00:00:00.090 - 00:00:16.570

...starting, or are you starting? Okay. I started. We didn't even talk about it being Friday.

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And I'm glad that it is. It is Friday. Before a long weekend. Thank goodness.

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Two holidays, I think, one on top of the other. How are you holding up with another unusual start to an unusual semester? I'm feeling, feeling quite positive about it. It's, and it's because of the number of students around.

00:01:04.350 - 00:01:22.620

So I just feel a lot better than, I don't even remember how many semesters it's been since before, but however many semesters it's been since before. That's, that's right. Yes, the campus is coming a little bit more back to life, so that is encouraging.

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Yeah. Yeah, it's humming. Well, welcome to everyone joining. We're just gonna wait a couple minutes here as people are filing in and we'll get started.

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If you're joining us for the first time on our doc talks, my name is Caleb McDaniel, I'm the chair of the history department here at Rice, and I'm also the co-chair of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice with my colleague Alex Byrd. And we're very excited today to be resuming our weekly doc talks, which we began about a

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year ago, if I'm not mistaken, last fall we started meeting on Zoom every Friday at noon central to share with you some of the documents that have caught our eye as historians doing research for the task force, and to work through them live and without a, without a net.

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We're really just using this as an opportunity to show how historians think about sources that are important to our work, and we're grateful to have you along. I think over the last year, some of the best doc talks we've had have been ones where we have audience participation.

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If you have questions or comments, things that you'd like to say about the, the sources, you can use the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen and we'll make sure to leave some time at the end to address those questions or to incorporate your ideas and comments. Also, if you haven't been to our website in a while, the task force website at

00:03:21.740 - 00:03:45.650

taskforce.rice.edu has posted on the front page the updates that were released by the task force this summer. One on the research that we've been doing about the history of slavery and its relationship to the Rice Institute and its founding, and also an update about research

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on the Founder's Memorial in the academic quadrangle, the historic academic quadrangle. And we've just recently, I think in the last seven days, if I'm not mistaken, posted an appendix to that update that was promised in the text but just went live on the website, and it's a document that has sample responses from a questionnaire that was

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circulated in the spring that solicited feedback from the Rice community. Basically asked how they were thinking about the Founder's Memorial and what their best ideas or the best angles of approach to the question of the Founder's Memorial would be, and I think it's really a testament, that document.

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It will be very interesting, I think, for future people in our position, future historians, to look back and see just the range of thinking and thoughtfulness within the Rice community at this moment in time. So it's a great snapshot and I think gives a lot of food for thought.

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So if you haven't seen that yet, really encourage you to go to the website and check out not only the updates but also those sample responses. Dr. Byrd, it's great to be back with you. I think we've gotta, we've got to stretch our our doc talk muscles a little bit, since

00:05:06.540 - 00:05:18.300

we've taken the summer off. But that's the way it is any time you get back to the classroom, so. And... There may be bumps. There may be bumps today, but that's, that's okay.

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I'm sure we'll have everything worked out over, over the next couple of weeks, and who knows, today could, could be excellent. Could be. See, I love that, that optimistic energy. Well, our format of course for these doc talks is just each of us brings a document to

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talk about and and we can discuss what caught our eye about it, what kinds of questions we think we can answer with these documents. So I'm curious, what did you bring to show us today? So I, I brought a vita, a CV, today.

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The, a vita is what we very fancy academics I think like to call our version of a résumé, and it typically focuses on our work and what we've produced. It may also, it will list our jobs as, as, as well.

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But unlike a résumé, it will list things like how many talks we've given, which, the kind of material that doesn't usually make it onto a traditional résumé. And the, the résumé that I'm going to focus on today is by Rose M. Brewer, or Rose Marie Brewer, who was an early black faculty member on campus.

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And let me get it cued up so we can take a look at it and do what we do with these documents. You'll see from the title that I've given it, "Black Faculty at Rice", that I'm gonna try and explore it in a, in a, particular to Dr.

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Brewer, but also as it regards a larger research project or question that the task force has been assigned to, to focus on, especially this semester, by our research subcommittee, or working group. Have I renamed our working groups committees?

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Our research working group, which is particularly interested in, in recovering the history of black faculty at Rice, but not just the history of black faculty at Rice as individuals and as, as persons, as important as that is, but the institutional history of black faculty, what have been the institutional efforts that have been

00:08:08.730 - 00:08:36.660

developed and undertaken at the university to attract and keep black faculty? That's the larger framing of this particular project that we're taking on, and I'm going to approach this document with that project in mind. And what we have here is a two-page vita that has been stapled together.

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It is, I think, obviously typewritten on a kind of yellowed paper. If it were a word processor, the font would be Courier. It is quite attractively spaced and is divided into about a dozen, about a dozen categories that are common, that are common to academic vitas.

00:09:07.680 - 00:09:31.380

We, we have at the very top the title "vita." We have Professor Brewer's name, unlike in the vitae or résumés that would be produced now, there's, there's hardly no variation in font. So if this were a current vita, Rose Marie Brewer would be at least in 20- or 25-point

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font, but, but here, everything is in about 12-point Courier font or what would pass for Courier font, and to call attention to a section of the vita, all that the vita writer has is capitalization at their disposal. So down the left side of the vita are these capitalized sections, and then the

00:10:00.750 - 00:10:18.300

further details are spelled out to the right, and the sections are like name, address, date of birth? Glad we've gotten rid of that on vitas. Education, employment history, fellowships and grants, dissertations, area of interest,

00:10:18.780 - 00:10:42.780

etc. And what strikes me, there are a couple of things that strike me about this document that don't necessarily speak to the larger project that I started out with, but, but I find striking nonetheless, and just want to mention. There is some evidence here about the evolution of a teaching scholar.

00:10:43.470 - 00:11:13.380

You can see from her education and when she begins graduate school in relation to when Dr. Brewer gets in the classroom and starts teaching, is it's all relatively quickly. She, she earns her M.A. In 1971, and she's in the classroom even, even before that, at Indiana, at Indiana

00:11:13.410 - 00:11:33.570

University. By the school year of 1974-75, she is a visiting lecturer at Rice University. From the vita is evidence that she, she lands at Rice before she has the PhD, which Dr.

00:11:33.570 - 00:11:55.020

McDaniel and I, because we pay attention to our older colleagues, we know was long practiced at the university. Some of the most distinguished researchers in, in my lifetime at the university are people who got their first jobs here before their dissertations were, were completed.

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And I find that interesting because we, stop me after this, Dr. McDaniel, because that is, that's something that has turned into a kind of hard line in places when it comes to recruiting, but one of the questions that we would raise about Rice and its institutional efforts at recruiting is whether that, whether that

00:12:20.310 - 00:12:43.920

practice was widespread or whether it's just anecdotal with me. But also, what, what would a practice like that have served at an institution like ours? What would it have meant to hire people just before they had their PhDs? How would that have been, or was it, did people see it as in the interest of, of the

00:12:43.920 - 00:13:10.080

university? Another thing that I find striking is the description of her dissertation project at the bottom of the first page under dissertation, and at the top of the second page, her statement of professional plans. And what strikes me about this document that's, that's written no, no later, no

00:13:10.080 - 00:13:36.840

earlier than 1975, is just how current her research interests are, how cutting edge they would even be today. Her dissertation focuses on the, the, the politics, I won't risk a word that I am better reading silently than pronouncing, the political development of black youth and

00:13:36.840 - 00:14:01.500

the ways in which their family, school, and and peer groups and racial awareness and other variables leads to the development of a youth black politics. And those of you who will, after this talk, go follow Dr. Brewer's career, you'll see her, last year, you'll find her online talking about youth

00:14:01.650 - 00:14:21.860

politics and youth black politics in places like Minneapolis and Ferguson. And the statement of her professional plans is also cutting edge. These are, these are still areas that are at the forefront of research in sociological and African and African American studies.

00:14:21.870 - 00:14:48.540

"I'm interested in doing teaching and research in the areas of power relations, structured inequality." That's, that, that is still the dominant phrase, "structured inequality and several applied areas in, in sociology, specifically urban and medical systems." So that, this would be the area that we would know of as today as health

00:14:48.540 - 00:15:10.250

disparities, right. So those, those things strike me right off, and there are some, there are some questions that I, that I'd be interested in that, that don't necessarily speak to the larger project that I described before at the beginning.

00:15:10.250 - 00:15:20.550

One of them is, is personally, who is Dr. Brewer before she's Dr. Brewer? Right. Where does she come from?

00:15:20.570 - 00:15:44.240

And there's some evidence here, right, or there may be some evidence here where she's, where she's from. It turns out that the evidence on her education is actually pretty good evidence. She's, she's born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, several generations after the, the, the destruction of, of black Tulsa.

00:15:44.690 - 00:16:16.610

She lives in the, in the midst of the black memory of, of that destruction, and she's written quite poignantly, poignantly, essays on growing up under those conditions. Questions about what she does, right, and how she fares at Rice, come immediately to mind. But I gotta get off those quickly, because the, the, the research and teaching

00:16:16.610 - 00:16:52.040

working group is interested in the institutional history of black faculty at the university. And this is a question that has has been important even in public discourse outside of, outside of the ivory tower lately, especially given the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones at the University of North Carolina and her tenure case, what

00:16:52.040 - 00:17:21.680

became of her tenure case, especially as it, as it, as it reached the trustees at UNC. And here's just an, an example of the ways that some scholars, right, have gone into these structural questions or have approached these structural questions of black faculty on campus and black women faculty in particular on campus, which is,

00:17:22.280 - 00:17:43.190

which is the, the way the question began to be framed once interest was generated around Hannah-Jones' case at UNC. This is an article that I hope you'll go to in the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can just point your browser there.

00:17:43.190 - 00:18:00.520

And I think I'll show it because we can, we can workshop it a little, Dr. McDaniel. Dr. McDaniel told us right at the beginning he's the chair of the history department, so we're going to do some admin work, I think. ..

00:18:00.520 - 00:18:22.420

Uh oh. On this, on this document. So I hope that some of y'all in the audience can go to it as well. But here is the, here is the, the document or the article, and in

00:18:22.420 - 00:18:46.810

great, are we in the 21st century? In great 21st-century fashion, it's also tied to a kind of database at the bottom that allows you to search the number of tenured black women faculty in the professorate across the United States.

00:18:47.290 - 00:19:17.500

And its data is from 2019, and in 2019, there were about, even though the number I'm going to give you speaks with some precision, there are about 251,921 tenured professors in the academy in the United States. So a little more than almost 252,000 professors who had reached a kind of midway

00:19:17.500 - 00:19:38.980

point in their careers at the, at the university, at their universities. And about 5,200 of those were women, were black women. So I'm in the history department, so my math isn't great, but that's not going to be a very large number.

00:19:38.980 - 00:19:59.500

It's gonna be a quite small number of around two, two percent. And this would give us the opportunity, if we had favorite schools, we could just search these schools and see, and see what came up in this data from 2019. So if you have a favorite school and you're in the audience, just go ahead and put it in

00:19:59.500 - 00:20:23.440

the Q&A and we'll do a search on it. One of my favorite schools is, uh oh, I don't even know how to spell one of my favorite schools. My, my, one of my children calls this Smartmouth. Smartmouth College. I don't know why, but I like this school a lot.

00:20:23.650 - 00:20:41.860

Swarthmore. We used to have a, Rice used to have a relationship with them. And we see at Swarthmore, they're above the national average, right, of 2%. They're at almost, at almost 4%. No one in the chat has given me any favorite colleges, so I'm just, I'm just gonna keep

00:20:41.860 - 00:21:02.310

moving, moving on, or did I lose the chat? No, but I'll throw out my alma mater, A&M. You can put that in and see. There are a lot of Texas A&Ms, but we probably want the one in...

00:21:02.310 - 00:21:06.630

College Station. Oh my goodness, where is it? Second, second row. Okay, here we go.

00:21:11.160 - 00:21:39.590

So y'all are coming in, you have 20, little less than the national average of 2.1%, but, but because the school is so big, you do have the question, would, would be that, right, does that feel bigger than Swarthmore, that comes in at a higher percentage, but a much, a much smaller number.

00:21:40.220 - 00:22:02.240

So I would, I would be curious about what that meant for community if you were interested in a community of black women professors. I won't even ask the questions, I'll just, I'll just say, right, that even though the percentage is low, maybe there's a, maybe, it's an open question of whether that lower

00:22:02.240 - 00:22:24.530

percentage results in less, in less community. This, this, this database raises all kinds of methodological questions that we don't, we won't get into, about how you count who's black, right, and if we knew these institutions really well, we could look at those numbers and we might say that number

00:22:24.530 - 00:22:39.930

seems off, and that would head us into other questions. What the, what the categories of rank are, because if your question is about community, then you wouldn't necessarily only want to be looking at tenured professors. Right, right.

00:22:39.990 - 00:22:54.570

Might want to look at on the tenure track or even people who aren't on the tenure track, but still can be vital in, in providing community and, and contributing to the institution. Yeah, and then we would hope that all these numbers would go up.

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So here we, here we see how the, the case at UNC has particularly shaped the discourse in the Chronicle at, at this moment. I notice that you closed that before you before you searched a particular school that we might be especially interested in.

00:23:16.500 - 00:23:41.820

I did, but I, but mainly because I only, well, mainly because I can do it by heart, is one, I don't need to search it, but also because I only wanna take about six more minutes, and I, and I want to get to some of the questions. But when we get to Q&A, we can have, we can have people throw the numbers in the, in the

00:23:41.820 - 00:24:02.660

chat, whether they think it's, where does it lie? I'll say that the number is between Texas A&M and and Swarthmore, right. So they can, they can pick what, what it is, I think it's about four. About four at Rice.

00:24:02.660 - 00:24:26.160

It might be three, three or four. But let's, let's head back into our project with Dr. Brewer. And I think it's okay to ask, right, why is this even a question?

00:24:26.640 - 00:24:44.700

Right. Why is the question of the number of black women faculty at the university a question? And fortunately for us, we don't have to answer it personally. We can count on our institution to, to, to answer it for us.

00:24:44.700 - 00:25:07.970

And in our, in our strategic plan that lays out the highest aspirations of the university, the Vision for the Second Century, Second Decade, it goes like this: "We must accelerate progress and building a diverse faculty and work to retain and advance the careers of faculty and their academic leaders." Why must we do this?

00:25:07.970 - 00:25:28.860

According to the V2C2, it's because every important thing at the university depends on it doing well. Every single and vital action of the university depends on the diversity of, of the faculty.

00:25:28.860 - 00:25:51.150

"Problems are better solved," says the V2C2, "Problems are better solved," which is backed up by a whole lot of research if we want to go further into it, but "Problems are better solved and innovations are more creative when we infuse the learning and research environment with scholars, students and staff who represent a wide range of life

00:25:51.150 - 00:26:16.410

experiences and perspectives across all disciplines. Research, cutting-edge research, and the criticism that makes it better depends upon a diverse faculty." And the same can be said of, of, of teaching and service as well. And so now I just wanna, in the time that I have left, I wanna circle back to Dr.

00:26:16.410 - 00:26:40.020

Brewer's vita. And I want to, I wanna focus in on the part of, of, of her résumé that begins to tell us the most about these institutional factors that we're interested in, or I think they potentially tell us the most, and it's the section under "fellowships and grains." If

00:26:40.020 - 00:27:07.680

we, if we look at these, we'll see that she got an educational opportunity fellowship from '69 to, to '70 at Indiana University. And then in 1972-73, she got a Ford Foundation Advanced Study Fellowship. And then in in '73-'74, just before, as she's beginning to finish up, she gets a

00:27:07.680 - 00:27:31.800

research grant in eight. But it's these two earlier ones that are, I think, particularly interesting for for our purposes here, and I just want to share a little bit about these before before I pass it before I pass it on to you, Dr.

00:27:31.800 - 00:28:04.850

McDaniel. So are you seeing Indiana University? Okay, good. So this is the latest iteration of that, of that fellowship, and we need to work back in time to find how it grew into how it's presently designed, but we see that the places it has ended up is as a, as a fellowship for first-generation college

00:28:04.850 - 00:28:37.100

students or "people who demonstrate acute financial need." And so I'd be interested, this idea of first generation is an idea that exists in different variations through time, right. Rice can lay claim to a certain type of iteration of this concern with first-generation college students because of its founding focus on "students of slender

00:28:37.100 - 00:28:58.550

means," right, who were, who were less likely to, to whose parents were less likely to have been in college. But then there's also her second fellowship with the Ford Foundation, and this is the, this is the foundation, this is the fellowship that, that, that grows out of

00:28:58.550 - 00:29:29.960

that. It's the, it's a, it's one run now by the National Academy that focuses on underrepresented to, underrepresented, increasing the number of underrepresented faculty with PhDs in in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. And so for me, what, what this part of her vita now begs for Rice is, what are

00:29:29.960 - 00:29:48.440

the institutional forces that bring Dr. Brewer to Rice in the time? Are they, are they the same, are they the same forces that I would call "light" institutional, right, that bring, that bring Dr.

00:29:48.770 - 00:30:01.190

Freeman here, right? Dr. Freeman gets here on a, on a phone call and a visit, right, there's not a great deal of institutional development involved. But in Dr.

00:30:01.190 - 00:30:24.110

Brewer's career, we see the impact of these institutional commitments on, on her career, and so those are the questions that I think we need to raise and follow next. How does she get here? What does it reflect about Rice's evolving processes on hiring and recruiting and

00:30:24.110 - 00:30:33.470

recruiting faculty? And so I'll, I'll stop, I'll stop there. I didn't, I didn't have any trouble talking there, Dr. McDaniel, so I don't know.

00:30:33.710 - 00:30:49.790

Well, and the other side of the question is both how, how she got here, but also why she left and what she went on to do after her time at Rice. So those are, I think... Well, what she went on to do is truly amazing.

00:30:51.050 - 00:31:09.590

For those of you who have a little, and still doing, I don't wanna make it seem like it's past, still doing--those of you who have a little time on the, on the Internet after we're over will leave extraordinarily impressed. That's fascinating. Well, thanks for, for bringing that document.

00:31:09.590 - 00:31:28.370

I guess that means I'm up and need to share my doc. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think about it, because this is a document that earlier this year, when we were on a hiatus from our, our weekly doc talks, I came across this down in the Woodson Research Center, and it was a document I knew right

00:31:28.370 - 00:31:45.020

away was doc talk material. But at the same time, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it and how it related to our ongoing research, so I have some questions or ideas about that, but I'm really eager to hear your and the audience's ideas of of how this might relate.

00:31:45.260 - 00:32:01.880

And so I can show you a physical copy of the document. It's a book that was published in 1913, and the title of the book is, Houston as a Setting of the Rice Institute. Houston as a Setting of the Rice Institute.

00:32:02.000 - 00:32:26.660

And I can even put in the chat a link to a digitized version of this book if you're interested in going to the Internet Archive and looking at it. The link is actually to the original book, which, as I said, was published in 1913. What I'm holding is a reprint of this book that was produced by the Rice Historical

00:32:26.660 - 00:32:44.000

Society in 2002. So the Rice Historical Society, which is based here at the university, interested in the history of the institution, saw this as a book that they wanted to reproduce. And I think when you when you open it up, oop, I just dropped it on the floor.

00:32:44.450 - 00:33:06.200

Thankfully, that wasn't an original copy. This is the, this is the occupational hazards of, of history on the fly. When you open up the book, you can see why the Rice Historical Society would have been interested in it, because the book contains a lot of old photographs of the institute at

00:33:06.200 - 00:33:26.630

its founding, and the first dozen or more pages of, of this book are devoted to the history of the Rice Institute. So I'm hoping you're seeing on the screen here the picture of Dr. Edgar Odell Lovett, the first president of the institute, and on the right, the first

00:33:26.840 - 00:33:47.750

trustees, or the trustees at the time, not the first, but at the time of the Rice Institute, including James A. Baker, and there on the bottom row, William Rice, not William Marsh Rice, but his nephew William Marsh Rice, and that Rice's brother, Benjamin Botts Rice, on the right, who are

00:33:47.750 - 00:34:05.270

both nephews of William Marsh Rice. And as you scroll on, you can see a lot of pictures of the early campus, the administration building, the cloister in the administration building. So there's a lot here of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the Rice

00:34:05.270 - 00:34:27.740

Institute and particularly images of early campus. But the book itself is not about the Rice Institute. The title is history--Houston, Houston as a Setting for the Jewel of the Rice Institute. So the Rice Institute is the jewel, Houston is the setting in which the institute was

00:34:27.740 - 00:34:52.690

founded in 1912, the year before this book, before this book was produced, would have been the opening of the institute. And the book, as the title suggests, is really more about Houston as a whole. And so as you scroll through, you'll find pictures of Houston buildings, early public

00:34:52.690 - 00:35:13.090

school buildings in Houston. You will also find pictures of municipal and nonprofit organization buildings, the social services in the city. You'll find pictures of the city auditorium.

00:35:13.090 - 00:35:41.760

You'll find pictures of the parks of Houston and sort of outdoor green spaces. And you'll also find at the very end of the book a pretty lengthy section that's titled, "Representative Men of Houston." And so you can scroll through there and see some of the, the, the leading figures or representative men of Houston in 1913.

00:35:42.480 - 00:36:02.820

And so it's a book that's, that heavily features the Rice Institute, but it's really about Houston as a whole, and one of the first questions I had when I, when I saw it, was who produced the book, why was it produced? It becomes pretty clear as as you're reading the book that it's a good example of what

00:36:02.820 - 00:36:18.600

American historians would call the progressive era, because it's produced in 1913 by sort of urban boosters who were very interested in improving the city of Houston. You can see Jesse H. Jones listed here.

00:36:18.620 - 00:36:41.180

That's a name very familiar to anyone familiar with Houston history or with Jones College and, and all the connections to, to Rice. And this book was produced by progressive-era reformers in Houston, who were very interested in improving the city and also touting the city's successes to the

00:36:41.180 - 00:37:00.470

nation as a whole. This was an era in which just after the the hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Galveston had switched to a commission form of city government that's still in textbooks to this day as as an example of progressive-era reforms, this kind of application of a

00:37:00.470 - 00:37:21.580

business-oriented social scientific mindset when it came to city government that was pioneered in Galveston, but had also been adopted here in Houston not long before this book was, was produced. So I just say all that to give you a little bit of an idea of why this book was, was

00:37:21.580 - 00:37:44.580

made, and there's even an opening line on an early page that that summarizes what the creators of this, the publishers of this book, wanted us to to know. And I'm just gonna read here in the, the red box what it says. It says, "The story of Houston as a commercial center, a wonderful place for

00:37:44.580 - 00:38:09.280

investment returns, has been told and repeated to the ends of civilization. The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Houston as a desirable dwelling place: a place where a child may begin its education in kindergarten and complete it in one of the world's greatest institutions of learning: where the best instruction in music

00:38:09.280 - 00:38:31.060

and art is available, the love of it daily inculcated in every school child of Houston, [...] where there is splendid organization of social and moral uplift touching every phase of civic life; where health consideration is vital, and public comfort, pleasure and recreation receive definite provision." These are very familiar progressive-era

00:38:31.060 - 00:38:51.740

keywords. "Uplift," an interest in public health, an interest in the arts, an interest in education. And it's the section on education that as a historian working on this task force I was most interested in. Obviously, the section on the Rice Institute was very interesting

00:38:51.740 - 00:39:16.450

and familiar, but that little opening gives you an idea perhaps of why the history of the Rice Institute section was followed by a section on the "Public Schools of Houston and Other Educational Facilities." Because remember that opening prologue said, what would make a city a desirable dwelling place?

00:39:16.810 - 00:39:44.530

Well, it'd be a place where a child could start in kindergarten and be educated and trained, and ultimately the endpoint for someone in Houston would be to go to the jewel, the crown jewel of the city, which would be the Rice Institute. And in fact, the, the book makes that pretty explicit on page 34.

00:39:44.950 - 00:40:05.440

It's talking here about the public schools in Houston and specifically two new junior high schools that were being built and were going to be better than any others in the South or the Southwest. The plan was to take the children of the seventh grade and put them in high school for

00:40:05.440 - 00:40:19.300

two years. And in those first two years of high school, a lot of the emphasis would be placed on industrial work. So practical skills in the event that the students need to drop out at the end of that

00:40:19.300 - 00:40:35.620

second high school year, they would at least have, as the book says, "a fairly good equipment for fighting the battles of life. On the other hand, if it is at all possible for them to continue, then they would be encouraged to finish the senior high school.

00:40:36.710 - 00:40:59.200

After they do this, the great facilities of the Rice Institute will be free to them. I find that kind of interesting because obviously, as you mentioned earlier, one of the the great things about the Rice Institute was it was open to people of slender means. It was a private institution, and yet it's kind of being mentioned here

00:40:59.200 - 00:41:14.500

almost as if it were a public school. You know, this is in a section on the history of public schools, and the idea is you go through the public schools and then once you finish the senior high school, if you could do that, you could move on to the Rice Institute because it would be free in

00:41:14.500 - 00:41:32.110

the same way that the public schools were free. But I wanna show you one other section and then kind of get your reactions, 'cause this is the part that I thought was, was related most to our work, but, but I'd like to know what you think about how it might be related.

00:41:32.950 - 00:41:53.650

There's a section in the book about night schools in Houston. So there are the public schools from kindergarten through the senior high schools we just looked at, and there's the industrial first two years of high school where girls might learn, as it says here, "cooking, sewing, dressmaking, millinery,"

00:41:53.800 - 00:42:19.180

and the the boys might learn "cabinetmaking or woodworking." But there were also "night schools developed in recent years," the book says, "for people who couldn't, could not attend school in the daytime, but were desirous of improving their educational advantages." And here is the first time in the book that I've found where we learn that

00:42:19.960 - 00:42:46.620

the Rice Institute is a jewel set in a city that is not exclusively white. There is a population in the city that the book refers to as "the colored community," or "the colored population," in keeping with the language of the time. And it says that, "there are four night schools for white pupils and three for people

00:42:46.620 - 00:43:00.090

of color," who could go to these schools. And the whole point of these would be that it wouldn't just be limited to children of school age. In fact, it says if a child was under 12, then they can't be admitted to the night school because they should be in the day school.

00:43:00.630 - 00:43:24.930

But "one never gets too old," the book says, "to be received in the night school. Many of those attending are in middle life, and a few are well advanced in years." And here I'm continuing to quote, "The oldest one on record is a Negro woman, 85 years old, who is attending one of the night schools in order that she may learn to read the Bible."

00:43:27.390 - 00:43:48.310

And on the next page, we actually have on page 31 some photographs of these night schools. So you can see here on the left, there are some, at the top, there are some white students sitting at typewriters and who are learning, the caption at the end of the book tells us, about business.

00:43:48.340 - 00:44:05.500

Then there's also, in the second photograph here, are some white students standing above drafting desks, learning architecture. There are some immigrant students here at the bottom who are learning English. And then on the right, there are photographs of black students at these night schools that

00:44:05.500 - 00:44:30.130

have been described in the pages before. At the top, there are some men working on cabinets and chairs, and on the third photo here, we can see an elderly black woman on the front row next to a young man, and the caption at the, the end of the book tells us that this is the 85-year-old woman who's been

00:44:30.130 - 00:44:48.400

referred to as the oldest student in the night school, who's there to learn to read the Bible. It turns out there's a better photograph of that picture in another publication from around this time called Progressive Houston, there's the term progressive again.

00:44:49.030 - 00:45:09.700

And I just wanted to show you this one, 'cause you can get a much clearer image of this, as it says, "Scene in a Houston colored night school. In the front row are a grandmother and grandson, showing that there is no age limit" to these. I just find this, this photograph, particularly the way it's, it's, it's framed,

00:45:09.700 - 00:45:31.660

the young man on the right is kind of the only one looking directly at the camera, and, and sort of making eye contact with us as the viewer, as we're taking in this, this photograph from the early 20th century. So that's the document I wanted to talk about, and maybe I could just stop there and

00:45:32.110 - 00:45:51.810

ask, what do you make of this document with relation to our own work? Is it, is it something that you think a task force interested in the Rice Institute, is this a source that's relevant to our, to our charge and to our work? And if so, how?

00:45:51.830 - 00:46:13.040

What do you think about that, Dr. Byrd? Yeah, clearly, right, clearly is, and in a way that, that we have to explore further, but, but in a way that, part of our work

00:46:13.130 - 00:46:38.360

is not as easy as the, as the part that, that is focused on the history of the the university itself. And so that's an easy one for me to, to answer. And I think this document also speaks to some of the questions we were beginning to

00:46:38.360 - 00:47:05.360

grapple with, but of, like a lot of the things in the update, were, were in the process of grappling with, had not, had not solved them. And one of those issues, one of those questions had to do with Lovett and his view of the place of the university within the, within the wider educational ecosystem,

00:47:05.360 - 00:47:23.750

right, of Houston and the South. Because I remember us puzzling through some of his early remarks about Rice and its place in education in the South, and in some points, it wasn't quite clear how broadly he understood that ecosystem.

00:47:24.980 - 00:47:41.370

Yeah, and it's clear that progressive-era Houstonians of a certain kind were thinking about that whole ecosystem. You can see that from this book. They were thinking about how to improve education in the city, because, as they said,

00:47:41.370 - 00:47:56.550

that makes it a desirable place to live, right, and so in the same way that progressive reformers were interested in public health or or commission forms of city government, they were interested in education writ large, but it's, but it's also a segregated ecosystem.

00:47:56.550 - 00:48:17.160

And it's sometimes, you hear the word "progressive" today, and it means a certain thing politically today, but it still carries a connotation of progress, right, and improvement, and so it's a little jarring sometimes for people who aren't familiar with the history of the progressive era to find that segregation was, was not, there's

00:48:17.160 - 00:48:33.860

nothing in this "progressive" book that is criticizing segregation. Racial segregation instead is presenting that as part of this progressive package of reforms, that we do have schools... Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:33.860 - 00:48:57.450

We have these schools, but they're also, they're geared, and they're, and they're targeted, and they're aimed to different populations in the city, and each one serves its purpose, but quite explicitly, it's clear that the the Rice Institute is kind of the jewel or the the the endpoint, when it kind of said that there's this imagined

00:48:57.450 - 00:49:17.020

journey that that a child in Houston would take. You start in kindergarten and eventually then at the end of this, this system of education, you can go take advantage of the Rice Institute. What I'm, what we know, of course, from the charter and the beginning of the institute is

00:49:17.020 - 00:49:33.700

that that was not true for every child in Houston. It wasn't true of the child pictured in, or the young man, I should say, who was pictured in the photograph that we saw of the night school. So there, so there's, the question in my mind, I mean, in some ways, that's, that's

00:49:33.700 - 00:49:59.660

just restating the obvious, that the Rice Institute was a product of of a segregated Houston. But it also raises the question of what were the consequences of that exclusion on the city as a whole, on African American Houstonians, on the education system in Houston? What were the consequences of exclusion?

00:50:00.800 - 00:50:20.520

That's kind of a question that, that comes to my mind, and I'm not sure that this source, does this source help us think through that, or what would you what would you say? I, right, I think it does in a very rudimentary way, right, and if we continue

00:50:20.520 - 00:50:55.620

down this path, we may or may not find more developed material that that speaks to the question, right, because, so we have, we have, we have suspicions, right, about the, the use, who has use and who has access to the physical plant of the, of the university. And so one of the things, right, it's clearly, it's an institution for white

00:50:55.620 - 00:51:10.620

students, but, but is its physical plant, are the resources of the university, ever available to wider communities, right, is it... The library. Like say, the library, the library, for example. Yeah, like the, the library.

00:51:10.620 - 00:51:36.570

I mean, don't, don't get me going, but yeah, like like like like like the library. When, when, when we, stop me after this, right, when we've reached the pre, in the history of Southern private institutions, when we reached the pre-desegregation phase, one of the, one of the things that begins to put pressure on the segregationist policies

00:51:36.840 - 00:52:00.480

concerning enrollment at the university is the increased use, or people pushing for access to, the, the, the physical plant of the university and in, in desegregated ways, which becomes a kind of precursor, right. What happens when black people come to speak at the university that they cannot attend,

00:52:00.480 - 00:52:23.380

come to work at the university that they cannot attend and their children cannot attend? And and what happens when philanthropies begin to make resources available to Southern institutions, but but write the rules in such a way as to open up the university to to a broader range of people?

00:52:23.380 - 00:52:44.610

I think this all raises these questions in that direction. Well, I think it also, you know, if if, again, we think about the history of of the Houston public schools and the way that they were envisioning a particular outcome for students who go to the junior high and then go to the the senior high school for those

00:52:44.610 - 00:52:59.430

first two years and then might drop out, but if they could continue, they would complete the senior high school, then they would go to the Rice Institute. There's kind of a, the mindset of these progressive educators was that you kind of track people in particular directions.

00:52:59.430 - 00:53:20.400

And the fact that the Rice Institute was available to some but not all of those students, how does that affect the, the investments that are made even at the lower level, the high-school level, the junior high-school level, at different kinds of schools? You know, there were schools that were open, public schools that were open,

00:53:20.400 - 00:53:42.120

segregated schools for black Houstonians, but if the, if the idea is, and of course there were also within Texas, Prairie View and colleges and and institutions of higher learning available and open to them, but not the jewel that is being depicted here of the Rice Institute in Houston.

00:53:42.120 - 00:54:04.200

So does that affect what kinds of curricula and what kinds of investments of resources are placed into those those public schools? You know, I think that's one way of asking about the impact of exclusion on the community that the Rice Institute was in and how it shapes the way that the public schools

00:54:04.200 - 00:54:26.610

developed. You know, aside from the fact that in that photo, we're also getting a glimpse of who was excluded from from the Rice Institute. And maybe sometimes we we tell the history of the university as a, as a progressive story of inclusion, and so we, we start the story with the names we know of, as you said,

00:54:26.610 - 00:54:51.360

Professor Freeman or Raymond Johnson, you know, Jacqueline McCauley is, and from our first doc talk, the names of the people who who came to the Rice Institute at those moments of desegregation and inclusion, but then, what if we turned the story around and thought about the history of, of those people who, whose names we might not know,

00:54:51.720 - 00:55:17.960

but who were, who were excluded by this this founding decision of the Rice Institute. And it was striking to me that in that book, the woman is described as 85 years old, which I could go on a tangent there, just to reflect on what that means about when she would have been born and if in 1913 she's 85, then that connects this era to the first

00:55:17.960 - 00:55:38.510

era that we were charged with studying, the period of slavery. This would have been a woman who was born before emancipation, which just puts this in proximity, this photograph in proximity, to the subject of the update that we released this summer about the history of slavery in Texas.

00:55:39.110 - 00:55:57.710

But it doesn't, it says her, her age, but it doesn't say her name. It doesn't say the name of of the young man next to her, and it didn't say that in the, in the Progressive Houston journal either. But it does say her name, I was able to find her name in another source that I'll just

00:55:57.710 - 00:56:12.920

briefly show you, which is the Houston Post. And let me pull it up if I can, make sure I pull up the right one. Oops. You're not seeing it, are you? You're seeing...Are you seeing?

00:56:12.920 - 00:56:19.010

Yeah. You're seeing it, okay. "Houston has oldest pupil." "Houston has oldest pupil in country's public schools." And look at the picture, there's

00:56:19.010 - 00:56:31.260

the same picture again. Right, you recognize that. But here it gives a name. Sister Pilot, 85 years.

00:56:31.950 - 00:56:53.310

And "By her side sits Robert London, 14." Both of them are in the night schools. And it gives the name of the woman who's standing in the back, Cecilia Scott, as the founder of these night schools in Houston. And this is an interesting article that we don't have enough time to spend with, but it

00:56:53.310 - 00:57:20.830

talks a little bit about why Sister Pilot, as she's called in the article, wanted to go back to school. It mentions that she was born back in the antebellum days, and it says that she and her husband actually own their own home at 2714 New Orleans Avenue, and it talks a little bit about the origins of this this night school, what kinds of things they

00:57:20.830 - 00:57:43.270

learn, how it, how it's been staffed by the graduates of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, by some of the graduates of Prairie View, and that overseeing this whole school is a man named Walter L.D. Johnson, who as homework for the audience, you can go find out a little bit more about

00:57:43.300 - 00:57:56.290

Walter L.D. Johnson. There's a Houston Public Library branch named after him. I'll leave it to you to find out why. But it says that in the summertime, he was taking post-graduate courses at the

00:57:56.290 - 00:58:13.910

University of Chicago. So this is again in 1912, the Rice Institute has just opened its doors. But we have this whole other ecosystem, this whole other educational infrastructure that this article is featuring.

00:58:13.910 - 00:58:37.760

And it gives us some of the names of the people who are in that system, but who could not have been in the Rice Institute at that moment in time. So that just raises questions for me about the history of the people whose whose names were not first, but nonetheless were impacted by this decision.

00:58:40.240 - 00:59:01.210

And we have in the, in the chat, Dr. McDaniel, a contribution from one of our audience members, Jan West, that that speaks to the some of the potential consequences of that exclusion for Rice and for Houston, what it meant, and I'll quote Ms.

00:59:01.210 - 00:59:21.430

West here, "that the city and university deprived itself of the resilience, drive and intelligence of a broad segment of the community." Exactly. Exactly. I think what this is showing us is, and the article comments on, on this in the, in the

00:59:21.430 - 00:59:46.930

text, the, the fact that, that women like Mrs. Pilot were, and we don't have time, but I can tell you her first name was Sally, I did a little bit more research, and that the, the determination to pursue education in these schools is very clear, in this article and in the history of these, of the black

00:59:46.930 - 01:00:06.550

community in Houston's, pursuit of libraries, pursuit of institutions of learning, all of that's happening at the same time. So the difference is not in terms of the, the drive and the determination for education. The difference is one that's really striking when you read this book, is

01:00:06.550 - 01:00:26.400

one of resources, and what's made available to the night schools, for example, as opposed to the Rice Institute that's depicted in the, the early pages of, of this book that I, that I wanted to talk about today. Well, we're, we're back, Dr.

01:00:26.400 - 01:00:42.380

McDaniel, I feel like we're back. It's good to be having a doc talk again. This was, this was great to, to do with you, and I'm looking forward to the future weeks. Thanks to all of the audience members who came to spend your lunch hour with us.

01:00:42.380 - 01:01:04.760

We hope you'll be back next Friday, we do this every Friday at noon, and that you'll share your thoughts and ideas with us, and come back in, in a couple of weeks, hopefully later this, later this summer, or this month I should say, this September. We hope to have some guest historians who are going to be with us to talk a little bit

01:01:04.760 - 01:01:22.940

about the update that we released this summer on the history of slavery and and work through with us their reactions to those findings and maybe point out things that we might have missed or could interpret differently. And so we're really looking forward to that opportunity.

01:01:25.040 - 01:01:52.730

It looks like I'm seeing one more, one more comment here in the chat about W.L.D. Johnson Sr., which was, his home was located on what's now called Emancipation Avenue in the Third Ward and once housed the office of Operation Breadbasket in Houston. Again, just some of these, these names and places are helping us get a sense of the

01:01:52.730 - 01:02:14.930

setting of the jewel of the Rice Institute and and the other jewels that are there in that history that that I think are relevant to our history as well, and understanding the history of the university and its entanglement with the history of segregation. So thank you all for being here with us today.

01:02:15.260 - 01:02:20.820

I hope to see you again next Friday. Have a great three-day weekend. See you, Dr. Byrd. See you.