In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools based on their race was unconstitutional. The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling led to many schools integrating across the country. However, did you know it took the Houston Independent School District until 1984 to fully integrate after the Supreme Court ruling and it remained as one of the largest segregated school districts in the United States for years? Here’s more on the complicated history.
The Push For Integration in HISD
After the Supreme Court ruling in 1954, some African American students applied to attend white schools in Houston and Harris County, but were denied access. At the college level, it took University of Houston until 1961 to admit its first Black graduate student. Rice University also did not begin integrating its campus until the 1960s. In HISD, the process was slower. In 1956, two Houston-area children, Delores Ross and Beneva Williams, tried to enroll in person at public white schools, but were denied. Later that year, their families filed a class action lawsuit against the school district. Despite the lawsuit, it took until 1960 for a federal judge to order the school district to implement a plan for desegregation.
Slow Steps Towards Integration
After the order from the federal judge, the school district began to integrate one grade level per year starting with first grade in September 1960. As the years passed, younger grades began to integrate, but some Houstonians pushed for full desegregation. In May 1965, Reverend William Lawson, a civil rights icon in Houston, called for Houstonians to protest HISD’s “stair-step integration.” Thousands of African American students boycotted schools and about 2,000 marched to HISD headquarters.
However, as time passed, the school district started to make progress. In 1975, the district opened its first magnet schools, which offered specialized programs to any student across the district and helped schools to continue to desegregate. By 1981, a judge reviewed the original case brought in 1956 by Ross and Williams, and found HISD was a unitary school system. The school district finally settled the decades-long case out-of-court in 1984 with the NAACP and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In a full-circle moment, Ross attended a ceremony to sign the settlement.
