Students document segregated past at Texas university

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The true story of how Midwestern State University balked at opening its doors to black students in the early 1950s came as such a surprise to two current students that they set out to publicize its details.
But far from being a black eye to the university, MSU students Chase Thornton and Robert Stewart III said the facts of lawsuits and counter lawsuits that were fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the campus white are a testament to how much things have changed and how far the university has progressed.
MSU currently welcomes students from 43 countries, including a 12 percent black population and a large Caribbean representation among its total enrollment of about 6,000 students.
Stewart started out just wanting to write a paper for his professor, Ernest Dover. As a history major, he decided to focus on how the local news media handled the reporting of the famous Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case and events surrounding Dr. Martin Luther King.
He discovered that Wichita Falls figured prominently in the news back then.
But while MSU's Moffett Library stores newspaper clippings from all the major academic and sporting events celebrated at the school since 1922, he found nothing there about the university resisting integration so vehemently that its board of directors appealed its case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The facts he discovered:
-- When Federal District Court Judge William Atwell ruled in 1951 that six academically qualified black students be admitted to the university's junior college, MU's board of directors appealed the ruling. They also secured a court order that forbade blacks from registering for classes while the case was being appealed.
-- In May 1953, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court.
-- Its ruling was appealed; and May 24, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Circuit Court, making it law: Blacks could enter Midwestern.
-- That final decision trailed the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case by just days.
-- Midwestern University's President James Boren was required to comply by permitting qualified "Negro" students to enroll in the tax-supported (Hardin) junior college of the university.
-- A few days later, the salutatorian and valedictorian of the 1954 spring graduating class of Booker T. Washington High School became the first black students in history to be accepted into the junior college division of Midwestern University.
"I was surprised," Stewart said of his discovery. "I made up my mind, I was going to find all the articles I could on that case."
He traveled to the National Archives in Fort Worth to read through court case documents and compare them with what he had already discovered in newspaper articles. "When doing the research and finding this information out, we found a lack of adequate information in the county archives and within the school."
Another surprise to Stewart was how few current MSU faculty members, administration or students know what a grip segregation had on the MSU campus at that time, and he determined to change that.
"It's an important piece of history for the city and university that was just left out," said Thornton, another MSU student majoring in political science. He joined Stewart in the research project that now surged beyond just a classroom assignment.
Thornton investigated the details of Atwell's decision from a political science standpoint and contributed his research to a paper the two co-wrote in November.
Together, they provided Moffett Library with transcripts of the landmark civil case that challenged segregation at MSU in 1951. They've also given copies to county archives and the African American Museum in Dallas.
Recently, the two seniors asked MSU Vice President for Student Affairs Howard Farrell to acknowledge the history by furnishing the money for a tree and a placard that would be erected on campus as a memorial -- perhaps timed with Black History Month in February. Farrell agreed immediately, Thornton said.
They hope to also publish a report in an academic journal.
"The school has been amazingly cooperative with this," Thornton said of their push for publicity.
The two see MSU's 1950s resistance to integration as more of a sign of the times for a university located "right in the heart of Jim Crow," Thornton said.
"It's not a mudslinging contest against the university or any particular person. We are doing this predominantly for the community of Wichita Falls and for the history of the university. We also feel it's important because it shows how far the university has come -- from the segregated South to modern times."
Stewart said the project has been encouraging, not discouraging, to him. Most people complain about how schools, nations, races or cultures need to advance.
"People fail to realize how far we have come, regardless of how far we may still have to go," he said. "We've come this far. Let's celebrate that and use that as motivation to keep it going."

(Contact education reporter Ann Work of the Wichita Falls Times Record News at worka(at)TimesRecordNews.com.)