Memo by Secret Memo, the University of Texas Kept Segregation Alive Into the 1960s

Sixty-six years ago, Marion Ford, an ambitious Houston teenager who had been set to become one of the first African American undergraduates at the University of Texas, received a terse letter returning his $20 deposit to room in an all-Black dormitory because his admission had been rescinded.

The transgression committed by Marion Ford, a saxophonist, writer, academic standout, star athlete, and all-around striver? He told a reporter he wanted to try out for the all-white Texas Longhorns football team.

The Ford episode in 1954 unspools over a series of documents, many of them marked confidential, resting deep within the University of Texas archives. I came across these documents while working on a book about football and race in Texas. Among other things they illuminate how far the university’s regents were willing to go to keep their beloved football team free of Black players. That previous May, the US Supreme Court had handed down its Brown v. Board decision, and the regents, each appointed by a segregationist governor, were determined to interpret the ruling in the narrowest way possible. The Ford crisis—it was nothing less than that to the men controlling the university—was one of the first tests following the Brown decision of how a state university would fold in newly admitted Black students. Within weeks the state’s most powerful figures had convened to thwart the mere prospect of a Black teenager setting foot on the field.