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Have you been enjoying our fall weather that we wait all year for? Yes. Yep. And it just sort of comes out of nowhere. Yes, yes. We hope it sticks, we hope it sticks around.

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Well, it's just past noon on a Friday, and so that means it's time for doc talks. My name is Caleb McDaniel, I'm the chair of the history department at Rice, and also the co-chair of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice. And we're so glad that you're here.

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We wanna welcome our attendees who are filing in. You may notice a little bit of a change today, because my co-chair of the task force, Dr. Alex Byrd, is out of town this week, and so we are very grateful that we have a guest who's stepping in to join us today, and that is Dr.

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Will Jones, who hopefully you can see. Will can, can wave there. And Will is a Rice PhD, graduated last year, right? Am I, it already seems like, okay.

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2020. 2020. And, and is now working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Woodson Research Center for the task force, and we're so grateful for all of the work that he's doing. Will, maybe you could introduce yourself a little bit to our audience.

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I know you've been on the doc talks before, last year, with the, the Woodson staff, but maybe for the benefit of those who, who weren't here last year, you could tell us a little bit about your own historical research and what you've been doing for the task force.

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Sure. So as, as Dr. McDaniel said, I defended my dissertation last year in the history department. I wrote about enslaved people in Louisiana who had survived forced migration during the 19th century.

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So I wrote about how they attempted to remake communities, families, churches, after having survived the domestic slave trade and other forms of forced migration. And then I was hired as a postdoctoral research associate to work in the Woodson to help do research on topics related to the task force.

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So that includes things that I'm familiar with, which is the history of slavery, and it has included things I'm less familiar with, which we'll actually be talking about today, which is the history of desegregation and civil rights, Jim Crow. So I have been, I have contributed to, to a lot of research that the task force has done,

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just sort of camped out in the Woodson for a year and a half and dug through, dug through the Woodson archives and looked at stuff at other places as well throughout Houston and Texas. Camping out in the Woodson is, is a great place to camp out.

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I'm a little jealous you get to spend as much time as you do there, and, and so grateful for the work that you've been doing. You sold yourself short a little bit when you said that there are things in the 20th century you're unfamiliar with, because I know that when you came to Rice, you also had

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some experience doing institutional history at your alma mater, is that right? That is true. So I did write, I wrote an undergraduate thesis at Tulane, where I got my bachelor's degree, and I wrote it on the history of Tulane and slavery. And it is, it is, I think, so, I think there's been another undergrad thesis written

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on a similar topic, but it is one of the few works on that topic about that school. So I still actually get, I get emails from, from members of the Tulane community who want to read it or have read it, and want to ask me questions about it. So it is one of the first historical pieces I have ever written and worked on, but it's

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probably my most popular, if that's, that's the phrase, it's been, it's been read by people more than just the committee who approved it and other scholars. So it is... Well, so, so far. So far.

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But, but I happen to know that, that your dissertation is an excellent piece of work, was a finalist for a big award with the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and looking forward to seeing that in book form. But in the meantime, I'm really glad that you are in the Woodson, doing research here

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at Rice to help us deepen our understanding of our own institutional history and its entanglement with slavery, segregation, and racial injustice, and grateful that you are available today to sit in in Dr. Byrd's absence.

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He'll be returning next week, and I hope that all of you in the audience will be able to, to join us next Friday, because we'll also have some guests on that show, some other members of the Rice University faculty who will be here to talk a little bit about their own scholarship and also some of their engagement with the task force research

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updates that we released this past summer on slavery and on the Founder's Memorial. And so I hope that you will put that on your calendar and be sure to return next Friday at noon central at this same link. Today, though, we have just a regular old doc talk.

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And you've been here enough, Dr. Jones, to know the drill. We pull up some documents and talk about the questions they answer, or more importantly, some of the questions they raise, and so I'm really excited to hear about what you've

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brought to share with us today. Sure. And let me, I'll preface this, this document by kind of saying how I came across it, 'cause I think it gives some insight into the historical method, but also my method. So one of the things that, that I like to do is, is give some time to just search around

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in the finding aid or search around in, in an archive, even if I'm not necessarily interested in the question, like, a specific question, or if I'm interested, I would give time to just, hey, what does the finding aid show me? I've worked in the Woodson long enough and in presidential records, which is where the

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document that we're talking about comes from, to know how those records are organized, how they came to be. So a lot of times they're really just working files from a, from a president's office, that then got sent to the Woodson, a lot of times without much reorganization

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after having been in the Woodson. And when you go through the finding aids, you'll see interesting titles and things. And so the title that I saw for the folder that this document is in is called Complaints, and it has some, some year range, and I always read the complaints file,

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every, every president at Rice, I think maybe except for Lovett has a complaints file or a criticism file or something. And it's, you usually find some interesting stuff and sometimes it's just undergrads complaining about something.

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So I will show, this is from the papers of William Vermillion Houston, whose last name is spelled like "Houston," but it's pronounced "Houston." He was Rice's second president, so he became president after Lovett in the late '40s. And he was president all through the '50s until 19, early 1960s, 1961, and he's

00:08:08.620 - 00:08:25.830

followed by Kenneth Pitzer, and Pitzer is the president who oversees desegregation at Rice. So Houston sort of occupies this middle space in Rice's history between Lovett, who's the first president, right, he's the university builder, as Dr. Boles says in his book.

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And Pitzer, who's the president, who's actually not here for very long, but while he's here, he does desegregate the school. And during the time that Houston's here, Houston oversees a lot of building, he oversees, the colleges start in the '50s, Rice Stadium is built in the '50s, Fondren

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Library is built in the '50s, I think the RMC is built in the '50s, right, so there's this huge building campaign. Rice is aggressively pursuing federal grants to fund research, right, and this will become important in the '60s with desegregation, as Melissa Kean shows in her book, Desegregating

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Private Higher Ed. So one of the, one of the questions I generally had about the era, and I think a lot of people have, is what people at Rice, whether it's students, or presidents, faculty, administrators, what they are thinking or doing about integration and civil

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rights in the '50s, in the '40s and '50s. Because we know, right, there's a monumental Supreme Court decision in 1954, Brown versus Board of Ed. Right. And that must have had some, right, there must have been something going on at Rice,

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people had opinions. Right, these are educated folks at Rice, they have opinions about this. So I was, I was curious about that. So I look through this complaints file just to see what's there.

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And I come across this letter from an alumnus whose name is William R. Thornhill, and I will, I'll read it sort of paragraph by paragraph to kind of dissect his thought here. So it's directed to William Vermillion Houston. It's dated October 22nd, 1956, and immediately, as a historian, I see the date

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and I think, aha, so we're post-Brown. Okay. "As an alumnus, I have read with much surprise that the candidacy of James B. Giles for position four on the Houston School Board." Already, in the first sentence, having read the letter, okay, 1956, there's a, there's a guy at Rice who's running for

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the school board. This has, I'd be surprised if, if this didn't involve integration in some way, shape, or form. "I immediately assumed," this is the, Thornhill continuing, "he announced without consulting you, but as no public repudiation from you has appeared, I am left to assume you approved of his action.

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Do you not think Rice has received enough undesirable publicity within recent weeks with the untimely death of two of its students?" Already, there's a few questions that that paragraph raises, I mean, right, one of the striking ones is, what is, what is this death of the two students?

00:11:09.340 - 00:11:27.760

What is that about? But also, right, he's suggesting that in some way, shape or form, Houston is approving of Giles running for a school board, but we don't really know yet from the letter what Giles's position on the school board is.

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But so there's plenty, so, there's some questions there, right. I, luckily, because of modern technology and things, I was able to answer what the death of the two students was about. That was a tragedy involving, involving a, something called the tire grab, which I don't

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think students do anymore. But two students accidentally died of carbon monoxide poisoning during this tire grab. And it was a few weeks before this letter. Okay, so, so Thornhill continues.

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"Rice Institute has been considered one of our highest institutions of learning. Allowing its name to be linked with a candidate on the liberal ticket will do much, I feel, to degrade the tradition of Rice Institute." Okay, so now Thornhill is starting to clarify his point, and it's becoming a little bit clearer to me.

00:12:17.960 - 00:12:33.830

Giles is running for a school board, he's associated with the Rice Institute, he's somehow associated with the liberal ticket, and this alumnus thinks that that's bad for Rice. He's writing Houston to try to get Giles off the ticket, claiming that this would be better for Rice if this, if this were the case.

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"From personal observations of televised meetings of the local school board, I assume the present liberal members are conducting anything but a serious attempt to transact school board business. Heretofore, Rice, I understand, has always maintained a policy of strict neutrality in

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local political problems and as such as increased its citywide prestige." You can see the argument that he's making. Rice should stay out of politics. We're not really clear what the politics are yet that Rice needs to be staying out of from

00:13:07.720 - 00:13:26.580

the letter, but that's his claim. I think it gets clear in the next paragraph, which is where my research bells, especially since I'm looking for things related to the task force, come off, they start ringing. So in the third paragraph, it says, "Evidence introduced in recent court action

00:13:26.880 - 00:13:41.670

reveals the credit for election of the present liberal majority of the school board is due the NAACP. Mr. Giles's association with the present liberal majority of the school board will degrade the Rice Institute." This is the kicker.

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This sentence is the kicker. "In my opinion, the founder of our school would be not only shocked, but also humiliated by Mr. Giles's recent action." So, I think, I think Thornhill's problem is a

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little bit clearer in this, in this paragraph, right. Giles is running on a liberal ticket for a school board, the school board has a liberal majority at this time, and the liberal majority, Thornhill says, is due to some sort of action by the NAACP, so therefore Mr.

00:14:18.730 - 00:14:36.160

Giles is associating himself with the NAACP and in some sense is associating the Rice Institute with the NAACP, and this is something that Giles thinks that William Marsh Rice would have an issue with. And not only he would have an issue with, but it would degrade the Rice Institute or the

00:14:36.160 - 00:14:54.880

reputation of the Rice Institute in the city of Houston. You know, I have to say, as you're talking, this feels like a really timely source, given that we've just had some school board elections here in Houston and across the country. A major question is the relationship between higher education and

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public education, what should be taught in schools, what local school boards should do about curricula, specifically around issues of the history of racism and racial injustice in our country, and a lot of times you find, in the coverage of those elections, people saying that school boards are supposed to be apolitical, they shouldn't be polarized,

00:15:18.340 - 00:15:41.440

these, these should be neutral administrators, and yet what you're reading for us here points out that there is a long history of school board elections being very politically contentious and not at all apolitical, but in fact, closely tied to other currents of the society at the time.

00:15:42.550 - 00:16:03.310

Yeah, I think, I think that's, that's true, and I think, I think this, this letter raises a lot of questions about that school board election and what the politics were. We see political terms thrown around in this one particular, there's "liberal," "liberal majority." That is, those were contemporary terms at the time.

00:16:03.310 - 00:16:20.320

I've, I've done a little bit of research into the, into the, this school board election, and that is the terms that people use, conservative and liberal, and it is because, like you said, school board elections are supposed to be nonpartisan, so we can't, in our sort of political vernacular, use what we like to say, which is

00:16:20.320 - 00:16:34.900

GOP or Republican or Democrat, because these are technically people who are not running as candidates for a party. But they are, they are ideological elections, right, and so there are ideologies attached to some of these tickets.

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The letter goes on to, to suggest that Giles shouldn't, one of the reasons why Giles shouldn't be on the board, on the school board, is because a member of the Rice faculty shouldn't be in a position to accept or reject regents of the University of Houston, which is interesting.

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I think, I'm fairly certain, I don't, I'm fairly certain the school board had some sort of power like that. The University of Houston did not become part, it was start, the University of Houston was started by HISD, it did not become part of the state university system until the

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'60s, so. He, Thornhill wants Houston to basically get, to, to use his influence as the Rice Institute president to, to remove, to have Giles removed from the ticket. And the key piece of information in that paragraph that I don't think you've shared

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before, that, that Giles was a member of the Rice faculty, so that raises some, some questions for me about who Giles was and what he was teaching. So Giles was a member of the Rice faculty, he was an economics professor, and he, he, it's hard to say what he, what his, what his position was vis-à-vis desegregation, except,

00:18:02.000 - 00:18:17.260

I guess it's not hard to say, but it is a little bit more nuanced. He's not what, I did some research on this, and I think if I click this, you should, we should be able to see. So I was able to go, again, because of the miracle of the Internet, I was able to go on,

00:18:17.390 - 00:18:37.910

on a database and look at old Houston Chronicles and things. And Giles is mentioned in a few stories related to this selection, and he is again. Here he is from the Houston Chronicle. "James B. Giles, Rice Institute economics professor, also was endorsed by the Parents

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Council." I'll talk about what the Parents Council was in a sec. "He said he feels that the board," quote, "should 'not be inactive in the field of integration.' Giles said he is," quote, "'moderate' on the question of integration. Mrs. Frank Dyer," her name was Dallas Dyer, "Giles's opponent for position four, said she

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is opposed to the board taking," quote, "'any steps.'" So that's, that's the, those were the stakes of this election, that's who Giles was running against, was someone who, who was not going to do anything to, to enforce the, the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board.

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And Giles, he calls himself a moderate on the question. He says the board should not be inactive, which is, which is a fun phrase. "Should be active," if you're grading undergraduate, undergraduate papers and say, let's put an active voice, "should be active."

00:19:36.560 - 00:19:47.510

The double negative is doing a lot of work there, though, I'm sure... Right. To help him with his constituents. Right. And so, and, you know, in raising the, one of the questions that this letter raises

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is, well, what is Giles's position? So we have who is Giles, well, he's an econ professor at Rice. But what, what is his position on integration? Is he, there's, there's pro- and anti-integration, but there's also, how does

00:20:00.680 - 00:20:17.180

one go about integrating the schools, and what is the timeframe? Because the Brown decision said, right, mandated that public schools need to be integrated, but there was a lot of, not so much gray area, but there was a lot of, there was a lot of different ways school boards could go about it.

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And over decades, school boards in the South in particular resisted integrating, chose different ways to integrate, and all of those, all of that, those questions got sort of fought out in local school board contests. So this is an instance in 1956 where this is the, I think this is the first school board

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election post-Brown in Houston, where voters have to decide, A, are they going to integrate the schools? Because one of the, one of the options is no, and then the other is yes, but how? And it seems that Giles is, he's in favor of integration, but it's not, it seems like his

00:21:03.210 - 00:21:22.890

opinion is, we have to integrate, that's the law, and if we do it on our own terms, then we don't have to face a lawsuit. Right, the people that he was running with were very much, their argument was, yeah, it's the law that we have to do it, right, this is what makes them moderates, I guess.

00:21:22.890 - 00:21:40.780

We have to do it. If we don't do it, we're gonna be sued and, it's gonna go, we're gonna have to integrate on not our own terms. Right, and that's the key, right, is local control of the process. There's a, there's a great book about the process in Houston of school integration, and

00:21:40.780 - 00:21:54.540

the title says it all, I think, Make Haste Slowly. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of Giles's position, from what we can glean from the Chronicle, right, is make haste slowly, right.

00:21:56.610 - 00:22:15.840

So you know, Thornhill, I don't think, agreed, it doesn't seem, with that position. For what it's worth, Houston responds and says he does not, Houston does not stake a claim in his response. He does not say, Well, Giles is right, you should go, be quiet.

00:22:16.950 - 00:22:36.210

His response is very measured, very sort of middle of the line. He says, I agree, he starts by trying to seek common ground with Thornhill. He says, I agree that the school board elections are really important. "Certainly the plan of having the public schools operated by locally elected board is

00:22:36.210 - 00:22:51.270

the best yet devised for giving local citizens the opportunity to have good schools and the responsibility if the schools are not good." I do see a lot of, that was Houston's response to Thornhill. There is some rhetoric of local control in Houston's response.

00:22:51.630 - 00:23:09.420

He does say he is not going to use his influence as the Rice Institute president to get Giles off the ticket. So he says here, I think, yeah, this is his second-to-last paragraph. "There are represented in our faculty and in our student body all kinds of opinions.

00:23:09.630 - 00:23:23.340

Nothing would be farther from the truth than to suggest that Rice people are unaware of public questions. It would also seem to me highly inappropriate to hold that such citizens as are associated with the Rice Institute, either as faculty members, as alumni, or as

00:23:23.340 - 00:23:45.290

students should be hindered from expressing their views and exerting their influence." And then he ends with, "I certainly join with you in deploring the impasse that seems to have developed in our school board." That impasse is due to the question of integration. He doesn't talk about that here, but, "that seems," quote, he continues

00:23:45.290 - 00:23:58.710

here, "that seems to have developed in our school board and hope that the judgment expressed by the voters in the next election may help to resolve it." So then, and he blind CCs here, George R. Brown, who's a member of the board, and J.

00:23:58.710 - 00:24:16.480

Newton Rayzor, who's also a member of the board. And these people will, will be key players in Rice desegregation. I wanna highlight J. Newton Rayzor as the blind CC here because a person who is referred to in the Chronicle as

00:24:16.480 - 00:24:36.940

Mrs. J. Newton Rayzor is Eugenia Rayzor. She is actually the chairman of the Parents Council for Improved Schools, which is the organization that is sort of fronting the, that is, that's the organization that is supporting the so-called liberal ticket.

00:24:37.650 - 00:24:59.760

So Giles and other liberals running for the school board in 1956 are endorsed by the Parents Council, which is run by Newton Rayzor's wife. So I'm sure Newton Rayzor was not surprised by the letter. He seemed, they were involved in these, in these public discussions.

00:25:00.240 - 00:25:13.410

So, there is, I'm trying to think if there, if, do you have any questions? Well, I mean, I guess one big question is, who won? Did he, was he elected to the school board? Oh, yeah.

00:25:13.410 - 00:25:30.590

Okay, and then I guess, you know... No, he was, he did, he did not win. He lost, he, he, he lost, the liberal ticket lost, and the conservatives ran the school board, I think, into the, into the '60s, maybe even into the '70s.

00:25:30.590 - 00:25:53.060

In December, so, this was, this letter is from October, leading up to the election, the election was early November. And then in December, the NAACP files a lawsuit against HISD because they had attempted to, to get some black children admitted at white HISD schools and were

00:25:53.060 - 00:26:12.170

denied earlier in the year. And HISD, or, the NAACP files a lawsuit against HISD, which eventually leads in the early '60s to a federal court mandating that HISD desegregate, which is exactly what the Parents Council candidate said would happen.

00:26:13.950 - 00:26:31.010

Well, it also raises the question, since you mentioned the NAACP, of what Thornhill might have in mind when he argues that the NAACP's actions were responsible for the election of a liberal majority to the school board. Yeah, that was a question I had as well.

00:26:31.010 - 00:26:57.880

So I did some research, I was able to look into, that is mentioned in, in Make Haste Slowly, in Kendall's Make, Make Haste Slowly. That was in reference to a story that the Chronicle ran on October 9th, so about two weeks before Thornhill wrote this letter, that was about a court case against the NAACP

00:26:57.880 - 00:27:13.480

by the State of Texas. The State of Texas was trying to get the NAACP thrown out of the state, claiming that they were violating their charter by being, by engaging in political activism, but especially elections.

00:27:13.810 - 00:27:42.130

And in that court case, they showed documents from the Houston branch of the NAACP, where the members of the NAACP are talking about their attempts to get out the vote during the 1950, what was it, '54, board election, and the '54 board election resulted in a liberal majority on the school board.

00:27:42.610 - 00:27:58.530

That was the only time that there was a liberal majority on the school board during this time period in HISD. So that's what that's in reference to. According to Make Haste Slowly, the, the conservative ticket running for the school

00:27:58.530 - 00:28:15.600

board during his time really grabbed on to that story. They reprinted, they took out a full-page ad in the Chronicle and other newspapers, they reprinted it, they added commentary about the NAACP is, is influencing our school board elections, and they're sort of agitators and outside, you know, that kind of stuff,

00:28:16.710 - 00:28:44.510

reminiscent of some rhetoric today, I think, some Antifa rhetoric today that we see. So that's what that was in reference to. Giles is, is not, I looked, we have something called, in the Woodson, we have things called info files, and so most people somehow who worked at the school or were students or, not

00:28:44.510 - 00:29:05.240

so much students, but a lot of people who worked at the school have a file with some information about them in the Woodson, and usually they're news clippings or things like that. The info file for Giles is two newspaper clippings from I think the early '70s. It was not super helpful on learning more about him, but I did learn that Giles,

00:29:05.240 - 00:29:32.850

around this time, I think it's 1956 or 1957, becomes the director of admissions at Rice. And he remains the director of admissions at Rice, the Rice Institute and then Rice University, when the name is changed in 1960, into the mid '70s, which means that Giles is one of the people who's in the room deciding when, when, when the first black

00:29:32.850 - 00:29:51.150

students are going, or applying to Rice in the mid '60s, he's one of the people deciding who to admit. And so he probably saw Jacqueline McCauley's application and Charles Freeman III's application, and he was in the conversations about their admittance to Rice in the mid '60s. So...

00:29:52.530 - 00:30:09.210

That's fascinating. Yeah, I think you can see why this document helps provide some context for the history at Rice of desegregation, and also because of President Houston's own statements during his term about why Rice could not integrate. I think it was before this, in the...

00:30:09.600 - 00:30:26.250

In the '40s, yeah, in the Thresher. Late 1940s, after World War II, the Thresher held some student polls and some editorials about integration, and Houston's response is kind of reminiscent of the tone that he takes in his response to Mr.

00:30:26.250 - 00:30:47.730

Thornhill, that, you know, his hands are tied, the charter is what it is, a very diplomatic, kind of measured tone, but one that I think goes on to have a long lasting impact on the discussion about integration at Rice, this idea that it's really the charter that, that is holding the university back.

00:30:49.200 - 00:31:03.570

So, very fascinating, thank you so much for bringing that document. I think there's a lot that, that, that raises for me, a lot of questions that we'll[ have to continue to research. I mean, one final question that I think is a little bit related to the document I wanted

00:31:03.570 - 00:31:13.680

to talk about today is do you know anything about William Thornhill, what class he graduated with at Rice? He says that he's an alumnus. Is that something that you were able to confirm?

00:31:14.670 - 00:31:33.480

No, I haven't, I haven't looked into him. I do think that it would not be difficult, right, I think, because the, the Rice Thresher is, is digitized on the Portal to Texas History, we could do a search for Thornhill in there and he might come up in an early Thresher.

00:31:33.600 - 00:31:43.210

Yeah. And the Campaniles are also on, digitized and available through the Woodson, at scholarship.rice.edu... Yes.

00:31:43.800 - 00:32:07.470

And so we could look for him there, and I think fairly quickly. Yeah, well, maybe, maybe while I'm talking, one of our intrepid audience members will be able to tell, 'cause, and I ask because I, as fate would have it, brought a document today that is also a letter from an alumnus of Rice, an alumnus from the class of 1924,

00:32:07.620 - 00:32:27.930

and so I was a little bit curious whether Thornhill goes back that far or whether he was a more recent alumnus. But what I wanted to share was a letter not to the president of the institute, but instead to the Rice Thresher, written by an alumnus named Joseph S.

00:32:27.930 - 00:32:41.280

Werlin. And let me see if I can pull up the Thresher issue I'm interested in here. Can you see that on your screen? Can you make sure? Can you see the whole page from left to right? Yes.

00:32:41.520 - 00:33:02.660

Okay, okay. So what I have on my screen is the front page of the Thresher from February 27, 1925. And this is one of my favorite mastheads, we noticed last week, I think, when we were looking at some images of Jack Shelton with the basketball team, in 1920 I believe, that

00:33:02.660 - 00:33:26.210

on the basketball players jerseys, they actually had the owl that you can see depicted here behind the masthead or the, the name, "The Thresher," at the top. And so we've become familiar over the, the, the weeks that we've done the doc talks with Threshers from this period, and right away, as we're, as we're looking on the front page,

00:33:26.210 - 00:33:39.230

we can see some familiar names. President Lovett is apparently on his way back to Houston. There's an article about a nomination for the May Queen. We've talked about the May Fete in the 1920s before.

00:33:40.010 - 00:33:55.850

But what I'm interested in, as I mentioned, is a letter written to the Thresher on page two from Joseph S. Werlin, who is an alumnus of Rice. He graduated the year before in 1924.

00:33:56.150 - 00:34:20.900

And in that time, we read here in an editor's note at the top of his letter, that Worland is now attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. And according to the editor's note here, while he's there, Werlin has met some other Rice alumni, including Jabo Hathorn, which, that name rings a little bit of a bell for

00:34:20.900 - 00:34:46.370

me. I think that he shows up a lot in the Campanile as a football player at, at Rice. And also Hathorn's wife and another Rice alum, Harry Kessler. All also are now at the University of Chicago. And so the editor's note says that Werlin's there in the Windy City, he's met some other

00:34:46.370 - 00:35:01.940

Rice students, and in fact, they've organized a Rice Club there at the University of Chicago, and Worland is contemplating joining it, the editor says, "at an early date." And so he promises to keep the Thresher in touch with the activities of these old Rice grads.

00:35:01.950 - 00:35:19.260

I mean, this is something, of course, that alumni of universities love to do is connect with other alumni and keep the, the institution up to date on what they're doing, whether it's in alumni publications like here at Rice, the Sallyport, or the Rice Alumni News.

00:35:19.280 - 00:35:44.720

But here it's interesting that Werlin, as a very recent graduate of Rice, just walked the stage the year before, decides to write his letter to the student newspaper, to the Thresher. And he says in the headline here, "Werlin writes of 'Democracy, Rice and Chicago University.'" I'm just gonna read the very beginning of his letter to get a

00:35:44.720 - 00:36:03.620

flavor of his voice and what he's writing about. Worland says, "That the Rice student body is thoroughly democratic, nobody, least of all the students themselves, thinks of questioning. Let an outsider raise the question and immediately a host of 'clinching' points are

00:36:03.620 - 00:36:24.500

made. Rice has no fraternities, all are welcome to the commons, student offices and honors are based on merit, dances and entertainments are open to all, the Student Association is closed to none. In brief, there is absolutely no discrimination." And so he says, "If

00:36:24.500 - 00:36:45.980

democracy consists in equality of person and opportunity, then Rice is certainly democratic." Now, there are a lot of things we could talk about just in that opening few lines, because anyone familiar with the early years of the Rice Institute knows that it wasn't always the case that Rice did not have exclusive student clubs.

00:36:46.280 - 00:37:06.470

And in fact, there was some controversy in the early years of the institute about clubs like I think the Idlers and some others that are escaping me, some concern maybe even that student groups like the literary societies would become too exclusive or elite. And so President Lovett stepped in to try to change that and make sure that the

00:37:06.470 - 00:37:28.550

organizations were more open. But clearly, by the time Werlin is a student in the 1920s, we gather that the student body has come to embrace this idea of Rice as a democratic institution, and I think that reflects the aftermath of World War I, when of course President Woodrow Wilson was

00:37:28.550 - 00:37:50.480

talking about making the entire world safe for democracy and really valuing democracy in a global context, and so the idea of the Rice Institute being very democratic, open to all students, no tuition being charged, very socially open, is something that Werlin knows that the students he's writing to are going to take a great deal of pride in.

00:37:51.680 - 00:38:13.730

But as you read on in the letter, you discover that Werlin's kind of setting the reader up, because he says at the opening that everybody believes Rice is very democratic, and yet he says here at the bottom of this first column, "And yet I wonder," he says, "I wonder if after all, our Rice democracy is not that of the group,"

00:38:14.570 - 00:38:34.780

and he says he wonders if it's sufficiently sensitive and elastic to comprehend new conditions if they should arise. "In short," he asks, "how much strain could it stand?" Okay, now, maybe because this is a doc talk about the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, you can

00:38:35.230 - 00:38:50.920

guess where Werlin is going here. But he moves in this next section to an illustration, and he asks his readers to imagine a thought experiment. And I want to preface this part of the article by noting that he's going to, to use

00:38:50.920 - 00:39:10.690

some racial stereotypes in this article that I think reflect his own situation in the 1920s, and certainly the way that people talked, white students, I should say, at the Rice Institute, talked at this particular moment in time. So we wanna handle some of these, these words with care, because the the argument

00:39:10.690 - 00:39:28.920

that Werlin is making is, we're going to see, is a little bit countercultural, and yet some of the ways that he talks about racial groups are still very bound by culture and stereotype of that moment. But basically, he wants his readers to imagine a thought experiment.

00:39:28.930 - 00:39:54.280

He says, "Suppose that some fine day, while the dorm students are seated at dinner in the commons, there suddenly entered a score or so," and I'm quoting him here, "Negroes, a half hundred or more Mongolians, [...] and some half dozen Hindus, briefly a veritable mosaic of races." And imagine, Werlin says, "that these people began dispersing

00:39:54.280 - 00:40:18.460

themselves about the several tables, occupying the vacant chairs beside and across from the already seated Rice students." Okay, now, you know, I'm kind of trying to imagine a student at the Rice Institute opening up the second page of the Thresher and reading this, and given what we just saw from another alumnus of the university, which

00:40:18.610 - 00:40:44.680

one of our crack archivists from the Woodson has found out for us in the chat, was a graduate from 1951, so even later than this, in 1951, we know how one alum thought about the question of integration, and we've talked on the doc talks before about the nervousness of even progressives in the 1920s on racial questions about social

00:40:44.680 - 00:41:11.050

integration. The idea of social equality was a bridge too far, even for those white progressives who were willing to entertain the idea of integration as a, as a political ideal. The idea of the commons, the dining room being integrated in the way that Werlin is imagining here, I think would have made some readers very nervous right from the

00:41:11.050 - 00:41:27.940

beginning of his letter, or at least we can speculate about that. One question I have is, how would readers have received this little thought experiment that, that Werlin gives them? This is a few years before, by the way, in 1928, another piece in the thrasher that

00:41:27.940 - 00:41:49.360

we've talked about on the doc talks, discusses a Pre-Law Society banquet where the question of integration was raised, and of course, people who've been to the talks before or listened to our recent podcast episode on that document know the, the uproar that that discussion caused in 1928, just a few years after this.

00:41:49.360 - 00:42:08.390

But let me continue with Werlin's letter. He asks his readers to imagine the dining room filling with a veritable mosaic of races, and then he goes further. He says, imagine that "in the classroom," and also "in the lounging room of the Autry

00:42:08.420 - 00:42:36.560

House, you [were to] find" what he calls, quote, "the same crazy quilt of humans." And he, I'm gonna skip over here some of the stereotyped language that he uses that, that is very much on the screen, to describe some of the non-white, archetypically non-white, bodies that he is imagining occupying space on campus, everywhere from the intimate

00:42:36.560 - 00:42:56.300

spaces of the dining room to the classroom to the lounging room of the Autry House, a student social center on campus. And then he imagines going beyond campus, that you had to town, and "your streetcar neighbor," he says, imagine, is, quote-unquote, "colored." And when you

00:42:56.300 - 00:43:17.420

entered the movies, imagine you found him there, too. "And in Coney Island and in the Rice Hotel lobby," he's just sort of layering on one space after another that he is imagining being integrated in this way. And then in all caps, he poses the punchline question, "What, gentlemen of Rice and

00:43:17.420 - 00:43:41.920

ladies, would you do," in such a situation? Now, I'm gonna quote here what Werlin says next. He says, "Your answer probably is, who in God's own Southland could imagine such a regime? And he goes on in this paragraph to underscore the, the implausibility of such a

00:43:41.920 - 00:44:01.710

scenario in the minds of, what he imagines would be in the minds of many of his readers at the Rice Institute. He says all of this is "Nonsense, unbelievable, not in America." It couldn't happen here. "However," Werlin pivots, "however and whatever your answers may be, it

00:44:01.710 - 00:44:25.350

may interest you to know that my illustrations were not hypothetical and non-existent, but are actually taken from reality. Such conditions actually prevail and have prevailed for years at the University of Chicago." Remember, that's where Werlin has gone from Rice to study for a graduate

00:44:25.350 - 00:44:42.030

degree, and he's met other Rice students there, And he says that in Chicago he's seen these things happen in the classrooms, in the dining rooms, on the streetcars, in the movie theater. He's, he's experienced integration of this kind, "and the remarkable thing," Werlin

00:44:42.030 - 00:45:03.730

says, "the remarkable thing about it is that there doesn't appear to be the slightest friction or objection to such a new and revolutionary state of affairs among the students. One would never dream, judging from Chicago University, that such a situation isn't most, isn't most usual and natural, and does not exist everywhere." And

00:45:03.730 - 00:45:20.080

here Werlin lays his own cards on the table. How does he feel about this? He says, "I, for one, must admit, it is a beautiful thing, and am convinced that Chicago University has taken a bold step in the right direction.

00:45:20.080 - 00:45:41.680

Here, metaphysical wranglings over the nature of 'democracy' was given short life. They believed in living, not talking, democracy. [...] And so Chicago University is today symbolical of democracy in the most rigorous definition of that term." And he brings it home with the final paragraph.

00:45:41.680 - 00:46:10.650

"As to Rice, he says," it has had as yet little opportunity to examine her idol. Let us hope that her liberal spirit will very shortly outleap her extra-campus environment and atmosphere of inertia that now so sorely repress it, and lead her to emulate, even surpass, the liberalism of a Chicago university.

00:46:12.430 - 00:46:30.610

So that's Joseph S. Werlin writing of "Democracy, Rice and Chicago University" to the Rice Thresher in 1925, many years before the civil rights movement and the, the actions in Houston around the school board election that you were talking to us about, Dr.

00:46:30.610 - 00:46:46.350

Jones, and what questions does, does that raise for you? I've got some questions for sure about this particular article. I mean, aside from one that you've already mentioned, which is how did, how did readers view this, and also, were there reactions to it printed in later Threshers?

00:46:46.350 - 00:47:03.490

Sort of rebuttals or, right. Yeah, I mean, that, that's something that we could, we could look into, because we know from, from the 1928 pre-law banquet, there were students on different sides of the question even at that banquet, there were, I think, five students who voted for

00:47:03.490 - 00:47:15.990

integration at this banquet, and, but then fourteen voted against, and one wonders how Werlin's letter was received. I think that's a great question. And one of my questions...

00:47:16.280 - 00:47:32.740

I wonder if Werlin...oh, sorry. Go ahead. I wonder if Werlin, just his, I'm thinking about his personal experience, did he, was he a, maybe accepted Jim Crow in Houston with unthinking, you know, unthinking about it and

00:47:32.740 - 00:47:51.930

then went to Chicago and experienced it and instead of being revolted was actually kind of astounded by it? And I can imagine it's something that he seems to care deeply about if he wrote this rather lengthy piece and sent it to the newspaper of his alma mater.

00:47:52.230 - 00:48:14.400

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, he's kind of framing it as going to Chicago and having this experience there, but one wonders, given how eloquent he is, and pieces of this letter about the ideal of democracy, it raises the question of whether he had started to question "the idol," as he

00:48:14.400 - 00:48:34.140

puts it, of segregation in the South, even before he left Houston and went to Chicago, where there already, was there already questioning what was happening, even while he was a student at the Rice Institute, or was this catalyzed by his experience at Chicago of a very different environment?

00:48:34.140 - 00:48:54.000

I mean, to me, that kind of raises, one of the first questions I had when I read this letter, which is, who is Joseph S. Werlin? I mean, this just cries out for a little bit more information and context. And it turns out that Werlin went on from the Rice Institute to have a pretty

00:48:54.000 - 00:49:09.930

interesting career. He went to the University of Chicago, he got a master's degree in history there at the University of Chicago, so I like him already. He studied, while he was at the University of Chicago, he studied the Russian

00:49:09.930 - 00:49:37.380

Revolution and the Bolsheviks, and he was himself the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States who had moved from the north to Pearland, Texas, where he grew up on a farm outside of Houston until he came to the Rice Institute. He also had a brother from that same family who went to the Rice Institute.

00:49:37.620 - 00:49:56.520

But you can maybe see from that family history where he got some of his interest in the history of Russia. And he, as part of his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, later traveled to Russia during this revolutionary time, and came back and spoke, even while he was a

00:49:56.520 - 00:50:22.890

graduate student in Chicago, about his experiences there and what he learned. You can see an article about him here in the Chicago Tribune in 1929 with a photograph of him and an announcement about a lecture that he was giving to an organization composed of college students about the history of communism, which is what he's studying there

00:50:22.890 - 00:50:45.840

at Chicago. So that's Joseph S. Werlin, and in fact, he returned to Houston in the end, and we read about him in an alumni newsletter many years later in 1964. So right as the charter trial is unfolding and integration is beginning, we read in the

00:50:45.840 - 00:51:07.530

Sallyport, the Rice alumni newsletter, of Dr. Joseph Sidney Werlin's death in 1964 at the age of 64, and we find out here that he had become a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Houston. He was a member of the Rice class of 1924.

00:51:07.560 - 00:51:26.430

He also attended the Naval Academy before he came to Rice. He went to the University of Berlin, the University of Chicago. He was a charter member of the University of Houston's faculty, as you mentioned, the Houston school board initially created what became the University of Houston as a junior

00:51:26.430 - 00:51:47.490

college, but in 1934 it became a university, and Werlin was a member of the first faculty of the University of Houston and went on to a long career there, studying not only sociology, not surprisingly, he was at the University of Chicago during the heyday of the Park School of Urban Sociology.

00:51:47.490 - 00:52:06.850

But he studied Latin American countries as well, and in fact received some commendations from Mexico for his work on Latin American studies. To this day, there is an award given at the University of Houston to students in sociology called the Joseph S.

00:52:06.850 - 00:52:29.010

Werlin Award, and there are papers that were donated by Professor Joseph S. Werlin to the University of Houston Special Collections, which includes folders that I would love to go see about his class lecture materials, including sociology courses that he apparently taught on subjects like, and I'm quoting the titles here, Negroes: The

00:52:29.010 - 00:52:54.570

Urban Situation," Sociology 222; "Negro Voting Discrimination," Sociology 232; "The Economy of Africa," Sociology 331. Since he died in 1964, and the University of Houston also integrated around this same time, it raises questions for me about when those courses were offered, and is there a

00:52:54.570 - 00:53:12.750

longer history of Werlin's interest in these questions that he expressed even in this early letter to the Rice Thresher in 1925? So that's a little bit more about Joseph Werlin, and it's actually interesting to note that when President William Houston, who you were talking about, was inaugurated as the

00:53:12.750 - 00:53:25.860

President of Rice, Joseph S. Werlin was there at the ceremony. Oh, really! Yes, as a representative of several schools with which he had been associated in the

00:53:25.860 - 00:53:40.770

course of his long academic career. So we know a little bit more about Werlin, but I think there's other questions that, that this article to the Thresher raises for me, not just about Werlin, but also about the University of Chicago.

00:53:41.580 - 00:54:04.620

I mean, the picture that Werlin paints here of the University of Chicago is really compelling, and, you know, it does kind of beg the question of, of whether the kinds of scenarios that Werlin describes as ripped from the headlines, as part of the daily reality of the University of Chicago, can we find out a little bit more about what was

00:54:04.620 - 00:54:25.200

happening there when Werlin was there? And it turns out that the University of Chicago did have, even by 1925, when Werlin wrote this letter, a long history of educating African American students, not only as undergraduates, but also as graduate students.

00:54:26.730 - 00:54:55.380

In fact, I read that by 1943, the University of Chicago had already awarded at least 45 PhDs to African Americans, which, in that, at that time, was more than any university in the world. And among those PhDs were some leading black intellectuals of the early 20th century, including another alumnus of the Chicago history department, which is where

00:54:55.410 - 00:55:11.760

Werlin is studying here, Carter G. Woodson, who received his master's degree in history, the same degree Werlin was studying for, in 1908. And, of course, Woodson went on to get his PhD from Harvard University and is known as

00:55:11.760 - 00:55:28.470

the father of African American history. In 1926, the year after this letter was written, Woodson helped with a successful campaign to have Congress declare a Negro History Week that laid the foundations for Black History Month that's still observed today.

00:55:29.220 - 00:55:48.600

And more importantly, Woodson went on to, to form organizations for the study of African American history, the Journal of Negro History that is today the Journal of African American History, so that gives you a little bit of a sense of what was happening at the University of Chicago even before the Rice Institute opened its doors.

00:55:48.600 - 00:56:14.580

And so Werlin's not wrong that there's something different about the University of Chicago, but I do have some questions about how he describes how easy that has been at the University of Chicago, because he, perhaps to press the point in his comparison with the Rice Institute, makes it sound as though, you know, Chicago talked the, walked

00:56:14.580 - 00:56:33.780

the walk from the very beginning instead of just talking the talk. That, that they had a short life of "metaphysical wranglings over the nature of democracy," and that there's absolutely no friction or objection, he says, at Chicago, to such a new and revolutionary state of affairs among the students.

00:56:34.440 - 00:56:50.720

That definitely raises some questions for me. I mean, I'd like to know a little bit more about what was happening in Chicago, because at least the little that I've been able to glean so far suggests that it wasn't entirely frictionless at Chicago either.

00:56:50.730 - 00:57:14.580

Of course, this is only a few years after the red summer of 1919, the Chicago race riots that, that came very close to the doorsteps of University of Chicago students and faculty. And we know that in the same years that Carter G. Woodson was studying at the University of Chicago in 1907, there were a couple of

00:57:14.580 - 00:57:40.380

controversies involving black women studying at the university who were prevented from living on campus in the dorms, and in one case, a student was accused by another student of passing as white in order to join a sorority on campus. And so the idea of a complete democracy, at least in, in 1907 or 1908, might be a little

00:57:40.380 - 00:57:59.490

bit strange, but maybe we can imagine that Werlin doesn't know about all that. He may be thinking of more recent events, because in 1923, the new administration at the University of Chicago had made a decision to allow African American students to live on campus in the dorms.

00:58:00.450 - 00:58:21.810

So that, I think, was a pretty revolutionary shift in what was known at the time as "the social question," and we know from the yearbooks at the University of Chicago around that time that you see more and more African American students appearing in their pages, in student groups, and so that might be partly what Werlin is thinking of when he

00:58:21.810 - 00:58:38.850

imagines these thought experiments. Perhaps he has in fact experienced some of the kinds of social integration that he challenges Rice Institute students to imagine and also to enact or even emulate by the end of the article.

00:58:38.850 - 00:59:00.350

But I think it is interesting, the power that these narratives have. Werlin kind of accepts uncritically the idea that University of Chicago has always been a panacea, and that narrative gives them a certain power in making this argument about the defects, as he sees them, of democracy at the Rice Institute.

00:59:00.830 - 00:59:25.110

But when you scratch a little bit below the surface, you find that at the University of Chicago, not unlike at the Rice Institute, a lot of those changes came with a lot of contestation and required key administrators, key student leaders, to take a stand. So that's the document that I brought for today.

00:59:26.330 - 00:59:44.410

I think that's fascinating. I think, perhaps because of the research that I, that I do now through the postdoc and everything, I, it's a little, I can make connections between universities and faculty and things like that. So when we were talking about the University of Chicago, I

00:59:44.410 - 01:00:06.880

immediately thought of Thomas F. Freeman, who was one of the first black professors at, at Rice. He taught for decades in the religious studies department as a visiting professor, he taught a class or two a year, and then mostly he was at Texas Southern, and, and

01:00:07.060 - 01:00:24.870

over there, but he got his PhD at the University of Chicago. Yeah, and I think we've also, in one of our earlier doc talks, we've talked about the night schools that were developed in Houston in the 1920s, right as Werlin is writing, and one of the architects of those schools we learned was studying at the University of

01:00:24.870 - 01:00:48.300

Chicago as well. So, you know, to me, it's a way of underlining, and I think this is Werlin's whole point, underlining for his readers, and also for us, historical contingency, the idea that there was a certain way that things had to be in the 1920s, and there was no way for it to be any different, is, is the kind of position that

01:00:48.300 - 01:01:12.390

we see President Houston taking a few years later, and yet Werlin is, is suggesting that, wait a second, there are other ways of running a university that were happening at the very same time as the Rice Institute was, was beginning, and so Werlin is kind of using those peer institutions to challenge the institute.

01:01:12.480 - 01:01:39.690

So I think that's, that's interesting, and to me, you know, set alongside your document today, it kind of raises the question of alumni roles and responsibilities for their alma mater. You know, we saw Thornhill writing to complain to President Houston about Giles's running on the school board, but here Werlin is writing as an alumnus to

01:01:39.690 - 01:01:58.530

the students to challenge them to think a little bit outside the box and in a way that, that we would recognize as, today, as more forward-looking. And so I think it works out well, as it often does on doc talks to discover that these documents do raise questions of each other as well as of us.

01:01:58.530 - 01:02:14.910

So thanks again, Dr. Jones, for being here and sitting in for Dr. Byrd. Thanks to all of you in the audience who have joined us today. Tonight, the task force has a public event at 6:00 PM, a lecture by Davarian Baldwin,

01:02:14.910 - 01:02:31.620

and so I hope that you will go to the website, taskforce.rice.edu, and join us on that Zoom webinar. It's gonna be a great talk, and very much, I think, in the vein of some of the questions that we've been talking about even today.

01:02:31.620 - 01:02:45.900

So if you're a doc talk fan, you don't wanna miss that event tonight, or our doc talk next week, where we'll be joined by some other members of the Rice faculty to talk about the work of the task force. And so thanks again for being here.

01:02:45.930 - 01:02:51.060

Thanks, Dr. Jones. Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's fun. Have a great weekend, everyone.