With All Deliberate Speed:
The Houston Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education

By ERIC L. FREDRICKSON

Fifty years ago next May, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional in the field of public education and presented a racially divided America with the daunting task of desegregating its public schools. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the Court’s opinion:
“To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. . . . We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are . . . deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.1”
Despite abolishing the dual system of segregated “white” and “Negro” public schools, the Brown opinion did not specify a procedural mechanism or timeline as to how and when desegregation was to occur throughout the land. Noting that Brown was a class action with plaintiffs from different locales with a variety of local conditions, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the “formulation of decrees in these cases present[ed] problems of considerable complexity.”2 It was the “considerable complexity” of the issues that would be litigated time and again in the years ahead.
The method of desegregating the nation’s schools was left to the individual school districts, and, not surprisingly, there was much disagreement and, in some cases, violent opposition to implementing the Brown decision, particularly in the southern states. When the Brown plaintiffs complained that the various school districts were dragging their feet, the Supreme Court, in a subsequent opinion known as Brown II, ordered the lower courts to “enter such orders and decrees necessary” to ensure children were admitted to public schools on a racially non-discriminatory basis “with all deliberate speed.”3
The Supreme Court recognized that there were a “variety of obstacles” for local school districts to eliminate in making the transition to a desegregated school system and that the lower courts could “take into account the public interest in the elimination of such obstacles in a systematic and effective manner.” The burden of demonstrating a “good faith” compliance on the road to fully implementing the Brown mandate would rest with the individual school districts.4
In Houston, Texas, blacks viewed the Brown decision with guarded optimism. Given the dynamic nature of Houston’s multicultural and diverse community today, it is difficult to visualize and comprehend the segregated nature of Houston in the early 1950s. Blacks comprised 125,400—or 21 percent—of Houston’s population of nearly 600,000.5 Jim Crow laws (so called after a “black face” character in minstrel shows) enacted since the days of Reconstruction segregated the community. Signs labeled “colored” and “white” were common and Houston’s pioneering black lawyers suffered the same indignities as the rest of the black population. Black lawyers had to use separate rest rooms at the courthouse; one black attorney, Matthew Plummer, was struck by a white man while attempting to enter the cafeteria in the Harris County Criminal Courthouse. Another black attorney, the late Weldon Berry, recalled in a 1995 interview with the HBA Historical Committee how even the court dockets were segregated: “They had two lists—colored and white. If a white lawyer had black and white clients, he would sign up his black client on the black list and white client on the other list. And he would be called first on the white list and then he would have to sit there patiently until [the court] exhausted the white list and he could be first on the black list.”6
As a black lawyer, Berry was even restricted in where he could obtain office space for his practice. According to Berry, the only downtown office building open to black professionals was the MacDonald Building located on the corner of Louisiana and Prairie. “It was not possible to get office space in another building because of my color,” said Berry. It was also difficult for a black lawyer to get new clients. “The majority of blacks had white lawyers because there were just a few black lawyers. It was quite a risk to go to a black lawyer,” said Berry, and “only a few courageous souls would risk an important thing like a divorce to a [black lawyer].”7
When it came to public education, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) was the largest segregated school district in the country. Of the 144,232 students on the school rolls, 36,017—or 25 percent—were black. As for the immediate impact of Brown on HISD, McCarthyism and Houston’s own Red Scare activists helped perpetuate segregation in the public schools by branding desegregation as “a communist plot.” HISD school board elections were often heated and bitterly contested based on the candidate’s stand on desegregation, and disagreement among the various factions of the school board over how to implement the Brown decision slowed the pace of substantive progress to a crawl.8
In the wake of Brown, there were “a lot of black parents who wanted to [integrate the schools], but they were afraid they would lose their jobs,” recalled Weldon Berry. Houston’s black community, in conjunction with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), finally found the test case they were looking for to challenge HISD’s segregation policy after two black girls, 14-year-old Beneva Williams and 9-year-old Delores Ross, were turned away when they tried to enroll in all-white schools near their homes in September 1956.9
On December 26, 1956, Ross and Williams filed their original class action complaint in the federal court for the Southern District of Texas against HISD, the Houston School Board and other administrative officials, asking for desegregation of the public schools. Houston attorney Weldon Berry was the lead local counsel for the NAACP in representing the plaintiffs, along with attorneys Henry Doyle and Francis Williams. Houston attorneys Joe Reynolds and Bert Tunks of the law firm Bracewell, Tunks, Reynolds & Patterson (now Bracewell & Patterson) represented HISD.
Styled Ross v. HISD, Houston’s first and largest school desegregation case was heard in the federal court, located at the time in the federal post office building at the corner of San Jacinto and Rusk in downtown Houston. The four-day hearing began on May 20, 1957 and received extensive coverage by the local news media. On the eve of the hearing, the presiding judge, Ben C. Connally, told the press that he “didn’t know of anything that could be more controversial” and that he had received “quite a bit of propaganda . . . anonymously in [his] mail.”10 Speaking later to a packed courtroom, Judge Connally acknowledged the “strong sentiment regarding the segregation issue” and firmly warned courtroom spectators that “no demonstrations would be permitted.”11 Both parties to the lawsuit agreed that the key issue was whether the school board had moved with “deliberate speed and good faith” in complying with the edict in Brown desegregating public schools. But when Judge Connally queried attorney Bert Tunks on whether the Houston School Board accepted the Supreme Court decision as “the law of the land,” Tunks replied that he would “rather not answer that question directly” because “such an academic question is not pertinent to this case.”12
Surprised by the response, Judge Connally pressed Tunks. “You are not denying the force and effect of the Supreme Court decision. You are not arguing the opinion that the school case does not mean what it says or does not apply to Houston?” In response, Tunks stated: “It is extremely difficult to read the opinion in the segregation cases without concluding that the judiciary has usurped some of the administration functions of the local governmental agencies.” Telling Tunks that he was “not trying to put [him] on the spot,” Judge Connally said that the time had come “when we must try this proceeding in a proper fashion” and for each party to “make its position clear . . . without qualifications.” For Judge Connally, the law was “abundantly clear that desegregation of the Houston schools [was] inevitable unless or until the law [was] changed in some fashion.” The only real question was “whether or not the method here offered is a bona fide attempt to comply.”13
As the hearing progressed, it became apparent that there was considerable disagreement among school board members on the issue of desegregation and that they had no particular “method” to offer the court. When asked on cross-examination whether the school board had any plan for desegregation, school board president Mrs. Frank Dyer replied that the board had “many plans to mitigate the impact of any program of desegregation” but that it wanted to complete its current building program before presenting a specific plan.14
Throughout the four days of testimony, the Houston school board sought to show that it had made “a reasonable start toward paving the way toward desegregation and that it had acted in good faith” since the Brown decision and that there were many administrative problems of great complexity to resolve before desegregation could begin in Houston.15 The plaintiffs’ attorneys countered that the school board was not moving fast enough and that “no amount of waiting, committees, or programs will lessen the problems of desegregation, so it should be done now.”16 After both sides rested their case, Judge Connally gave the attorneys a month to file their briefs.
While Houston awaited Judge Connally’s decision in the Ross case, Judge Connally thought carefully and deeply about how he would rule, often rising “in the middle of the night to ponder his decision.”17 After five months of deliberation, Judge Connally announced his ruling on October 15, 1957, declaring “the policy of racial segregation now enforced by . . . the Houston Independent School District to be unlawful” and directing the school district to “proceed with all deliberate speed toward the maintenance and operation of the schools . . . upon a racially non-discriminatory basis.” Noting that Brown “specifically holds that public education is primarily a state function, to be administered at the local level,” Judge Connally allowed the school board to devise its own plan to desegregate the Houston schools. Although he set no particular date for desegregation to begin, Judge Connally warned that “a court of equity will not countenance inordinate delay or evasion where the enjoyment of a constitutional right is involved, though its recognition and enforcement be difficult and unpopular.”18
School Board President Mrs. Frank Dyer called the decision “wise” and was “gratified that Judge Connally ha[d] shown an understanding of the problems of the [Houston] school district in not setting a date for desegregating and leaving to the board of education the implementation of the order.”19 Although Judge Connally gave HISD considerable leeway in the speed at which its desegregation plan was developed, he expected the process to move along in a judicious and timely manner. When it became evident that no plan would be soon forthcoming despite numerous extensions of time to do so, Judge Connally set June 1, 1960 as the deadline for HISD to file its plan of desegregation. The plan HISD finally submitted called for a voluntary integration of one elementary school, one junior high, and one senior high school commencing in September 1961.20
After waiting over two years for a concrete plan of desegregation, Judge Connally was not impressed. Calling the HISD plan a “palpable sham and subterfuge designed only to accomplish further evasion and delay,” Judge Connally formulated his own “stair-step” plan and ordered that Houston’s public schools would be desegregated with the opening of the regular school term in September 1960. Under Judge Connally’s plan, the first grade would be desegregated in 1960, the second grade the following year and so on until complete desegregation was accomplished in 1972. When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Connally’s ruling, the road was clear for black children to enroll in previously all-white schools.21
Unlike the 1957 standoff in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard in support of angry whites committed to blocking black admission to all white schools, the desegregation of the Houston public schools proceeded “slowly, but without high drama or a serious threat of violence and disruption.”22 By 1962 the first and second grades of HISD had been desegregated in “an orderly manner . . . with a minimum of friction and discontent.” This, said Judge Connally, was “a matter in which the City of Houston may well take pride.” 23
The beginning of desegregation in HISD during the 1960 school term did not mark the end of the desegregation lawsuit. The federal court retained jurisdiction over the case to monitor progress and to enter any further orders deemed necessary to ensure that HISD’s desegregation plan complied with the latest desegregation rulings of the United States Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia was a turning point in the desegregation cases because the Supreme Court, for the first time, spelled out in express terms what a desegregated school system should look like to comply with the mandate of Brown. Recognizing that public school districts across the land were not moving with “all deliberate speed” to “convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch,” the Supreme Court declared that “the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out” and that the burden was on each school district to “come forward with a plan that . . . promises realistically to work now.”24
The Fifth Circuit adopted the Green holding in Singleton v. Jackson Municipal Separate School District (1969) and announced general rules the Fifth Circuit would follow in future desegregation cases in determining whether a unitary school system had been established. Those guidelines included student, faculty and staff ratios, integrated extra curricular activities, school transfer policies, transportation, and school construction and site selection to prevent the recurrence of a dual school structure once a desegregation plan was implemented.25
By 1970, HISD’s legal representation had come full circle. When the Ross case began in 1956, Joe Reynolds and Bert Tunks, members of what later became the law firm Bracewell & Patterson, represented HISD. Tunks subsequently left the firm in 1957 to become judge of the 113th District Court of Harris County. Bracewell & Patterson continued representing HISD until 1966 when Reynolds left to start his own firm. When a new school board took over in early 1970, the board returned its representation to Bracewell & Patterson.26
Within Bracewell & Patterson, partner William Key Wilde headed the HISD legal team, assisted by new associate Kelly Frels. Frels was just six months out of law school when he was assigned to work with Wilde on the Ross case. By the time Wilde and Frels got on the case in 1970, the central issue was no longer “a matter of whether to integrate, but how to foster education without destroying it,” recalls Frels. “Remember that we were going through one of the most significant social changes ever. Yes, some of those things were less than what was needed to integrate, but they were steps along the road.”27
The objective was to eliminate single race schools, which at the time was defined as 90 percent of one race. “Hispanics were counted as whites during those days, so what you largely ended up doing was pairing Hispanic and black children,” says Frels. “It made no sense whatsoever” from the standpoint of working to achieve a unitary system. “Also, there had been a lot of what we call ‘white flight’ during the pendency of the lawsuit and so the Fifth Circuit order was based on statistical data that was no longer valid. So we ended up pairing black schools with black schools because the neighborhood had changed.”28
Perhaps the most innovative step HISD took toward operating a unitary school system was the creation of the magnet school desegregation program. Frels says he will never forget how the magnet school program came about. “Billy Reagan (the HISD Superintendent) called me on a Friday afternoon and said ‘I’ve got an idea.’” Reagan’s idea was to create a series of magnet schools offering specialized programs on a district wide basis so that school children would want to ride the bus to get there “because what was there was better than what they had and it offered an opportunity.” The challenge was how to turn Reagan’s idea into a workable plan and that, says Frels, was “the most thrilling conversation I have ever had as a lawyer. Here I was, just a third year lawyer and I’m telling Reagan why he can’t do a particular thing the way he wanted to while at the same time giving him alternatives.” Frels felt like he was part of the creative process in finding a workable solution to Houston’s long, drawn out desegregation problems. What HISD proposed to do had never been done anywhere in the United States as part of a desegregation order. Frels and his client were literally breaking new ground, and by the end of the day they had a half-way plan developed.29
Under the magnet school program, select schools with one-of-a-kind curricula were opened to district wide enrollment to promote integration by choice. The thinking was that the prospect of quality education would overcome any racial considerations parents might have in deciding where to send their children to school. It was one thing to develop a plan; it was quite another to sell it to the community that had to live with it. In order to garner support, a special task force of school administrators and people from all walks of the community came together to study and fine tune this alternative plan to forced bussing. In the end, all parties to the segregation lawsuit agreed to the magnet school concept as a reasonable and workable plan. The first magnet schools opened in 1975, and their success would eventually end the local desegregation lawsuit.
A major challenge to HISD’s desegregation plan arose in the early 1970s when a splinter group on Houston’s affluent west side attempted to organize the Westheimer Independent School District (WISD). This move posed a serious threat to HISD’s desegregation plan because the proposed boundaries of WISD contained a large majority of the white school children in HISD that were needed to implement acceptable ethnic ratios under HISD’s plan. For the first time since the Ross case began, the NAACP and HISD successfully worked together to defeat the common enemy they saw in WISD.30
In the first round against WISD, the court enjoined the creation of WISD for a three-year period. When the three-year period ended, WISD raised its head again and “the battle got tougher,” says Frels. “We were losing at every turn and ultimately we had to file a motion to disqualify the federal judge on the case.” Signing his name to the motion with Bill Wilde to disqualify Judge James L. Noel, Jr., was “singularly the most difficult thing as a lawyer . . . I’ve ever done,” says Frels. “It was very difficult to do because we all liked Judge Noel and he is a fine man, but it appeared that he was not impartial.” The case was then transferred to Judge Finis E. Cowan, who later permanently enjoined the creation of WISD.31
Judge Cowan was the third federal judge assigned to the Ross desegregation case and its progeny. During the course of the 28-year litigation, five different judges presided over the case. According to Frels, “Historically, in desegregation cases the newest judge gets the case.” In reflecting on the different judges who presided over the Ross case, Frels credits Judge Ben C. Connally for “holding things together” until the United States Supreme Court handed down its Green decision declaring that the time for a workable desegregation plan “is now.”
“It’s hard for us to remember what it was like in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Frels. “Judge Connally held things together during a period of difficult social change because of the respect that everyone had for him that he was trying to do the right thing and keep chaos from occurring.”32 Weldon Berry also had high praise for Judge Connally: “He looked, acted and talked like a federal judge. There was no way in the world you could say you didn’t get a fair trial in his court because [Judge Connally] was the epitome of gentility and courtesy.”33
Once the United States Supreme Court made it clear that the time for “mere deliberate speed” had run out, Judge Cowan moved the case along at a quicker pace. “Judge Cowan did a magnificent job of moving things in his own way and causing us to focus on the real issues,” says Frels. In contrast, Judge Connally “didn’t let it move so quickly that it destroyed itself.”34
A trial ultimately was held on whether HISD was unitary and in 1981, Judge Robert O’Conor, Jr., found that HISD had done all that was practicable under the circumstances to desegregate the public schools and declared HISD to be a unitary school system. Judge O’Conor placed the Ross case on the inactive docket and indicated that he would review the case again in three years.35 The parties eventually settled the litigation and Judge John V. Singleton, Jr., approved a settlement agreement on November 27, 1984 that finally ended the 28-year lawsuit.36
The legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and the local case of Ross v. HISD is a mixed one. “Brown isn’t a completely failed experiment, but it hasn’t by any means accomplished everything we wanted it to,” said Weldon Berry at the fortieth anniversary of Brown. “Our expectations were too great. You can’t legislate love. The best you can do is throw people together and hope they will tolerate each other.”37 Looking back on the legacy of Brown in 1994, Rod Paige, who was HISD’s first black superintendent and who is now the U.S. Secretary of Education, opined that Brown was “one of the most important things that ever happened to education. But it was limited in its scope . . . . We should have been more worried about education.”38
Ironically, HISD’s present demographics indicate that many of its school campuses are still dominated by one race, just as they were when Brown was handed down. Today, HISD has 212,099 students along the following ethnic lines: 57.1 percent Hispanic, 30.5 percent African American, 9.3 percent White, 3 percent Asian, and less than 1 percent Native American. Of this number, a staggering 80.2 percent of all students are “economically disadvantaged,” meaning they meet the federal criteria for free and reduced-price lunches.39 The reality is that Houston’s demographics have changed so much in the 50 years since Brown that the racial dynamics that drove Ross v. HISD no longer apply. Fifty years after Brown, the challenge has shifted from racial equality to narrowing the disparity in academic success among the different ethnic and economic groups in the public schools in order to achieve efficiency and excellence in public education.
Finally, while some constitutional law scholars and advocates of judicial restraint may charge that Brown is a glaring example of naked judicial activism and policy making from the bench, there should be no disagreement that the end result was the right one for a nation founded on the principle of equality for all. The transformation of American society did not happen overnight, but Brown put racial and social equality in the forefront of the national consciousness and forced Americans to grapple with difficult issues that demanded resolution for the country to progress as a free democracy. Although Brown was about public schools, its holding soon spread to other areas of American life, which ultimately culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And even though there was violence in some parts of the country in opposition to desegregation, the greater truth—and perhaps the greatest legacy of Brown—is that the rule of law ultimately prevailed in resolving decades of social injustice without widespread civil turmoil and violence.

Endnotes
1. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 2. Id. 3. Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955). 4. Id. 5. United States Bureau of the Census. 6. Weldon H. Berry. Personal interview by Mike Monks. March 3, 1995. Houston Bar Association Archives. 7. Id. 8. The Houston Post, May 22, 1957. 9. The Houston Chronicle, May 18, 1994. Beneva Williams tried to enroll at McReynolds Junior High and Delores Ross tried to enroll at Sherman Elementary. Ironically, the children the subject of Houston’s school desegregation case would graduate from high school without ever attending an integrated school. 10. Houston Press, May 20, 1957. 11. Houston Chronicle, May 20, 1957. 12. Id. 13. Id. 14. Id. 15. The Houston Post, May 21, 1957. 16. Houston Press, May 22, 1957. 17. The Houston Post, July 14, 1974. 18. Ross v. Rogers, et al., (S.D. Tex., No. 10,444, October 15, 1957), unpublished opinion contained in the Ben C. Connally collection, Houston Metropolitan Research Center. 19. The Houston Post, October 16, 1957. 20. Houston Independent School District v. Ross, 282 F.2d 95, 96 (5th Cir. 1960). 21. Id. 22. Houston Chronicle, September 28, 1987. 23. Ross v. Dyer, 203 F.Supp. 124, 125 (S.D. Tex.—Houston 1962). 24. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, 391 U.S. 430, 437, 88 S.Ct. 1689, 1694 (1968). 25. Singleton v. Jackson Municipal Separate School District, 419 F.2d 1211 (5th Cir. 1969). 26. Searcy Bracewell, Bracewell & Patterson: “Some Early Recollections,” (unpublished paper, Bracewell & Patterson, Houston 1981). 27. The Houston Post, May 15, 1994. 28. Kelly Frels. Personal interview by Eric L. Fredrickson. September 29, 2003. 29. Id. 30. Id. 31. Id. 32. Id. 33. Berry interview. 34. Frels interview. 35. Ross v. HISD, (S.D. Tex., C.A. No. 10,444, June 17, 1981). 36. Ross v. HISD, (S.D. Tex., C.A. No. 10,444, November 27, 1985). 37. The Houston Post, May 15, 1994. 38. Id. 39. Houston Independent School District Facts & Figures, April 2003.


Eric L. Fredrickson is a partner with The Fredrickson Law Firm, a general civil litigation practice in Houston. He currently serves as the chair of the HBA Historical Committee and as a director
of the Museum of Southern History. In addition to practicing law, he is a writer and historical consultant. He is the author of several historical books and articles on the Houston legal community, including Andrews & Kurth: The First 100 Years of Excellence and A Commitment to Public Service: The History of the Houston Bar Association. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (BA '85) and the University of Houston (MA '91, JD '94).

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