Building the Ivory Tower - LaDale C. Winling Politics and Culture in Modern America

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new methods of segregating.27

      Austin turned to city planning to institutionalize separation of the races. In 1927, the city plan commission invited Will Hogg, chairman of Houston’s plan commission, to discuss a plan for Austin. Hogg had gone on record with the Houston commission: “Negroes are a necessary and useful element of the population and suitable areas with proper living and recreation facilities should be set aside for them. Because of long established racial prejudices, it is best for both races that living areas be segregated.”28 Yet explicit racial zoning had been deemed unconstitutional, and so it would not be among Austin’s instruments of urban development.

      That same year, the plan commission hired Koch and Fowler, a Dallas engineering firm, to create Austin’s first master plan.29 Traffic and transportation, public services, land use—for the first time, all of these would be considered in concert, and the planners would present a unified vision for the city’s future. The university contributed its expertise to the endeavor through an alumnus, Hugo Kuehne, who served as a local representative for the plan and later helped create the UT architecture program.30

      Koch and Fowler’s 1928 plan proposed a service district in East Austin where the city would locate public facilities for African American residents. The report recommended that “the nearest approach to the solution of the race segregation problem will be the recommendation of this district as a negro district; and that all the facilities and conveniences be provided the negroes in this district, as an incentive to draw the negro population to this area.”31 In the 1910s, white residents of West Austin had fought a bitter battle against an African American school there, arguing that black residents would follow black schools.32 Koch and Fowler turned that logic around in their 1928 plan, which went public as a special insert in the city’s leading newspapers in February.33 The press discussed Austin’s “racial segregation problem”—not the inherent unfairness of it or its cost to society, but the barriers to effective segregation. Even though the city’s Hispanic population, at greater than five thousand, was more than half the size of black Austin, far less anxiety attended segregation of the city’s Hispanic population. Largely Mexican American, they lived in two neighborhoods, one at the foot of Congress Avenue near the Colorado River, and one in the southern part of East Austin. There was no planning effort to concentrate the city’s Hispanics in either of the two districts. The color line was drawn more boldly between black and white than it was between brown and white.34

      Koch and Fowler’s report planned a segregated city that would at least double its size, reaching three to five miles outside of the boundaries in 1928. Civic leaders accepted the plan and set an election for city bond issues worth $425 million in the spring of 1928 to fund the infrastructure improvements it called for, including road paving, more and better school buildings, and parks and leisure spaces. The business community was squarely behind the “Onward Austin” campaign that would guide development for several decades.

      Everett Givens saw the bond election as an opportunity. Givens was a dentist and business leader, one of only seven black medical professionals in the city.35 He was a native Austinite but had gone to Howard University for his dental training, returning to Austin to practice.36 “Insofar as you could say that [black] Austin had a political boss when I came here … it was Dr. Everett Givens,” a political rival later remembered.37 A longtime Austinite called Givens “a bronze mayor.”38 Givens was part of a generation of black leaders who sought equalization long before integration rose to the fore of the civil rights movement.39 He had inherited the mantle of black leadership from an earlier generation; the philosophy of Booker T. Washington had guided those predecessors, who advocated self-improvement rather than radical social change.40 While Givens made greater demands on Austin’s leaders, he did not question the fundamental logic of segregation.

      Bond elections empowered black voters, and this was a rare moment to exercise their political clout. Whites largely excluded African Americans from Democratic primaries, which were the de facto general elections in the one-party South.41 They could intimidate voters or exclude black citizens from being members of a private political organization. Bond issues, however, were general-election votes ostensibly guaranteed to majority-aged citizens. Poll taxes, however, constrained the franchise to more affluent and business-friendly parts of the black electorate. Passage of a bond required a supermajority, a two-thirds “yes” vote. These elections were often closely divided, making African Americans—nearly 20 percent of the city’s population—a key swing constituency. A bond election had failed in 1926 without black support, and the city’s boosters would not let that happen again. They also consulted retired postal clerk Dudley Woodard about the black community’s likely response to the bond issue. Woodard estimated that 95 percent of black voters would go along with the property-tax increase if they received infrastructure improvements from the program.42 East Austin desperately needed road improvements. Only three streets east of East Avenue were paved, and the rest were packed dirt and gravel. East Avenue itself, the main thoroughfare on the eastern side of the city, was hardly paved and had no paving at all north of 19th Street.43 Boggy Creek, a small tributary to the Colorado River, ran across roads and through backyards to make a swampy mess of impassable streets and marshy lots.44

      Everett Givens also prodded city leaders to devote some of the bond-funded infrastructure to East Austin, to which they agreed. An activist recalled some decades later that Givens “got where he could get…. He believed in not stirring up things. Keeping people quiet. ‘Let me take care of it.’”45 Addressing a crowd of his friends and neighbors at a public outreach meeting in April 1928, Givens said, “We believe in the bonds, and all that we ask is that we get a dollar’s worth of value for every dollar spent.”46 Woodard also held promotional events for the bond election, convincing black voters to approve the measure.47 The bond program particularly appealed to the property-owning class of Austin African Americans who could pay the poll tax: the improvements would make their land more valuable.48 Austin’s African American wards supported the bonds overwhelmingly, which passed strongly all across the city.49

      The dual-track infrastructure of Austin would not have been possible without capital from financial markets drawing investment from outside Texas. The city marketed the bonds in New York, and notices ran in the financial papers.50 Thus, the financialization of public infrastructure and the implementation of an openly segregationist plan spread north. Violence in the form of lynchings, house bombings, and race riots were clear and localized ways that whites maintained the color line in communities.51 Financial instruments disguised culpability for the color line. Government bonds spread responsibility for Jim Crow—and profit from it—to investors around the country.

      By 1929, Austin had millions to spend, and the infrastructure plan began to work. The black community got its paved roads in East Austin, a public library branch, and a public school.52 The city’s black elites already lived in East Austin, and with each passing year after 1928, more African Americans moved to East Austin from their enduring neighborhoods of Wheatsville northwest of the UT campus, Clarksville west of downtown, and South Congress across the river. Ada Simonds, whose family moved from Clarksville to East Austin early in the century, remembered the segregation worked “because people are going to go live where the facilities are. The family needs recreational resources, the family needs educational resources, they need a place for a church…. You’d be closer to the church. You’d be closer to this and to that and to the other.”53 The racial geography became even more segregated under the Koch and Fowler plan, making the city’s white sections whiter and black neighborhoods blacker.54 Segregationist city planning first redrew the color line on city maps, then slowly on the city landscape, house by house and block by block (Figures 16 and 17).