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SEGREGATION
IN TWO TEXAS TOWNS by
Robert G. Cowser |  |
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than twenty-five years ago Bill Moyers won an Emmy for a PBS documentary featuring
the “two worlds” of Marshall, Texas,
his home town. The film focuses on life in Marshall
during the Great Depression and World
War II, the time of Moyers’ boyhood. As a youngster, Moyers was hardly aware
of the black community in Marshall, though it made up approximately 50% of the
population. It was an autonomous community with churches, a variety of businesses,
and two colleges: Wiley and Bishop. |
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he was a boy, Moyers occasionally saw black people when they shopped in department
stores. He also observed that some black women came daily to work as domestics
in the homes of whites, and black men often came to the white section to do yard
work. Moyers realized that these black people were ignored as “real” people who
had lives of their own beyond their duties as workers. In a sense, the blacks
were invisible, as Ralph Ellison portrays his narrator in the novel Invisible
Man. |
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| Ironically,
after Moyers left Marshall, he became
interested in learning all he could about the black community in his home town.
For example, he learned that Melvin Tolson, a black poet whose work he admired,
taught English literature at Wiley College during the time Moyers was a student
at the all-white Marshall High School. Tolson gave readings and lectures at black
colleges churches in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson also organized a debate team at
Wiley that won a national debating contest against the Harvard University team
in 1935. Moyers began a collection of materials that he used in writing a biography
of Tolson. Denzel Washington produced a film, The Great Debaters, based
on the Wiley-Harvard debate. |
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Marshall
High School
Postcard courtesy www.rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
Wiley
College
Postcard courtesy www.rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
In
1954 I began my teaching career in Big
Sandy, a town thirty miles from Marshall.
The two worlds depicted in Moyers’ film also existed in that small town at the
juncture of the Texas and Pacific and the St. Louis Southwestern Railways. The
blacks lived south of the tracks, an area where we whites seldom had occasion
to visit. Occasionally, I would meet a black man or woman coming out of the post
office as I entered, but I hardly considered ever becoming acquainted with them.
Once during the two years I lived in Big
Sandy I drove past the frame building that housed the three-teacher school
for blacks. Another time, I drove past a black church on a Sunday evening specifically
because a colleague told me that I should hear the choir. I drove slowly past
the church absorbing the sounds of a hymn interspersed with the sounds of “Amen.”
With my car window rolled down, I could also hear the shuffling of feet on the
bare wooden floor of the church.
On the day before classes began at Big
Sandy the first year I taught there, the three black teachers came to a general
faculty meeting at the school for whites, a two-storey red brick building set
on the highest hill in town. The superintendent introduced the black teachers.
Though I spent two years there, I never saw the black teachers again, nor did
I inquire about them. Now, I wonder in what ways my experience at Big
Sandy would have been different if I had become acquainted with these colleagues.
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