1960s desegregation in the Deep South was a tense situation. In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace made his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,” trying to prevent black students registering for classes at the University of Alabama, and it became a highly publicized and iconic incident of the Civil Rights era and southern desegregations.
But two years prior to the dramatic standoff between Wallace and the black students that were eventually enrolled, Texas was quietly desegregating its own institutions.
The first black student to enroll for classes at Texas Tech University was a woman named Lucille Graves, who was one of a handful of African-American students who enrolled throughout the latter half of 1961. She came to Tech to pursue her master’s degree, but Graves was consistently denied entrance based on the university’s establishing charter, which designated Tech as a whites-only school. But Graves and the others' eventual enrollment in late 1961 was the catalyst for the desegregation of the rest of the city of Lubbock, said Alwyn Barr, a retired history professor who studied Texas’ African-American history.
“Certainly by the mid-60s, there had been considerable desegregation in Lubbock. And it was without any major violence or crises - the sort of thing that did happen in some other places, especially in the Deep South,” Barr said.
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Graves wasn’t without help, though. A series of national and local events set the stage for what Barr called the “process” of desegregation and Graves’ subsequent enrollment. The loss of a conservative segregationist’s seat on the Texas Tech Board of Regents, the national advance of desegregation and the civil rights movement as well as a series of private meetings between Regents and the Lubbock NAACP aided in Texas Tech’s eventual desegregation.
“This was true of other universities across the state, even if they had begun to enroll African-American students,” Barr said. “The process was one step at a time. And so Tech, like some of the other schools, didn’t automatically integrate its dorms or its eating areas or recreation areas instantly, at the same time. Students were admitted, so there were still stages to go through.
Texas universities were quicker to desegregate than universities in the Deep South, Barr said – the University of Texas at Austin welcomed its first black student in 1950 and Texas A&M University quietly admitted three African-American students in the summer of 1963. But it still took until seven years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 invalidation of the “separate but equal” doctrine for Tech to implement a change, according to Karlos Hill, an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech.
“Texas Tech, in terms of the history of race – the history of race relations – was just like every major southern university: segregated,” Hill said. “And after the Supreme Court invalidated it, it was like other southern colleges and universities, was very slow to desegregate.”
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The state of Texas presented a geopolitically unique setting for the civil rights movement, said Barr, and universities in the state during the 1960s reflected the difference between Texas and states in the Deep South.
“Texas is a little different, in that it’s southern in its eastern half and western in its western half,” said Barr, who taught at Texas Tech for 40 years. “It’s always been kind of a frontier of the south, and while it followed, it had segregation laws that did in fact segregate universities and a lot of other things. It wasn’t the center of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
“Tech lagged behind the University of Texas and some other universities within the state, but probably is somewhat ahead of schools in the Deep South.”
Since Lucille Graves’ enrollment in 1961, Barr said the African-American population at Tech has grown significantly – “by the early 70s, there were probably about 200 African-American students, which of course, is progress when you only start out with about eight” – but Hill said progress is still to be made.
“If you start with the first African-American to graduate from Tech and you look at now – four to six percent [of the student population] – there has obviously been some progress,” Hill said. “But at a large state institution, state school, four-year public college like Texas Tech, you would expect at least closer to 10 percent.”
Throughout the next decade and the rest of the civil rights movement, more milestones were passed: Ophelia Powell-Malone was the first black graduate of Texas Tech. Danny Hardaway was the first black football player recruited by Texas Tech. George Scott was the first black faculty member at Texas Tech. African-American political activists and commentators regularly lecture at Tech. But Lucille Graves, who after repeated refusals of her enrollment, was finally accepted, marked a change at Texas Tech that continues today.
