Advancing Democracy

by Shabazz, Amilcar

• ISBN13: 9780807828335
• ISBN10: 0807828335
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Integration in Texas colleges before Brown. As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is important to consider the historical struggles that led to this groundbreaking decision. Four years earlier in Texas, the Sweatt v. Painter decision allowed blacks access to the University of Texas's law school for the first time. Amilcar Shabazz shows that the development of black higher education in Texas--which has historically had one of the largest state college and university systems in the South--played a pivotal role in the challenge to Jim Crow education. Shabazz begins with the creation of the Texas University Movement in the 1880s to lobby for equal access to the full range of graduate and professional education through a first-class university for African Americans. He traces the philosophical, legal, and grassroots components of the later campaign to open all Texas colleges and universities to black students, showing the complex range of strategies and the diversity of ideology and methodology on the part of black activists and intellectuals working to promote educational equality. Shabazz credits the efforts of blacks who fought for change by demanding better resources for segregated black colleges in the years before Brown, showing how crucial groundwork for nationwide desegregation was laid in the state of Texas.

Author Biography

Amilcar Shabazz is a professor in the Department of American Studies and director of the African American Studies program at the University of Alabama

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(8)
1 As Separate as the Fingers
Higher Education in Texas from Promise to Problem, 1865-1940	9	(25)
2 The All-Out War for Democracy in Education
Ideological Struggle and the Texas University Movement	34	(32)
3 Lift the Seventy-Five-Year-Old Color Ban and Raise UT's Standards
University Students for Democracy before Sweats	66	(29)
4 This Is White Civilization's Last Stand
University Desegregation before Brown	95	(43)
5 Democracy Is on the March in Texas
Black Equality versus White Power, 1955-1957	138	(58)
6 Plowing around Africans on Aryan Plantations
Access without Equity at Texas Universities, 1958-1965	196	(22)
Coda	218	(5)
Notes	223	(58)
Bibliography	281	(14)
Index	295