Answers to Go with Susan Smith
San Marcos Public Library 625 E. Hopkins St. 512-393-8200
Q. I’d like to teach my students about integration at Texas State University. What do the library’s local history files have to offer?
A. For my next-to-last article in the Daily Record, I’ve chosen a column that originally ran on Feb. 1, 2009.
In the San Marcos/Hays County History files on African Americans, I found “The African-American Presence at SWT: Celebrating Forty Years, 1963-2003.”
This booklet points out that 1963 was the centennial year for the Emancipation Proclamation. It was in 1963 that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.
That same year, Texas State graduate and then vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson, spoke at Gettysburg. He said, “Until justice is blind, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”
In 1962, Dana Smith, an 18-year-old black woman, applied for admission to Southwest Texas Teachers College. University President Flowers wrote that her application had been rejected because of the ‘whites only’ provision in the charter that established the college. His letter stated that only an act of the state legislature or a court order could make it possible for the college to admit Miss Smith and other black students.
Her father, Daniel Smith, filed a lawsuit against the college on his daughter’s behalf. The Gay Paree Club, an African American women’s social and cultural group in San Marcos, collected donations in the black community to help with legal expenses.
On February 4, 1963, Judge Rice of the U.S. District Court in Austin signed the court order that ended segregation at SWTTC. President Flowers said, “We will accept Negro students as we would any other academically qualified students.”
That afternoon, Miss Smith and three black women from San Marcos (Georgia Faye Hoodye, Gloria Odoms, and Mabeleen Washington) registered for classes. Later that week, Helen Jackson enrolled.
The booklet states that integration of SWTTC was accomplished without the white protests that black students encountered at some other integrated campuses. However, these women did face racial slurs and covert discrimination.
