Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  JUSTICE DELAYED

  African-Americans usually only saw such positive depictions of their race at church, where black preachers taught that God would provide in the long run, despite the injustices the congregation witnessed on a nearly daily basis. The church provided a physical and moral center for black society, but African-American church leaders did not escape corruption. White leaders recognized the leadership role preachers played and tried to control the clergy. In larger cities, such as Dallas, black preachers accepted white patronage and, in return, made sure their congregations did not challenge white rule.51

  Segregation benefited African-American newspapers, often the only source of information about the black community. The Dallas Express gained a wide readership in a city where 93 percent of the black community was literate. Not only did the paper report on daily developments but its editors encouraged African-Americans to get involved in politics and offered black history lessons.52

  Whites, meanwhile, delayed civil rights whenever possible, and Marlin’s Tom Connally filibustered the AntiLynching bill of 1937.53 But there were bright spots among Texas’s congressional delegation. That same year, U.S. representative Maury Maverick wrote, “I do not hate colored people; neither do I claim greater knowledge of them than Yankees.” That was enough for black Texans to name him one of the few white Texans contributing to race relations.54 Maverick’s support for Roosevelt’s New Deal and his progressive approach to race, though, led to a primary challenge, where a conservative white Democrat ousted him.

  While black supporters couldn’t help Maverick because of the whites-only primary, in nonpartisan city elections, blacks could legally vote if they paid their poll tax. In Dallas, A. Maceo Smith organized the Progressive Voters League to raise money for poll taxes and recruit black voters.55 The League registered five thousand voters for the municipal election of 1937, the year white politicians split into five competing factions and were surprised to learn that the black vote would choose the winner. Smith convinced all the candidates to commit to building a second black high school, hiring of black police officers, and creating more city jobs for blacks. Smith then backed the Forward Dallas Association, which won five of the nine city council seats. The whites kept every promise, except the hiring of black police officers.56

  Even progressive whites, though, often treated blacks as second-class citizens and insisted on segregation. When blacks began moving into Dallas’s Exline neighborhood, one not racially zoned, assailants detonated eighteen bombs to scare away black home buyers between December 1940 and November 1941. Police never identified any suspects, and African-Americans learned that cooperating with the white community would deliver only so much.57

  In statewide elections, the Democratic party’s dominance left many African-Americans disillusioned, and only fifty thousand blacks voted in the 1940 general election. During the congressional vote two years later, blacks cast only 33,000 ballots. That changed when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the whites-only primaries in 1944 and ordered political parties to give African-Americans a chance to vote.58

  The NAACP membership chairwoman in Dallas, Juanita Craft, became the first black woman ever to vote in the Dallas County primary. She spent the next two years recruiting African-Americans, and by 1946, the local chapter numbered seven thousand members.59 The need for more activism was exemplified in Marshall, Texas, when the leaders of the East Texas town activated the National Guard to stop blacks from voting. African-American leaders and protesters faced down the troops, and city leaders allowed them to vote. The 1946 gubernatorial race was the first since Reconstruction where the top white candidates actively sought the black vote. More than 75,000 African-Americans voted in that election, despite the poll tax, but this still represented less than a 14 percent turnout of eligible black voters.60

  A 1948 poll showed that 66 percent of whites opposed equal rights for blacks, and in 1950 the Texas legislature expanded segregation by banning joint facilities in state parks. State agencies did little to help blacks, with the highway and education departments offering only menial jobs. Until the 1960s, the Texas Employment Commission maintained a policy of cutting off unemployment benefits to African-Americans who applied for jobs normally held by whites. Nevertheless, African-Americans built successful businesses, including nine statewide insurance companies by 1947.61

  African-Americans in Texas remained divided on whether to push for integration or to accept continued segregation with truly separate but equal facilities. Many black professionals, such as doctors and teachers, feared that integration would lead to whites taking their jobs, while others worried that desegregation would destroy African-American communities.62

  Whites resisted any attempts by blacks to move out of the slums of West Dallas, a nine-square-mile shantytown where fewer than 10 percent of dwellings had indoor plumbing and typhus and tuberculosis were pandemic. In the early 1950s, blacks again tried to move into the Exline neighborhood south of Fair Park, but after blacks bought twelve homes, bombers destroyed them. This time, though, Dallas police made arrests and a special grand jury investigated. Despite testimony implicating prominent white citizens, the grand jury indicted two Hispanics. Prosecutors took only Pete Garcia, a light-skinned Mexican-American living in Exline, to trial, where he claimed white status. Allegedly, he had joined the bombers to solidify his standing in the white community, and a white jury acquitted him. The bombings, though, failed to stop African-American families from moving into the neighborhood, and soon most white families had moved out.63 Exline became one of Dallas’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

  REBRANDING

  At the Texas State Fair in 1952, organizers unveiled a fifty-two-foot mannequin called “Big Tex.” Organizers bragged that Big Tex wore size seventy boots and a seventy-five-gallon hat. The following year, they mounted a moving jaw and a loudspeaker so he could welcome guests to Fair Park with a hearty “Howdy Folks!” Big Tex was perhaps the most transparent attempt by Texans to move away from their history as a southern state with Confederate heroes and transform Texas into a western state, the home of cowboys and oilmen. Interstate 35, which splits Texas on a north-south line from Dallas to Laredo, represents an informal division between the old and new Texas. Almost every county courthouse east of I-35 has a memorial to Confederate veterans, while few to the west do. The rebranding was remarkably successful, and fifty years later many people are surprised to learn that Texas was a slave state.

  Texas conservatives, who always had a tumultuous relationship with the national Democratic party, remained publicly opposed in the 1950s to equal rights for African-Americans. In the 1952 presidential race, Governor Allan Shivers endorsed the Republican candidate, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, over the Democratic contender, Adlai Stevenson. African-Americans voted overwhelming for Stevenson and opposed Shivers in the 1954 primary, but Shivers won renomination for a third term.64

  The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 triggered real panic among conservative Texans, and Shivers promised to fight the order by all legal means. In Mansfield, near Fort Worth, 250 white students stopped black students when that district tried to integrate in 1956, and Shivers sent Texas Rangers to remove the blacks.65

  In 1955, the state legislature cut off funding for any school in Texas that integrated without voter approval and issued a list of excuses a district could use to remain segregated, such as space, transportation, psychological effects, and morality. Lawmakers passed a law that automatically shut down a school if federal troops tried to enforce integration and absolved children from attending school if their parents opposed it.66

  White conservatives used propaganda to tie the civil rights movement to communism, and they made the Dallas school board their central battleground against liberals, desegregation, and communism for the next twenty years. The chairman of the English Department at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University inspired a resurgence of anti-Semitism in 1951 with a best-selling book entitled The Iron Curtain Over Am
erica. Author John Owen Beaty denied that Eastern European Jews were Jewish and claimed they were a mongrel race descended from Satan that sought world domination. Beaty’s book sold very well in Dallas and inspired modern white supremacist groups like the Aryan Nations. Anti-Semitic groups in Dallas linked the NAACP to secret Jewish groups plotting global dominance and the oppression of whites, including the forced breeding of white women with nonwhites.67

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  I’m not the maître d’ to the Pearly Gate, so who He lets in is His business. But I am not going to open the side door to heaven to one of these racist hypocrites that come up to me talking about how we loved you all, when I know better.

  —Julia Taylor

  Albert Tomlinson decided to sell off part of the Hill in 1946 and gave first dibs to the African-Americans living on it, offering to sell Vincent the one hundred acres he worked for $45,000. Vincent didn’t have that kind of money, and no bank was going to give a mortgage of that size to a black man, so he was going to have to move his family, along with all of the sharecroppers on Tomlinson Hill.1 But Albert knew he was pushing a hundred people out of the only homes they’d known, so he set aside a plot a few hundred yards from Vincent’s house for a black neighborhood. The government was offering veterans coming home from World War II low-cost loans to buy homes through the Veterans Administration, and Albert wanted to take advantage of the housing boom. He drew up a plat of one-acre home sites called the A. P. Tomlinson Development.2

  Albert gave lots to the African-Americans who had spent generations on the Hill and arranged to build eighteen-hundred-square-foot bungalows if the black families agreed to pay a third of the cost up front. After years of paying them their “share,” Albert knew how little cash the families had, so he loaned them the remainder of the building costs. Vincent chose a lot just off the highway and arranged for his relatives and children to get adjoining lots.3

  After the years they had spent living in a sharecropper’s shack, the new bungalow transformed the black Tomlinsons’ lives. The simple house had a pier-and-beam foundation that lifted it off the ground, the walls were insulated, and it had a tin roof. Since it was next to the highway, the house came with electricity, which pumped well water into the house. Vincent bought a propane tank, so the children no longer had to chop wood for heat. Charles told me he loved the new house:

  We bartered and we got us a TV later and already got electricity and all that. We was the only one got a refrigerator up here on the Hill. And the other kids would come by and look at it. You could keep your ice cream in there and put it in the freezer and it would still be hard. With an ice box you would buy your ice cream and put your ice in there, it’[d] get soft. But them ice trays, them cubes, you know, that was something. That was something to see. First time they’d seen it, first time I’d seen it.4

  Vincent let everyone in his family know land was available at a reasonable price, and soon all the cousins joined the Tomlinsons. Albert sold lots to a dozen other black families, and land ownership instilled pride in the community of 107 people. A new store even opened up along State Highway 7.5 But the move also signaled less welcome changes.

  Albert moved the sharecroppers into a village because the new landowners planned to use machines to work the land, not people, and they planned to grow more corn and raise cattle, both of which require less labor than cotton. Albert was laying off the sharecroppers, and without any farmwork, Vincent found himself unemployed for the first time in his life. His children began looking for jobs, but there were fewer and fewer of those in Falls County. Mineral-water tourism declined once antibiotics became widely available.

  People moved off the farm and into towns, while the county combined school districts and bought buses to bring farm children into town for classes. By 1950, the Lott Independent School District had annexed the Tomlinson Negro School, shut it down, and had started busing black children to a segregated elementary school in Lott.6

  AN OLD-FASHIONED SHERIFF

  Falls County residents elected Brady Pamplin sheriff in 1946 for his first of many terms in office. Pamplin had spent a decade as a Falls County deputy, two years as a Texas Ranger, and had served in the Air Force during World War II.7 He was an old-fashioned sheriff who wore a Stetson cowboy hat and carried a big revolver. Pamplin stood over six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and made a point of knowing everyone’s business, both in the black and the white communities. Frank Wyman told me about the first time he saw Pamplin in western Falls County. Six black churches had organized a Sunday school conference in Chilton and a church in Waco had chartered a Greyhound bus to transport those wishing to attend. Frank said he was impressed to see blacks riding in the front of a bus in 1955, but soon trouble started:

  A group of teenage boys, as they would do, went to the downtown area probably to buy a package of cigarettes or something like that. They went into the store and as soon as they walked in the man told them to get out because he didn’t serve niggers. One of them mumbled something in response. Under the guise that he just simply didn’t take any cursing from anybody, the storekeeper started chasing the boy.

  [The store owner] picked up a pipe and chased him, and the boy ran back to the church and it was during a break period. There were people selling dinners. They had little stands out. There were refreshments and all of that. People were mingling, a lot of people from the different churches, and this boy ran down the middle of the crowd with this white man. He had an apron on [and was] carrying a large metal pipe and he ran through the crowd and I rushed to the front just to get a bird’s-eye view of it. The bus driver told one of the ministers if they could go in and get the boy and put him on the bus that he would pretend that the boy was a customer. Then they informed him that he indeed was a customer, that he had come down with the group from Waco.

  [The driver] said, “Well, if you can get him on the bus I guarantee nothing will happen to him.” … The boy had crawled under someone’s house and he came out and they put him on the bus.

  The man who was chasing him went back to his store and in just a few minutes showed up with a friend of his in a car.… I picked up the pipe and was pounding it in my hand and this elderly deacon walked up to me and gave me a sermon about not having hate in my heart. I said, “This sounds familiar; please don’t tell me I should pray for him.”

  They did get the boy back to the bus. The store owner was driving the car. The passenger, his friend, opened the door of the car before he displayed this huge knife. He turned to the crowd and said, “You all might as well just leave [the store owner] alone, let him do what he has got to do.”

  [The store owner] went over to the bus and the Greyhound bus driver told him that if he stepped one foot on the threshold of the bus that he would blow a hole through him big enough to drop an egg through. He pulled out this drawer and displayed this huge pistol that he had.

  But Reverend Weber sat down in the door, and he was big enough to occupy the entire thing. Reverend Weber was about a four-hundred-pound man. He sat down on the steps of the bus and they were almost to the point of an argument of the bus driver telling him to move. The bus driver cursed like an angry black man: “You know if he’s so bad, let him bring his ass up on this bus, let him step up on the bus.”

  So the preacher, not wanting any bloodshed of anybody, he remained sitting on the bus, saying that: “If you’re going to get on the bus, you’re going to have to come over me.”

  The sheriff walked up, and they explained the things on both sides to the sheriff. And the sheriff told him, “I’m fixing to go back to Marlin and have my Sunday dinner. And I am praying right now that nothing causes me to have to come back over here, because I will put my boot ankle-deep up your ass, do you understand what I’m saying? Excuse me, Reverend.”

  That ended the confrontation, and the white store owner left. Frank said everyone knew what was coming next when Pamplin said, “I don’t like violence, but…”8

  Frank’s
college-educated father, Charles Wyman, was a schoolteacher, and many African-Americans came to him for advice. The white community also recognized Charles as a leader in the community, and Pamplin often asked Charles for help when investigating serious crimes involving blacks. Pamplin frequently visited Wood Street, where he often picked up his dinner at Strickland’s Café. Pamplin didn’t interfere with African-Americans unless they did something to anger him or the white community, but Frank said the mere sight of him could strike terror among blacks.

  CELEBRATING FALLS COUNTY

  Falls County marked its centennial in 1950, and the Marlin Chamber of Commerce formed a special Centennial Commission to organize a weeklong celebration. The festivities started on Sunday, October 8, when preachers held special church services, while organizers designated Monday Homecoming Day, with parades, marching bands, and floats. Ranchers brought their best animals to the Empty Saddle Club Arena for Livestock Day on Tuesday, while Youth Day was on Wednesday and Agriculture Day was on Thursday. The chamber hired a carnival enterprise to provide rides and games on the courthouse grounds and the United Daughters of the Confederacy built a memorial log cabin as a special exhibit. The chamber also commissioned the John B. Rogers Production Company to produce a four-night historical pageant on the football field, complete with elaborate costumes and props. The company recruited three hundred citizens to pantomime the county’s history on the football field while narrators read from a script over the loudspeakers. The pageant scenes included nomadic Native Americans, Spanish settlers, the early white pioneers, and the establishment of the first church. Others portrayed Civil War soldiers lowering the Confederate battle flag to signal their defeat. The spectacle ended with the queen of the centennial and her court parading across the field.9

  The celebration provided a brief diversion from Marlin’s growing economic problems. Recognizing his hometown needed a little help, U.S. Senator Tom Connally arranged for the construction of a 222-bed Veterans Administration hospital in 1950. If the doctors saw their business at the hot springs drop because of antibiotics, he figured they could shift to government work. The hospital employed 13 physicians and 290 other employees and quickly became the largest employer in Marlin.10