By Bethany Scott The Houstonian yearbook highlighted the need for financial aid as a major reason for the University’s bid to become a state school. Houstonian yearbook, 1961. Despite its current status as one of the country’s most diverse universities, the University of Houston, like numerous institutions of higher education, was founded in an era […]
Tag Archives | racism
In the Name of Decency and Progress: The Response of Houston’s Civic Leaders to the Lynching of Robert Powell in 1928
By Dwight Watson Click here to read a pdf of the full article.
Carter Wesley and the Making of Houston’s Civic Culture
By Amilcar Shabazz Click here to read a pdf of the full article.
8-F and Many More: Business and Civic Leadership in Houston
By Joe Pratt To click here to read the pdf of the full article.
The Chicano Movement in Houston and Texas: A Personal Memory
The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was essentially a grassroots community insurrection and rebellion against a stifling racism and oppression that strangled the Latino and Black communities of Houston and Texas in that time, and a determination to fight and defeat it. We sought to bring the Mexican American out of second-class citizenship […]
The Dawn at My Back: A Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing
The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing explores what it means to grow up in a racist society. It describes the injustices endured daily and vividly paints a picture of the pain they carry with them. Blue’s story demonstrates the power of racism to rip families apart, even as one consciously […]
The KKK in Houston and Harris County, 1920-1925
On the evening of November 27, 1920, some two hundred mysterious figures threaded their way behind a torch bearer through the downtown streets of Houston. A hush fell over thousands of onlookers as the hooded figures silently “passed like specters from another world.” The second Ku Klux Klan had arrived.
Letter from the Editor: Confronting Jim Crow
As a white boy with working class parents, racism was in the air I breathed in my youth. Jim Crow touched every part of my life. Racial attitudes handed down by poor whites in the South for generations remained pervasive and unrelenting in my world in the 1950s and early 1960s. The underlying reality was […]
In Search of Freedom: Black Migration to Houston, 1914-1945
To read the full text of this article by Bernadette Pruitt that appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Houston History, download the pdf version.