Following the Precursors

In the six decades since Heman Sweatt—the first African American admitted to UT—walked through the doors of the law school, thousands of courageous and talented African-American students have attended the University. Meet the three who won UT's 2011 Heman Sweatt Legacy Award.

The students who first followed Heman Sweatt are known as the Precursors. They include Edna Rhambo and John W. Hargis, among the first black undergraduates to complete their studies at the University; James Means Jr., UT’s first black athlete; Don Baylor, the first black student to play Longhorn football; and Barbara Smith Conrad, the music major cast in a lead opera role in 1957, only to be forced by the Texas Legislature to give up the part because of her race. In recent years, the University has celebrated many of these students and the formidable odds they faced in their attempts to get an equal education in an institution that was largely reluctant to accept them.

However, African-American students who attended the University since the 1970s had their own challenges to overcome and have not been acknowledged much. On May 6, as part of the 25th anniversary of the Heman Sweatt Symposium, three more recent alumni were honored with Heman Sweatt Legacy Awards. The stories of these alumni make clear that they, too, were antecedents of a brighter, more equitable future.

Finding a mission

Randy Bowman, BS ‘87, almost didn’t make it to his second semester of college. “If not for receiving an A in English, I believe that I’d have been asked to leave the University,” he says. But he adjusted, raised his grade point average, and eventually hit his stride, serving as president of the Black Student Alliance and an active member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity and the Friar Society.

As a student leader, Bowman strived “to have the University act in accordance with its values,” pressing for social justice on both micro and macro levels. On the global scale, he challenged the University to divest from apartheid South Africa; UT did so in 1986. On the state and local levels, he addressed diversity in the educational pipeline, actively recruiting minority students. “While I recruited all students,” he says, “prospective minority students tended to arrive needing the most convincing that the University would be a place at which they could get an excellent education, without feeling or experiencing hostility.”

Bowman recalls that the conservatism that swept the nation during the Reagan administration also affected the campus atmosphere. “Not all students seemed to practice conservatism with equal levels of maturity,” he said. “With regard to issues of race and diversity, the campus climate was strained upon my arrival in 1981 and was certainly no better upon my graduation.”

As a student leader, however, Bowman rallied his classmates to address issues of discrimination, leading efforts to convince the Texas Student Publications Board not to allow student organizations with discriminatory membership policies. The organizations that refused to comply with the new regulation were banned.

Bowman credits his mother, who experienced “de facto segregation” growing up in small-town Texas in the '50s and '60s, for instilling in him the sense that everyone is equal. She also taught him that when faced with inequality, he should “try to do what’s right,” upholding his own dignity and that of others. “I didn’t expect to encounter vestiges of those experiences as a part of my collegiate experience," he says. "When I did, I sought to do my part to address them, as did many others."

His activism turned out to be a significant component of his education, giving him experience in critical thinking, strategic planning, public policy, and “the workings of the many levers within public institutions.”

Bowman went on to attend law school at Whittier College, and was the first African American to serve as editor of the Whittier College Law Review. He then founded the  successful MW Logistics, and continues to be involved at The University of Texas as a member of the Texas Exes’ Black Alumni Steering Committee.

Embracing a dream

“While conditions and life were markedly better for black students in the '90s than they were in the '50s, '60s and '70s, it didn't mean that the campus was a utopia or haven for students of color,” former Student Government president and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity member Marlen Whitley, BA ’98, JD ’01, says of his college years. Like students before and after him, Whitley had to walk by reminders of the University’s segregationist past, including statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, each time he crossed the University’s South Mall.

During his sophomore year, Whitley participated in initiatives with the Minority Information Center (now the Multicultural Engagement Center), which tried several approaches to counteract unwelcoming symbols on campus. The most successful was a referendum to fund and build the Martin Luther King Jr. statue on the East Mall.

Whitley went on to serve as the MIC’s director while still an undergraduate, organizing student activism efforts such as marches against the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Hopwood v. Texas, which ruled in 1996 that race could not be considered as a criterion in college admission.

The Hopwood decision “was probably the single biggest challenge during my time as a student, because the impact meant significantly fewer students of color applying to and consequently being admitted into the university,” Whitley says.

In the year following Hopwood, Whitley was elected Student Government president. “This was incredible to me,” he said, amazed that on “a campus with less than a 4 percent population of black students, 50,000 students overall would elect a black student as its president against the backdrop of Hopwood and the collateral effects that decision had on the University.”

He approached the new post with action-oriented optimism, “rolling up my sleeves and fixing." Whitley dealt with student groups who still imposed segregation, administrators who did not appreciate the need for organizational leadership on diversity, and even external white supremacist organizations that posted racist fliers on campus kiosks.

Whitley’s initiatives prompted vehement criticism, sometimes the worst of it coming from the student body that had elected him. But motivated by his convictions instead of by politics, he steadily built momentum for change. “Just because the University had a conflicted history insofar as its acceptance and appreciation of black students didn't mean that [we] should forever be stuck in that era,” he says.

Whitley attended UT Law and is now an attorney for Thompson & Knight. He helped influence the long-term vision of the University by serving on the Commission of 125.

Engaging with a legacy

Choquette Hamilton, BA ’03, Life Member, was the most recent alumna in the group honored with Legacy awards this year. Attending UT in the early 2000s, she saw both subtle and overt instances of discrimination against students of color on campus.

Hamilton worked with other student leaders to organize rallies, marches, and awareness events on campus that called attention to the hostile environment toward black students still prevalent in the 21st century. In one campaign, the students created buttons with the slogan “Do I look furtive?” in response to a racial profiling incident in which an African-American student was stopped by the university police on the grounds that he “looked furtive.”

She also served on President Faulkner’s Committee on Racial Respect and Fairness and helped initiate town hall meetings at which students could speak with each other and with administrators about discriminatory experiences. “We also met publically and privately with key UT administrators such as the chief of police and President Faulkner,” she says. When such negotiations were not always effective, she and other students sometimes had to turn to negative press to persuade the University administration to take their concerns seriously.

Hamilton, who is earning her doctorate in Educational Policy and Planning, wrote her undergraduate thesis on African-American student activism at UT. She hoped her research would “inform people of what has happened in the past in order to help us move forward.” Now, she shares that history with current students as the director of the Multicultural Engagement Center, encouraging them to “be proactive rather than reactive” and “use the strategies that worked in the past and learn from those that didn’t.”

Facing the future

Like the Precursors before them, the three award winners bear a legacy that has changed the trajectory of UT. And they all have ideas about how to keep raising awareness of diversity issues. I would like to see a diversity course requirement for all students as well as diversity training for faculty, staff and students,” says Hamilton, while Bowman suggested that the university initiate more opportunities for diverse groups of students to interact, perhaps through “dinner dialogues” or service projects. “It’s easier to be more civil and care about another person’s perspective when you’ve had a chance to engage them initially somewhere other than on the horns of a political or ideological dilemma,” he says.

Someday, Whitley hopes he’ll be able to see UT “as a place that has worked tirelessly to overcome its own racially stained past and serve as a model or beacon light of hope for other institutions challenged by similar problems.” Thanks to the exhaustive efforts of these honorees and other student leaders and administrators who realize the importance of a welcoming, inclusive campus, that vision could become a reality.

Jill Hokanson is a social media coordinator in UT’s Division of Diversity & Community Engagement.

From left: Marlen Whitley, Choquette Hamilton, and Randy Bowman. Photo by Jill Hokanson.