Texas Southern University Student Sit-Ins 1960-1963

[JLWM8609]

I found this on YouTube.

There are modern day interviews, as well as clips of interviews from the 1960-1963 period, with video footage of the old Weingarten's on Almeda, and a news crew interviewing citizens in front of what appears to be Foley's downtown in the same time period.

[Vertigo58]

That was really cool. I personally had not see the neon Weingarten's lit up like that since I was a kid here in Houston. They even had a good glimpse of what the city bus looked like in the background. The posted signs proved that several races were being discriminated against then not just one, but several.

Thanks for this very rare glimpse to the past.

[Subdude]

Cool video, thanks for posting that. It was fascinating seeing Houston as it looked back then in the background, but also very disturbing that such a thing as enforced discrimination existed here.

[Original Timmy Chan's]

I heard an interview on KTSU a couple weeks ago by the professor who put the video together, along with the 3 student participants that were seen on the video.

What I found most interesting about the interview was what one of the men said (paraphrasing): The TSU student protestors always made two important phone calls before a sit-in. One to the media, and one to the police department. When a sit-in was planned, word would always leak out, and the black protestors would always see a line of white guys in their pickups waiting for them, and a line of police. The difference between Houston and many cities in the South was that here in Houston, the police would walk over to the line of white guys in pickup trucks and the trucks would leave. In other places, the police would stand to the side and watch without interceding.

That part surprised me. I've often heard about how desegregation in Houston was "managed" by the black and white power brokers of the time, so that the process went fairly smoothly. However, I was still surprised to hear that TSU demonstrator tell that story about the police protecting the black demonstrators here in Houston. I'm sure it didn't always happen that way, but interesting that it did happen at all.

[Vertigo58]

In fact sit-in's and then boycotting became the rage for most of the 60's. Or as mom and dad called them "demonstrations". Riot's on TV were so common in those days. Parents normally flipped the channel so us young one's wouldnt see. Vietnam/Cambodia footage was on almost every night it seemed. Kid's like us just didn't have a clue how terrible things were. We rather see Mr Rogers and Captain Kangaroo then.

There are at least 2 other topics under history referencing riots in Houston. Ours were tame compared to other cities.

[hbcu]

mexicans were discriminated against also....interesting.....

but alot of them will look down on blacks and they'll quickly abandon their heritage for the right price...

[FilioScotia]

In fact sit-in's and then boycotting became the rage for most of the 60's. Or as mom and dad called them "demonstrations". Riot's on TV were so common in those days. Parents normally flipped the channel so us young one's wouldnt see. Ours were tame compared to other cities.

There's a reason for the fact that Houston's early civil rights demonstrations were tame compared to other cities, and many of you here might not believe it.

Very early on when the Houston TV stations and newspapers learned that sit-ins and protests were planned in Houston, the TV managers and newspaper editors called a meeting. I don't know who came up with the idea, but they all agreed they wouldn't report lunch counter sit-ins and public marches around town.

They looked at the civil rights violence that was happening in other southern cities, and they felt that the only way to keep things relatively peaceful in Houston was to keep it off the TV and out of the newspapers. So the Houston sit-ins were pretty much ignored by our local media, deliberately. It was a classic example of censoring the news for the public good, and it worked. What we didn't know didn't hurt us.

Over a period of weeks and several months, the Houston sit-ins came and went, and they were peaceful for the most part. There were a few arrests but there were no racial confrontations or incidents worth mentioning.

Can you imagine something like that happening today? Neither can I.

[Retama]

North Texas State College in Denton desegregated the very same way.

When blacks began to enroll there in the mid-1950s, President J.C. Matthews adopted a low key approach intended to keep publicity to a minimum so that his campus didn't have violent incidents similar to the ones surrounding Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama. At one point he barred television reporters from the campus. Although crosses were burned in front of the administration building and at Matthews