Texans for Integration

The mostly white student body and the faculty of the University of Texas turned against their regents last week in a sharp demand for full integration of the South's biggest campus. In an atmosphere charged with resentment, rebellion and disgust, Chancellor Harry Ransom and President Joseph Smiley found themselves paralyzed by the need to accommodate the segregationist regents and unable to drop racial bars at a campus that plainly wanted them dropped.

With classroom integration tenuously established (there are about 200 Negroes among the 20,396 students), an absurd glossary of race-based regulations still rules in Austin. Negroes may not spend free hours in the sitting rooms of white dormitories, may take only minor roles in drama-department productions, may not play varsity sports. Paradoxically, they may visit white students in dormitory bedrooms if the door is kept closed, but may not visit in the dining rooms or social areas. Said a dormitory housekeeper to a Negro girl visiting the television room of a white dorm: "This is a public area. Therefore it's segregated."

Negroes on the Teams. Last spring, campus opinion began openly to buck the regents on two important scores: integration of dormitories and varsity teams. The student assembly voted 22 to 2 to integrate Texas' teams, 23 to 0 to integrate a men's dorm. But the nine regents, all of them appointed by segregationist Governor Price Daniel and former Governor Allan Shivers, voted to ignore the students' voice. "Narrow-minded, backward and hypocritical," Student President Maurice Olian called the regents' decision.

With the opening of school, tension began to mount. The regents were presented with a resolution, signed by 6,000 students, demanding integration of athletics. Fifty-five Negroes held sit-ins at segregated dormitories, and about 30 of them were put on disciplinary probation. That was too much for the faculty. Denouncing the administration's inquisition and punishment of the Negroes, Law Professor Ernest Goldstein said: "What happened was they collected all the known Negroes and then they asked them, 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Negro race?' "

While student leaders demonstrated and voted 5,132 to 3,293 in favor of athletics integration, Professor Goldstein circulated a resolution of his own. It denounced the dorm regulations as designed to "degrade the dignity of the individual, subvert the academic community and interfere with the educational process." The resolution was adopted by the faculty assembly, 308-34, then put in the mail for a vote of the full faculty. In the face of both student and faculty votes, the Regents insisted that the integrationist force on the campus was a mere "vocal minority."

A Test in Court. The students raised money throughout the week to take the university to court in a test of its integration policies. The faculty cheered them on and contributed to the legal-aid fund. When students gathered outside the faculty assembly to applaud their teachers, Goldstein (by this time the clear leader of a popular revolt) appeared in an open window, coattails napping, to encourage the legal fight. "Raise as much money as you can," he said, assuring them that they would win in court. "Of course, I can't actually suggest this. I'm employed by the defendant."

Much as Chancellor Ransom and President Smiley seemed apostles of segregation, those closest to the struggle said both men were unhappy voices of the regents' contradictory and ill-spoken views. Both seemed angry that the regents had forced the administration on the course it had struck, and both hinted that their sympathies lay with the faculty. Ransom, whose administrative philosophy is more to encourage dissent than to resolve it, said: "We should proceed with both a respect for the public trusteeship of the regents on the one hand and the completely honest and sincere expression of opinion of the members of the university community on the other." But that the regents were as responsible in their public trusteeship seemed dubious; the most recent poll of public opinion in Texas showed that voters favored school integration by 2 to 1.

The students have been more cheered by the faculty than saddened by the regents. Encouraged in their forceful, legal, quiet rebellion, they gather each morning near the administration building, where, beneath the university tower, they recite over and over in unison the inscription written there as the university's motto: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

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