We've Got to Try, page 14
This city has always made its own luck. So physically and politically isolated from the rest of the country, El Paso has always had to look within itself and to its sister city of Juárez to find its strength and opportunity.
That Truman quote that I thought of at the train depot in Cooke County applies—we’re not built on fear, but instead on an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
In 1949, five years after the Smith decision, Texas organized the first ever statewide boys’ high school baseball championship. Bowie High was an unlikely challenger for the title. It was named a generation earlier by the Klan-controlled school board and located in South El Paso’s impoverished Segundo Barrio. Nearly all of the student body was Mexican American and many were first-generation immigrants. Their parents worked the toughest, lowest-paying jobs in the community and their neighborhoods and schools lacked the resources that other parts of the city could take for granted.
Without money for uniforms, the team depended on the resourcefulness of the Bowie moms, who sewed jerseys and crafted gloves out of scrap material. It also helped that their coach, Nemo Herrera, believed in them.
Against the odds and under Herrera’s leadership, Bowie bested the dominant El Paso schools like El Paso High and Ysleta and moved on to play for district and bi-district titles, winning those games as well.
They benefited from Herrera’s constant training regimen, his deep personal investment in their success, and the fact that being from an immigrant-rich community was not a weakness, but a strength.
The semifinal game against Waco went into extra innings. With the score tied and the bases loaded, the Bowie team made the most of their bilingual border roots. Coach Herrera yelled to his catcher in Spanish that it looked like the Waco runner at third base was going to steal home. The Bowie catcher called for a pitch out, tagged the third-base runner, and then threw out the second-base runner, who was trying to steal third, setting up Bowie to win the game.
They headed to Austin to face the state’s top-seeded high school. On the bus ride there, the Bowie team was met with signs that read NO DOGS OR MEXICANS ALLOWED. They ate their meals in restaurant kitchens, the owners and staff unwilling to seat them at tables with other guests.
In Lubbock, one of the team members was confounded by drinking fountain signs that read COLORED and WHITE.
“Being brown, I didn’t know which was for me,” he told Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff.
On the night before the championship game, the Bowie team slept on cots underneath the stands at Memorial Stadium in Austin.
But the indignity they endured, the insults they bore along the way, never discouraged them or tempted them to despair.
They were focused on overcoming, on winning, on achieving their full potential and promise.
“It’s not who you are or where you’re from,” their legendary coach, Nemo Herrera, would remind them. “It’s who you become.”
The next day, the Bowie Bears took the field against Austin, the hometown team that everyone expected would trounce these boys from El Paso.
And they played the game of their lives, defeating Austin and winning the state championship.
As Wolff recounts in his telling of the ’49 Bears’ triumph, these boys from Segundo Barrio had something else:
The night before the team had left for Austin, students in a Bowie home economics class stayed up late preparing hard-boiled eggs for the players to eat on the trip. The Bears had won, one of those coeds would say at a Bowie reunion years later, “porque jugaron con huevos.”
They knew they weren’t supposed to win, weren’t supposed to compete with the richer, whiter, bigger schools. But they had to try.
They did, and they won.
* * *
It’s that same spirit that helped Thelma White rise to the top of her class at the all-Black Douglass High School in El Paso—and led her to apply to Texas Western College in 1954.
Texas Western had never admitted a Black student—in part because the state college system held that Brown v. Board of Education did not apply to higher education. But Thelma White applied for admission anyway.
The school’s registrar, Joseph Whitaker, denied her application after intense pressure from University of Texas System officials.
“One of the regents came to me and said, ‘Whitaker, there’s got to be a way you can keep these damn [expletive] out.’”
With the help of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, chief of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, White filed suit the next year, seeking to end the discriminatory admissions criteria at Texas Western. In doing so, she drew on the precedents of Brown v. Board of Education and victories won by the NAACP and Lawrence Nixon.
The federal judge hearing the case, El Pasoan R. E. Thomason, issued a ruling that summer that not only enjoined Texas Western from denying White admission but had the effect of ending segregation throughout public higher education in Texas. The benefits to Texas Western and El Paso came quickly.
* * *
In the fall of 1955, twelve Black students enrolled at Texas Western, the first successful integration of a Texas undergraduate college (among them was Mildred Parish Tutt, mother of U.S. congresswoman Barbara Lee).
The next year, Charles Brown joined the school’s basketball team, the Miners, becoming the first African American to integrate college athletics in Texas.
Within a decade, the school hired Marjorie Lawson, who became the first Black faculty member in the University of Texas System.
The pace of progress and the accompanying pride in the achievements of previously marginalized communities extended beyond voting rights, athletics, and academia.
In 1957, Raymond Telles ran for mayor of El Paso, an audacious undertaking, the same underdog spirit that animated Bowie’s attempt to win the state baseball championship and Thelma White’s effort to enroll at Texas Western.
Since its founding in 1873, El Paso had never elected a Mexican American mayor. Nor had any other major American city. But Telles, a World War II and Korean War veteran, had patiently and persistently developed a political organization that would allow him to overcome the de facto segregation of El Paso politics that had prevented meaningful Mexican American representation in positions of public trust.
Along with his brother Richard, Telles invested his time and resources in registering Mexican American El Pasoans to vote and organized fundraisers to pay the poll taxes of lower-income voters.
His disciplined campaign, his spotless record of public service, and his innovative effort to expand the electorate paid off, and on Election Night, Telles won by a narrow margin.
R. E. Thomason, the same judge who ruled in Thelma White’s case, administered the oath of office to Telles in front of the largest assembled crowd at city hall in El Paso history.
Telles served a successful first term, won reelection, and was then asked by President John F. Kennedy to serve as ambassador to Costa Rica, becoming the first Mexican American ambassador to any country from the United States.
But it was after Telles left for Central America that El Paso took another big step forward in the fight for civil rights thanks to Bert Williams, a young council member who had briefly served with Telles.
Williams had grown up in Segundo Barrio, one of the few Anglo kids in this overwhelmingly Mexican American neighborhood. Friends, mistaking his first name for “Bird,” called him “Pájaro.” Like Telles, he served in World War II, participating in the invasion of Okinawa. After the war, he played basketball at Texas Western College, and then after law school, he began playing competitive fast-pitch softball, winning two world championships. In fact, he later told reporters that part of the reason he ran for a seat on the El Paso City Council in the first place was to improve the quality of the city’s ball fields.
It was on one of those softball fields that Williams developed a friendship with Nolan Richardson.
Like Williams, Richardson was one of the few kids without Mexican heritage who grew up in Segundo Barrio, but unlike Williams, Richardson was Black, significantly constraining the options open to him in the still-segregated South.
Even so, the racial discrimination in El Paso—most evident in his exclusion from public pools, restaurants, and movie theaters, as well as from academic and career opportunities—did not keep Nolan from extraordinary achievement. And neither did challenges in his family life. Despite the fact that his mother died when he was three, and that his father was an inconsistent presence in his life, Richardson was able to devote himself to school and athletics, rising to become a star basketball player at Bowie and then at Texas Western, playing for coach Don Haskins. Richardson would later become one of the best college basketball coaches in the country, winning the men’s NCAA championship with Arkansas in 1994. He wasn’t bad at softball, either.
So council member Williams recruited Richardson to play for one of his national championship softball teams. After a game one night in June 1962, Williams offered Richardson a ride home and, on the way, suggested stopping at the Oasis restaurant for a beer and a bite to eat. Richardson protested, warning Williams that as a Black man, he would not be served. But Williams insisted.
“We went inside,” Williams told the El Paso Times years later, “and the waitress wouldn’t even look at him.… She said, ‘I can’t serve him.’ I told her, ‘I’ll see what I can do about that.’”
After the trip to the Oasis, Williams went to his city council office and began drafting a desegregation ordinance for the city of El Paso. When presented at the June 14 city council meeting, the ordinance passed unanimously only to be vetoed days later by Mayor Ralph Seitsinger, who insisted that integration must be voluntary and privately warned of the potential for rioting should the proposal become law.
This set up a showdown for the following council meeting, as Williams needed to keep a supermajority of his colleagues together to override the veto. Yet despite the controversy and the mayor’s appeal to the safety and comfort of the status quo, Williams stayed the course.
Whether people were against it or for it, the integration vote was all anyone could talk about, and given the public interest in the measure, the council meeting was moved from city hall to the three-thousand-seat Liberty Hall. Even then, there weren’t enough seats, and El Pasoans lined up on the sidewalks and streets nearby to hear the decision.
Williams and Seitsinger each made their case to their colleagues.The members of the city council took in the arguments, with deliberations lasting more than two hours before one of the council members made the motion to override the mayor’s veto.
And then, each member cast their vote. One after another, they affirmed their support for integration and against the mayor’s veto. El Paso and the cause of integration and justice won unanimously. The friendship between Bert Williams and Nolan Richardson, a white man and a Black man from the same Mexican immigrant neighborhood of Segundo Barrio, had produced a groundbreaking transformation in American civil rights.
El Paso would now officially become the first city in the former Confederacy to desegregate places of public accommodation, two years before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Supporters in the packed Liberty Hall erupted in applause and one of them, an unnamed Black woman, led the crowd in a rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Lawrence Nixon’s wife, Drusilla, was among those who sang along.
But she was not only a witness to this moment; like her husband, she had helped make it happen. She was an organizer on the Citizens’ Committee on Human Relations that had formed to push the El Paso City Council to pass the desegregation ordinance.
* * *
El Paso’s progress in civil rights made Don Haskins’s job as the new coach of the Texas Western men’s basketball team a lot easier.
Born in Enid, Oklahoma, Haskins had played college basketball at Oklahoma A&M, helping to lead the team to the NCAA semifinals in 1949 and 1951. His coaching career started in small Texas towns, like Benjamin, Hedley, and Dumas. In 1961, he agreed to take a pay cut in order to coach college ball in El Paso at Texas Western.
Thanks to Thelma White’s effort to integrate the school, Texas Western had played a few Black players before Haskins’s arrival, including Nolan Richardson. But it wasn’t until the passage of the El Paso integration ordinance that the school began to successfully recruit from across America. Haskins could now tell Black prospects that, unlike in other cities in the South, they would be able to sit in any seat at the movies, drink out of any water fountain at the park, and be served at any restaurant in town, including the Oasis Café.
Velvet James Barnes, an incredibly dexterous player better known as “Bad News,” was Haskins’s first big recruit. At six feet, eight inches, Barnes led the Texas Western Miners to their first NCAA tournament in 1963. The next year, he would be the first overall pick in the NBA draft, signing with the New York Knicks.
Other Black student athletes followed, and the quality of the Miners’ program continued to improve. They finished the 1965–66 season with a 23–1 record and qualified for the NCAA tournament. There, they had the toughest games they’d played all year, including against Oklahoma City, the only team that had defeated them in the regular season. But they won them all, including an overtime game and a double-overtime game, to reach the championship final against the number one–ranked University of Kentucky.
Kentucky was a legendary basketball program thanks to coach Adolph Rupp, who had already won four national titles with the Wildcats and clearly expected to vanquish this no-name team from West Texas.
But Rupp had one big weakness as a coach: Though he had created a dominant national program, he’d failed to recruit a single Black player and wouldn’t suit one up until 1971. He was missing the ability to see and attract talent regardless of race.
The Miners, meanwhile, had five Black players in their starting lineup.
With his Wildcats down three points at halftime, Rupp is alleged by former Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford to have told his team: “You’ve got to beat those coons.”
Though Kentucky would close within a point early in the second half, they would never take the lead and the Miners won the national championship game, 72 to 65.
Forty years later, Haskins would tell a reporter: “I really didn’t think about starting five Black guys. I just wanted to put my five best guys on the court. I just wanted to win the game.”
Texas Western’s defeat of Kentucky marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation in college athletics. And it wouldn’t have happened without the chain of events in El Paso over the prior forty years and the courageous leaders who’d preceded Haskins—the folks who fought for voting rights and secured a future where the government would be responsive to their needs.
When we fight—when, no matter what they tell us we can or can’t do, we try anyhow—we make the impossible possible. That’s Lawrence Nixon, Nemo Herrera, and the Bowie Bears. That’s Thelma White, Raymond Telles, Bert Williams, and Nolan Richardson. That’s the ’66 Miners. That’s El Paso. And that’s America.
But there’s another side to our story, too—the price we pay when we don’t fight, when we accept the fate that’s been written for us by others.
* * *
The day before the 1966 NCAA tournament started, Lawrence Nixon died from injuries he sustained in a car crash. Surrounded by his family, this elder statesman of Texas civil and voting rights passed away in his adopted hometown of El Paso.
It was the death of a giant and it coincided with the end of an era.
Though there would be moments of extraordinary leadership with national implications in El Paso following Nixon’s death—the Chicano movement and the breakthrough strike at the Farah factory in the 1970s are big examples—El Paso soon began to lose its pride of place as a national leader in civil and voting rights.
Comfortable in the success that had accrued from its previous years as the epicenter of trade and industry in the Southwest, satisfied by the moral victories from prior decades, and economically stagnant as a result, El Paso slowed its stride, adapted to the status quo, and chose comity and comfort over confrontation.
You could actually measure the decline. Our per capita income against the national average fell; our levels of educational attainment paled in comparison to the rest of the country; our voter turnout numbers dropped to among the lowest in the state.
But you could also feel it.
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in El Paso. In classrooms at Mesita Elementary and El Paso High School, I never heard of, nor was I taught about, the ’49 Bears or Carmelita Torres and the bath riots of 1917. Marcelino Serna, the immigrant who came back a hero from World War I, was unknown to me. And so was Lawrence Nixon.
What I did know was that El Paso wasn’t fulfilling its purpose or its potential. You could tell that there was greatness in our past—from the epic art deco buildings downtown to the reverence with which people treated Don Haskins, who was still coaching when I went to Miner games as a kid, to the pride with which El Pasoans of a much older generation carried themselves. But that greatness was not evident in the El Paso that raised my generation. I felt something as a young man in El Paso that I couldn’t articulate then, but I can see clearly now: we had lost our way.
We became a city that accepted a fate decided by others, a city that didn’t know its own history—one that became subject to the stories that other people in other cities would tell about us.
This beautiful binational community, whose border neighborhoods had served as the Ellis Island for the immigrants of the Americas—whose residents had led democratic revolutions in Mexico, whose leaders had changed the course of civil rights in the United States—wasn’t standing up for itself, wasn’t telling its own story, wasn’t learning its own history.
We had squandered the inheritance left by those who came before us. Not only did that dishonor their sacrifices and service, but it left us vulnerable to those who would take advantage of and use this community for dark purposes. Our history, our true story was the protection against the dangers generated by ignorance and lies. When we stopped telling our own story—because we’d lost the thread and couldn’t pass it on to the next generation—other people told it for us. In the new telling, El Paso became a “dangerous” outpost, a source of threats instead of opportunities.
