In the summer of 1955, administrators at the University of Texas at Austin had a problem: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, handed down the previous year, required educational institutions to integrate their classrooms. But the regents overseeing the state university system’s flagship campus, the old alumni who formed the donor base, and the segregationist political forces that pulled the purse strings were all determined to find ways to keep African Americans from stepping foot on campus.
UT had no conspicuous blocking-the-schoolhouse-door moment. A series of documents in the UT archives, many of them marked confidential, suggests that administration officials took a subtler approach: They adopted a selective admissions policy based around standardized testing, which they knew would suppress the number of African American students they were forced to admit.
I came across these little-discussed records, all but lost to history, while researching my book about the football player Earl Campbell and desegregation. (Campbell played at Texas in the mid-1970s, not long after the head coach finally allowed African Americans on the varsity squad.) In recent years, the university has tried to reckon with its past: Confederate statues have been removed and a portrait of Heman Sweatt, the African American postal worker whose application to the university in the mid-’40s led to a Supreme Court decision that presaged Brown, now hangs in the atrium of the law school that sought to bar his entry.
Historically, however, the university went to great lengths to perpetuate white supremacy. Today, standardized testing is widely seen as an objective index of merit. In Texas, in the immediate post-Brown era, it seems to have been used as a bureaucratic cudgel to maintain Jim Crow.
Less than two weeks after the Brown ruling, in May 1954, H. Y. McCown, the university’s admissions dean, dashed off a note to the university president with a proposal to “keep Negroes out of most classes where there are a large number of girls.”
“If we want to exclude as many Negro undergraduates as possible,” McCown wrote, the university should require African American students seeking admission to undergraduate professional programs to first spend a year taking courses at Prairie View A&M or Texas Southern University, both black schools. Essentially ignoring the thrust of Brown, the regents adopted the proposal.
But the gap-year solution was only a temporary one. In June 1955, the four-person Committee on Selective Admissions, composed of senior faculty and high-ranking administrators, argued that if UT loosened the graduate-student application process, “the University would be in a position to plead that it is acting in good faith to bring an end to segregation, and it should have some bearing with the courts in any attempt to postpone the admission of Negro students at the undergraduate level.” The university had already been forced to integrate the graduate-student ranks after the 1950 Sweatt decision; the committee seems to have been suggesting that graduate-school admissions would act as a fig leaf for obstruction at the undergraduate level.