogs or worked in the rail yard for Union Pacific.

Though he had dropped out of school in the fourth grade, going to work to support his widowed mother and younger siblings, he knew the importance of an education. When he learned his son was spending his school days on the golf course, he put a stop to it right away.

“My parents told the principal not to let me leave,” Jones said. “It was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t think so at the time. All my friends would go out making money, and I had to sit there and learn to read and write.”

With Jones stuck in the classroom, his golf skills lagged behind those of the other caddies. It didn’t matter. Because of their skin color, they were not allowed to play on any real courses in East Texas.

What’s more, by the time Longview’s links had integrated, many of the former caddies had not received a complete education. They were too poor to afford the greens fees anyway.

But don’t put all the blame on Pinecrest, Jones added. Though his school happened to be a pipeline to the caddy shack, Longview’s other three black elementary schools supplied labor to other commercial endeavors around town.

It’s just the way it was for black students in Longview, he said. Schools were separate and unequal.

Unequal education

Robert Cargill Jr. recalls life on the white side of the racial divide — and the false assumption of white superiority that necessitated that divide. A retired professor and longtime local businessman with deep roots in East Texas, Cargill graduated from white Longview High School in 1951.

“Most of us, as far as I know, didn’t know any black people except servants whom I dearly loved, but I didn’t know them socially,” he said, “and the prevailing segregated system was one that most of us didn’t really think about. It was sort of the way it was. And certainly most of the people I knew in high school were not thinkers, and we sort of did what we did and assumed that the world was the way that it would always be. We didn’t question whether it was right or wrong.

“Once I left Longview and went off to college and graduate school, I was forced to give some thought to these questions that weren’t really raised when I was a local boy.”

After Cargill had graduated and around the time Jones was enrolled in Longview schools, Terrell, the veterinarian, recalls hiring black high school students to clean animal cages and perform other tasks at his clinic on South Mobberly Avenue.

“I would test what they were learning in school,” he said. “They couldn’t even list the days of the week or spell them.”

“How did they get this far in school and not have any more knowledge than they have?” he says he asked the high school principal, a friend.

“We’re lucky if we can get them in the door,” the man replied, according to Terrell. “Their family’s economic situation is so poor they’re wanting their boys to be out there on a job, not at school. They get no support at home, because of their economic situation. They’re living in a different world.”

Many of the students dropped out of school completely, Jones added.

“Later on, when they got into their 20s, a lot of jobs started requiring them to have a high school education, especially after the Civil Rights Act opened up a lot of good jobs in the oil field and some of the better jobs at Eastman (Chemical Co.),” he said.

“They had to be functionally literate. A lot of them worked construction jobs and some of them did well, but a lot of them didn’t because they just didn’t have the education. They couldn’t read and write.”

Because of the men’s illiteracy, he said, they were indifferent or unable to help their own children learn to read, perpetuating the effects of inequality long after segregation came to an end.

Jones’ path was much different, however.

Opening to blacks

With his parents’ guidance, Jones stuck with his education. Upon graduating from segregated Mary C. Womack High School in 1960, he joined the golf team at historically black Wiley College in Marshall. No golf course in Marshall allowed blacks, either, so the team practiced on a nine-link course in Shreveport.

He graduated from Wiley and earned a master’s degree from Prairie View A&M University. After serving as a school band director in the Houston area for a few years, he returned to Longview in 1968 to sell furniture and raise a family of his own. (Later, he went to work as a conductor for Union Pacific and retired from the railroad in 1996).

As a black man in Longview in the late ’60s, Jones could eat at any restaurant and sit in any seat at the movie theater. He sold his wares to white and black people alike. But he found he was still unwelcome at the local golf courses.

“I went out there (to Alpine Country Club) a couple of times to try to play, but they told me it was private and I had to be a member,” he said. “That way, they could exclude you.”

He knew it was a ruse, and he wrote to the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The letter was not answered, but in 1969, Alpine and Longview Country Club finally opened to black people — five years after passage of the federal Civil Rights Act.

Jones has been a regular at Alpine ever since.

“I’ve never had any problems that were race-related on the golf course,” he said. “We just play. I think it has bridged race a lot.”

Jones won the Alpine Invitational in 1980. Four years later, he played a round at Pinecrest.

“To play at the place where you caddied and couldn’t play for years, it was really special for me,” he said.

‘Moving too fast’

Jones is a short man. He wears eyeglasses and a thin mustache, and he seems to exude a quiet confidence. He has lived a comfortable life, he said, and he has known a measure of racial equality his father couldn’t have dreamed of.

He still remembers his father’s subservience to white people. It is upsetting to consider, even now.

“He came from a whole different school, the old school — be respectful and do what the white man told you to do,” he said. “He would call a young man ‘Mister.’ I didn’t like it. I couldn’t stand it. He would be called ‘boy’ by white men who were younger than him, and he just had to accept it.”

In 1971, Jones did something that alarmed his father. He moved his family into a white neighborhood, off what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

“He cautioned me: ‘You’re moving too fast.’ I was just trying to get a house. I was trying to make some money, take care of my family and play golf.

“In five or six years, there wasn’t hardly a white house on the street. They all moved to the north side.”

Voluntary segregation

The re-segregation of Longview, with black people concentrated in the older, southeastern side of town and white people populating the surrounding sprawl, looms among the racially tinged issues facing the city, according to race relations advocates.

“As long as we’re over here and they’re over there, there’s no chance for any dialogue,” Terrell said.

From 1994 to 2007, the number of white students in Longview ISD fell by 40 percent, according to the Texas Education Agency, while the number of black students remained constant over the period tracked by TEA. The number of Hispanic students, meanwhile, increased over the same period from 8 percent of total enrollment to 28 percent.

“We have a tendency to migrate to people who look like us, think like us and feel like us, especially when there is no leadership that’s trying to do anything better,” said the Rev. Homer C. Rockmore, the local branch president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the pastor of Red Oak Baptist Church.

“You have everybody still living in our own areas,” he said. “You don’t see a total integration. We are comfortable in the areas that we live in.”

Rockmore grew up in segregated Longview. He said the NAACP continues to fight for racial equality in education, housing, employment and medical care. Racism has not gone away, he added.

“It exists, and it’s covered up to some extent,” he said. “It’s not as open.”

Racism must be tackled head-on, he said.

“The only way you can solve any problem in this situation is to find what the problem is and then work together to find an equitable solution to it,” he said. “As long as you put it behind you and pretend it doesn’t exist — and I think that’s what a lot of people have done, both black and white — we still have a problem.

“Most people want to be like an ostrich: stick your head in the sand and pretend this situation doesn’t exist. But it still exists.”

Segregation’s legacy

Making the most of his retirement, Jones plays golf four days a week.

Though issues of race and equality rarely cross his mind, he admits the legacy of segregation has left its mark on his view of the world.

“I don’t think about it lately,” he said.

However, “growing up segregated, you always have a certain fear or apprehension, whereas the generation behind me, like my kids, probably don’t. They feel like they have a right just like everyone else.”

Even still, today’s prejudice manifests itself in other ways, he said.

“It’s more subtle. It’s not ‘Can’t go in there, boy, you have to go in the back.’ … I know it’s alive. I’m not naive, but I also know that not all white people are racist. Especially some of the younger ones don’t even see it, and those who do, it’s something they learned.”

Jones was asked if he passed along any prejudice to his own four children. He thought for a moment.

“We were taught to not trust the white man,” he said.

“I might have taught my kids to be careful, watch what you’re doing, don’t talk to a white girl.”

Prejudice exists, and it probably always will, according to Terrell, Rockmore and others. Much work remains, they say, but Longview has taken many strides since Jones and his friends were caddying for white men at the country club.

“It’s so much better than it used to be,” Jones said.

“You’re not held back because of the color of your skin. I wanted equal pay. I wanted equal schools. That’s all we wanted — to start at the same line and play by the same rules.”

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Group sought way to stop integration

In May 1956, a concerned band of 700 residents united in Longview. Their mission was threefold:

– Maintain the separation of white and Negro children in public schools;

– Solidify laws banning intermarriage of the races;

– Stop the spread of “federal tyranny” revealed by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, only two years earlier, in Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1954, the high court had struck down state laws requiring separate schools for black and white students, ruling the laws denied equal education for black children.

Time-honored racial segregation was in peril.

The Longview Citizens Council elected as chairman the local business and civic leader Robert Cargill. Similar groups formed in Kilgore, Gilmer, Tyler and other towns.

They were not to be “a Ku Klux,” according to newspaper accounts. They were to legally pursue a statewide ballot referendum in support of state’s rights and in opposition to “illegal federal encroachment” and the intermingling of the races.

Within days, Cargill was named chairman of a statewide Texas Referendum Committee.

The group collected more than 160,000 signatures in an effort to put the referendum on the Democratic primary ballot in June.

Key Texas lawmakers, wary of tarnishing U.S. Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson’s national profile, tried to thwart the referendum movement. Cargill threatened legal action.

“Texans have died in two world wars on every front throughout the world to give oppressed people the privilege and the right to vote and to speak freely in legal and orderly processes,” Cargill was quoted as telling a newspaper. “We shall not tolerate a total disregard of these principles within our own borders.”

He prevailed, and the referendum passed by a four-to-one majority. The effort ultimately fizzled in the next legislative session.

Cargill remained a scion of Longview business and civic involvement. Toward the end of his life, however, his views had changed.

“An interesting thing to me was the transformation of my dad, who went from where he was in 1956 to where he was when he died in 1986,” said his son, Robert Cargill Jr., himself a local business leader.

“I talked to him about it,” his son recalled. “He said, ‘You know, I made a mistake. I was wrong.’ And I know that he cultivated friendships in the black community. … Although my dad could be and often was paternalistic, I saw that he was more attuned to protecting the black community from the imposition of the will of the white community in the 1980s than he had been.”

Cargill Jr. said he believes he knows why his father led the fight against integration.

“If you integrated the schools then you were challenging the status quo, and everybody who was in power liked the status quo,” he said. “If your power’s threatened, you get defensive. I’m not saying that’s great. I’m just telling you that’s what happens.”

Attitudes have progressed since the 1950s, Cargill Jr. said, but he added he still sees prejudice almost anywhere he looks. He offered a prescription to fight racism.

“It takes education,” he said. “It takes interaction. And it takes interaction that’s real, not just superficial.”

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First black city manager: Community ‘accepting’

In his seven-year tenure, Longview’s first black city manager said he discovered that some things about the city’s past weren’t talked about.

Deadly race riots in 1919 and the bombing of school buses the summer of 1970 before forced integration might not have been openly discussed, he said, but they contributed to a sense of uneasiness in dealings with race.

“Those things were lingering memories in a lot of people’s minds, especially in the African American community, and they helped me get a better perspective on what was going on and the way people felt,” said Rickey Childers, who left Longview in 2006 to become city manager of Lancaster near Dallas.

Childers came to Longview in 1999.

“I thought the community was very accepting,” he said. “People gave me a chance. The people there were sincere in the way they felt about things, and I didn’t personally experience any open prejudice or racism. I know some people didn’t like me because I was of color, and I think I may have won some of those people over with time.”

Black people outnumbered whites in Gregg County as recently as 1930, according to the U.S. Census bureau. The East Texas Oil Boom changed that, but Childers said because the black community is so well-established, its leaders are able to work confidently and openly with other groups.

A shining moment of unity during his time in Longview was the Black Ministerial Alliance’s prayer walks through drug- and violence-riddled neighborhoods in 2006, Childers recalled.

“I thought that was just beautiful,” he said. “I had been a little hesitant. I didn’t know if it would work, but I participated in two of them.

“People kept coming and coming — all different races. People came because they cared, and it was a beautiful thing. It was a very powerful message that showed the community was together, taking a stand against crime.”

On the other hand, he recalls attending town hall meetings in Spring Hill and Greggton, traditionally white areas of town that had been involuntarily annexed into Longview years earlier.

“Both communities don’t feel like a part of Longview,” he said. “Longview is downtown and the south side. ‘I’m Spring Hill — y’all down there are Longview.’ In Greggton, I was surprised that some of the more difficult ones are still angry about it.”

Greggton was annexed in the 1950s. Spring Hill in the ’80s.

“As long as Longview has an idea that ‘we’re Greggton, we’re Spring Hill, and we’re not Longview,’ that lack of cohesiveness in the community is one of (its impediments),” he said. “In a way, that’s tied to race.”

Published Sept. 13, 2009, in the Longview News-Journal