by Asher Price
In the decades after the war, whites held and abused absolute power. Lynchings, each a cruel, sadistic spectacle, persisted in Tyler through at least 1912. After World War I, as returning black veterans began challenging the status quo, Tyler became home to a robust chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Sundays found the Reverend Albert Sidney Poindexter, the publisher of the Tyler American, a Klan newspaper, preaching sermons on racial purity from the pulpit at Grace Baptist Church. Tall, gaunt, and wearing a droopy white moustache and an austere dark jacket over a freshly pressed shirt, he liked to stand on a Bible, the better to loom over his audience, as he held forth on the dangers of equality. On a chalkboard, he would write the salient points of his sermon. Here is one such list, captured in a 1922 photograph:
1. Opposition to Seducers.
2. White Supremacy.
3. Separation of Church and State.
4. One Flag. One Bible. One School.
5. Protection of Virtuous Women.
6. Good Treatment to Good Negroes.
7. Regulation of jitney passenger traffic.
8. Purity of the Races.
9. Here to Stay.
10. Stop the whiskey traffic.
11. Stop Loafing.
That year, 1922, saw the election of a Texas attorney named Earle Mayfield to the US Senate. Known as the Klan senator, he benefited during the campaign from a Ku Klux Klan conspiracy to intimidate supporters of his opponent. After leaving the Senate, Mayfield settled in Tyler. He died there in 1964, when Earl Campbell was nine years old, and was known as a segregationist to the end. For many, many years, the maid for the Mayfields was A. C. Moon, the half sister of Zephyr Fears, the black woman who looked after Sam Kidd, whose home was across the street. (“I was always told to say, ‘Good morning, Senator Mayfield’ or ‘Good night, Senator Mayfield’ whenever I should see him,” Kidd said.) When A. C. Moon died, Sam Kidd and his sister went to her church funeral service, the only whites there. Naturally, the congregants thought that the Mayfield clan had come to pay its respects. “Everyone there asked if I was a Mayfield”—and he remembered having to shake his head yet again; no Mayfield had bothered to attend.
Driving to Tyler today from the metropolises in the central part of the state—from Austin, for example, a trip that Earl Campbell has made hundreds of times—is like getting lost in Texas’s attic. First north to that brimstone, Baptist belt buckle of a burg, Waco, then off east along smaller state highways for a couple of hours, each town more forgotten than the last, each with its grand dilapidated houses, its once-charming Main Street storefronts now given over to antiques stores, themselves full of garage-sale mishmashes, the reliquaries of modest people’s estates: Disney shot glasses and cheap aluminum lemon juicers. Hubbard, Corsicana, Malakoff. Here and there, you find old brick warehouses gamely reinvented as artist studios or spruced-up housing, even as each town faces the long, decades-old challenge of losing its most promising sons and daughters to the big cities of Dallas, Houston, and Austin. It’s late afternoon on a soggy winter day, and the empty land outside the rain-blurred windows shifts from blackland prairie to post oak savannah. Athens and Brownsboro. Finally, you reach the East Texas Piney Woods and, in the dusk, the trees now just silhouettes, Tyler.
The Tyler into which Earl Campbell was born was—and, in some quarters, remains—nostalgic for the preintegration period. The home of Mayfield, the Klan sympathizer, is now a bed-and-breakfast with the name Memory Lane Inn. (For $159 a night, especially wistful visitors can stay in Mayfield’s own bedroom, known as the “Senator’s Chambers.”) And when, in 1980, the Smith County Republican Women sought the perfect spot for a pit stop during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign (Reagan said he wanted to plant some Tyler roses at the White House—“A little bit of Texas never hurts,” he said), they arranged for his wife, Nancy, to take tea at the old Mayfield house.
Tyler and Smith County were safe territory for Ronald Reagan: the last Democratic president to win the county was Harry Truman. Ralph Yarborough, the famed Texas Democratic senator of the period, who grew up a dozen miles from Tyler, once declared that when you crossed over the Neches River, the sinuous north-south divider that separated East Texas from, essentially, the old American West, “you were in a different world.” The only things redder than Tyler’s renowned roses, it was said, were its residents’ necks.
The year of Earl Campbell’s birth, the Tyler Rose Festival queen, Maymerle Shirley, a young woman chosen to serve as the community’s ambassador, headed to Dallas for a ceremony in her honor at Robert E. Lee Park. (In Texas, it often feels that just about everything—schools, streets, counties—not named for a Texas Revolution hero is named after a Confederate soldier or officer.) More than five thousand yellow Tyler roses were plastered to the vaulted stone columns of Arlington Hall (the park’s replica of the Lee home in Virginia), strewn on the steps, and fashioned into rosebushes. Shirley, a brunette with a toothy smile, wearing a yellow formal dress, white gloves, and a shimmering tiara, marched down the steps amid SMU students wearing Confederate gray. The band played “Dixie”; waving above the whole scene was the Confederate battle flag. You can see Shirley, and all the other rose queens, each frozen in time, at the Tyler Rose Museum. Pictures of them, from the festival’s start, in 1933, through today, line the walls. In each photo, a young woman, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, is situated on the third or fourth step of a grand curved staircase in the house of a prominent banking or oil family, usually a Greek Revival with two-story pillars out front; her back is to the camera, her rhinestone-studded dress trailing behind her, her shoulders thrown back, her head turned over her left shoulder, toward the viewer, in a look more doe eyed than come hither.
None of them is black.
The rose queen pomp is about being “grander than everyday life,” said the oil-and-gas man Ralph Spence. As the 1940 rose queen, his wife wore a white fur and silver-beaded dress with a train so heavy that she didn’t have to worry about falling forward while taking the stairs; her motto was “pretty is as pretty does.” Their daughter, Louise, presided as the 1968 rose queen: “It’s like fairy dust is sprinkled on you,” she once said. “You realize: ‘They really think I’m a queen.’” In 1978, Ralph Spence chaired Earl Campbell Day, when Tylerites turned out to honor the newly crowned Heisman Trophy winner, known as the Tyler Rose.
And if Earl Campbell’s family for some reason had wanted to visit Dallas that year of his birth, to cheer on Miss Shirley? They would have had to sit at one end of a Greyhound bus, behind a curtain four rows from the back. “The back of that bus where the hot engine was—man, that motor ran hot through summer,” said Grady Yarbrough, whose parents, like Campbell’s, were black farmers in the Tyler area, and who still remembers making such a trip as a twelve-year-old. “Now that was humiliating.” Yarbrough still carries wide, thrown-back shoulders and wears some of the same suits that he wore as a schoolteacher and principal for fifty years. When he was growing up, he said, there were “certain parameters that the white community had established”; for example, “You couldn’t go in the front door of any establishment—you went in through a side entrance or a back entrance. African Americans were not served in white restaurants or in white motels. Most African Americans didn’t complain. They recognized it wasn’t a healthy environment, they did the best they could do, they tried to make a living, they tried to survive, they tried to provide opportunities for their children and grandchildren.”
African Americans’ workaday life was ignored by the media. “They didn’t want the history of integration recorded,” R. C. Hickman, a photographer for the black newspaper the Dallas Express, said. “The Dallas Morning News wouldn’t carry a picture of us unless a black man raped a white woman or maybe if a preacher got run over. We did everything the white folks did. We died, got born, and we got married. We went to school and got degrees, but no one was recording it. You see we were viewed as second-class citizens and we had to prove that we were not.”
When
members of Earl Campbell’s family qualified for college, they were turned away from state-supported institutions. As Laura McGregor, for example, his great-aunt, prepared to graduate from all-black Emmett Scott High School in 1942, she learned that she couldn’t apply to Tyler Junior College—or to East Texas State Teachers College or to Kilgore College, the only state-funded institutions of higher education between Dallas and Shreveport. She was black and the schools refused to admit African Americans. “And my parents still had to pay taxes to support the junior college!”—and state taxes to fund the teachers college—she said with a rueful laugh. “Can you believe it?”
In 1955, the year of Earl Campbell’s birth, the all-white Tyler school board showed what it thought of the Warren Court’s holding in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case: the board voted to affirm that its integration policy would be the “same as last year”—meaning that total segregation would continue in Tyler schools.
As a boy, if Earl Campbell wanted to visit Tyler State Park, he entered not through the main entrance, the one that led to the nicely manicured white part of the park—with its concession stand, bathhouse, diving platform and beach overseen by lifeguards, boathouse, dance floor, playground, and miniature golf course—but via a roughly graded county road to the back entrance, heavily forested and relatively wild, at the far end of the lake, where children played in the water without lifeguards. The legislature had agreed to admit African Americans to the park only after the NAACP filed a lawsuit in the late 1940s. Texas at the time had 57,662 acres divvied up among forty-three state parks: not a single acre was allocated for the use of Texas’s African Americans, even though out-of-state whites, who paid no state taxes, could enjoy them.
In the fall of 1956, a year and a half after Earl Campbell’s birth, the Texas state attorney general, angered by NAACP lawsuits aiming to integrate parks and schools and seeking a sympathetic venue for his suit to shut down the organization, turned to a Smith County district court in Tyler. Baby-faced, with a high forehead and a penchant for double-breasted suits, John Ben Shepperd grew up less than thirty miles from the Campbell home and had filed a prosegregation amicus brief in the Brown case; now he sought to cut the crusading organization off at the knees. In what he hoped would be a template for suits in other states, he accused the NAACP of having illegally “fomented, encouraged, aided and abetted litigation throughout the State of Texas.” “For over one hundred years the white and colored races in said State have lived together peacefully and in harmony without strife or litigation”—a sentence that suggests slavery was of a piece with interracial harmony and ignores the efforts of state officials during the previous decades to systematically deny African Americans their basic constitutional rights, including where they could live, how much they could earn, where they could learn, and even where they could use the bathroom in public facilities—“and that, were if not for the activities of the Defendants, they would now and in the future continue to do so.” He accused the NAACP, which was represented by Thurgood Marshall, of operating illegally as a for-profit business and thus failing to pay proper taxes; of illegal political activity; and of barratry—litigation for the purpose of harassment. The suit asked that the NAACP be “ousted from doing business in the State of Texas” and that the court dissolve all the Texas NAACP chapters and prevent the organization from soliciting money for the purpose of instigating and bringing lawsuits.
The case was tried in a courthouse eight miles from the Campbell family home. The judge, an old family friend of Shepperd’s, went with the state down the line, finding that the NAACP had been “seeking to register students in various schools of this State by a method contrary to the laws of this State, and that such efforts tend to incite racial prejudice, picketing, riots and other unlawful acts and acts which are contrary to public peace and quietude, and that said Defendants, unless restrained, will continue to solicit and incite litigation.” Eventually, after Shepperd’s term finished that January and he was succeeded by a new attorney general, one more willing to compromise with the NAACP, the organization was allowed to continue its operations in Texas, albeit in weakened form.
Five years after Shepperd’s suit and a half dozen after Shirley’s Confederacy-themed fête, when a young Earl Campbell, just another little kid, set foot in his all-black, segregated elementary school, Tyler had more $100,000 houses per capita than any other Texas city, sprawling places often built of stone, occupied by executives at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Tyler Pipe and Foundry, General Electric, and bankers and oilmen. Key East Texas gushers had been tapped in the early 1930s, making wildcatters millionaires overnight; their mansions now lined gracious redbrick streets near downtown. It was a wholly different world from the wooden, sagging, seasick quarters in which the Campbells grew up, a gap traversed only by people like Ann Campbell, who served as a maid—a domestic, as they were called—in some of the grand homes. The Campbells were so hard up that after clearing away the picked-over holiday turkey carcass from the family whose house she tended, Ann Campbell would whisk it home to her eleven kids for further scavenging and brothing.
When Earl Campbell was coming of age, a black teen still couldn’t get a burger at the greasy spoon owned by F. B. Brown—unless he bought it by the back door and ate it outside. “We could never understand why Mr. Brown felt we were good enough to haul his hay but not good enough to be treated as equals,” Campbell said. At the grocery store, black children knew to put their money down on the counter and push it toward the white clerk—rather than hand it to her directly. “That’s just the way it was,” said Sam Biscoe, who, as a black high schooler in the 1960s, worked as a dishwasher at Jerry’s, a twenty-four-hour Tyler diner that also required African Americans to wait by the back door for their food. “What you felt was, something was wrong. It ought to be righted. We saw protests in different parts of the country, but Tyler was a small city, and we looked to Houston, Dallas for that stuff—we were not as bold.” The annual East Texas Fair in Tyler still had a color code: whites only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays; Thursdays, when African Americans were admitted, were known as “Nigger Night.”
Growing up in this atmosphere, Earl and his brothers had to do a lot of running. They had to run through the dusk to get home before dark, to avoid harassment from a few of the neighborhood whites who lived between their school bus stop and their own clapboard home in the boonies—these were poor people who couldn’t afford to live apart from African Americans. They had to make doubly sure they ran past the houses with white girls, a particularly dangerous source of trouble. They had to run from the police the time a friend of theirs went drag racing on a rural road and ended up crashing the vehicle. Willie Campbell, one of Earl’s older brothers, said all that running explains the Campbell brothers’ quick feet: “How the hell you going to catch us? We been running our whole lives. White people been running us.”
The older Campbell brothers—Herbert and Willie—“were big, strong boys,” said Biscoe, who quarterbacked for Willie at all-black Emmett Scott High School. They were great athletes—better, if we are to believe what Earl Campbell says, than he himself was—but were denied a shot at playing competitive big-time college football because they attended Emmett Scott, which had little equipment for organized sports and nearly zero exposure.
But desegregation, which had been plodding along with all deliberate speed in Tyler, got a jolt just as Earl Campbell reached his teens. Disgusted with how East Texas school boards had dodged integration orders since the landmark 1954 Brown decision, a federal judge in 1970 finally demanded a more pronounced, forced desegregation. The ruling did not sit well with white East Texans. In Longview, thirty miles east of Tyler, self-described “super-patriots” bombed a parked school bus—the vehicle of integration—in protest; while no one was injured, thirty-three vehicles were damaged or destroyed.
As happened in nearly all school districts forced to integrate in the South (and in many parts of the North), because black schools wer
e in worse shape than their white counterparts or because it was simply unfathomable that white kids would be sent to historically black campuses—or just as an official, sanctioned form of racial harassment and community disruption—it tended to be Smith County’s black schools that were closed. “It was a sad day, sad occasion when we got the announcement that the school would be closed,” said Donald Sanders, a black Tylerite who would have graduated from Emmett Scott in 1971 and who later became a Tyler city councilman. “None of the white kids were gonna be shipped to Emmett Scott,” another former student—a white student—said of that period. “Of course they shut it down.” Black coaches, teachers, and administrators, many of them long experienced, typically faced a brutal choice: accept a demotion and be folded into the newly integrated schools—black principals became assistant principals; black music directors now headed just the jazz bands; black football coaches became assistants—or quit. African American parents were naturally apprehensive about sending their kids to white schools. Hoping to assuage their fears, Dorothy Lee, chair of Tyler’s Council of Colored Parents and Teachers, wrote a rather touching, encouraging note to all parents of black kids who, like Earl, were due to start attending white schools in the fall, encouraging them to “make a good and lasting impression.”
You will find some of the world’s best young men and women in high school today, some black and some white. They are in the school you are entering this year. You have enjoyed good relations with many of these young people at the fair grounds, theaters, in stores and other places. So, they will not be entirely new to you. The student who shows himself friendly will always gain friends, so we trust that you will gain life-long friends during your high school years that will cut across class as well as racial lines.