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The start of segregation
After the Civil War, segregation developed as a method of group control. For both minority groups, segregation existed in schools, churches, residential districts, and most public places such as restaurants, theaters, and barber shops. -
Mexican Americans faces segregation too
Mexican Americans won their own protracted struggle in a series of favorable verdicts from Texas courts that weakened racial separation. Among these were Delgado v. Bastrop ISD (1948), which prohibited school boards from designating specific buildings in a school campus for Mexican children. In Hernández v. State of Texas (1954), the United States Supreme Court declared Mexican Americans to be a class to whom Jim Crow laws could not be applied. -
Sweatt v. Painter
Sweatt v. Painter challenged segregation in public schools and laid the groundwork for integration in schools -
The Supreme Court rejects Texas' plan
The Supreme Court rejects Texas' plan to create a new law school for black students rather than admit an African American to the state's whites-only law school. -
Brown v. Board of Education
The U.S. Supreme Court banned racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas. San Antonio was one of the first districts to comply. -
Mansfield Independent School District
In 1955, the Mansfield Independent School District (ISD), which numbered fewer than 700 whites and 60 blacks, segregated its black students into a four-room elementary school in the city. High school students were required to ride a bus into nearby Fort Worth and then walk twenty blocks to the all-black I.M. Terrell High School. -
Mansfield NAACP
The Mansfield National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a lawsuit on behalf of three black high school students (T.M. Moody, John F. Lawson, and Mark Moody), insisting that they should attend the high school in their community. The Mansfield NAACP hired Fort Worth attorney L. Clifford Davis to represent their interest to the school board. -
Texans keep trying to avoid segregation
Many white Texans did not accede easily to federal mandates or to some of their implications. In 1956, for example, the voters approved a referendum that opposed compulsory attendance in integrated schools and another that prohibited intermarriage. -
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In August of 1956
On August 30 and 31, 1956, an angry mob of nearly 400 whites surrounded Mansfield High School to prevent the enrollment of three African American students. Angry white residents hanged the three black students in effigy and outside reporters and observers were attacked. At one point the town’s sheriff, Harlan Wright, who attempted to confront the mob, was threatened. Downtown stores closed as a show of support and vigilantes met all cars entering town, barring integration sympathizers. -
Governor Price Daniel, Sr. ignored laws
The 1957 legislature passed laws encouraging school districts to resist federally ordered integration, though Governor Price Daniel, Sr., ignored such laws in the late 1950s. -
Mansfield Desegrigates
In 1965, faced with loss of federal funds, the Mansfield school district finally desegregated, its decade-long defiance of a federal school integration order was one of the longest in the nation during that period. -
Texas Education Agency took responsibility for desegregating schools
A district court in East Texas ordered the Texas Education Agency to take responsibility for desegregating schools. Assigning students to schools based on race, and segregated bus routes were illegal. Cisneros v. Corpus Christi ISD also extended the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to Mexican Americans. -
Hopwood v. Texas
A federal appeals court prohibits the use of race in college and university admissions, ending affirmative action in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. (Hopwood v. Texas) -
There is still some Segregation