On a Thursday night in September, about 50 black alumni, UT staff, and community members file into the Alumni Center’s Connally Ballroom for a panel discussion titled “Then and Now.” The atmosphere is casual, with friends hugging and chatting about the football team’s big win over Notre Dame the previous weekend; a young mom bounces a smiling baby on her shoulder. The room falls silent, though, when four people rise and begin walking toward the front of the room.

Charles Miles, Mamie Ewing, Leon Holland, and Willie Jordan are impeccably dressed. Now in their 80s, they walk slowly and deliberately to take their seats onstage. Lori Lewis-Conerly, MSW ’06, Life Member, past chair of the Texas Exes Black Alumni Network, introduces them, saying simply, “I am here because of you.”

Over the next hour, the four share their memories of what it was like to be among the Precursors—the first black undergraduate students to enroll at UT-Austin in 1956. As wide-eyed teenagers and 20-somethings, they arrived just one year after Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. The civil rights movement was in its infancy, and Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t give his “I Have a Dream” speech for another seven years. Although the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had mandated that public schools desegregate two years earlier, the pace of change was glacial. Classrooms were virtually the only place on the UT campus where black students could go, with dormitories, student organizations, sports teams, and nearby businesses all still separated by race.

Miles, Ewing, Holland, and Jordan talk about peers who hurled racial epithets, professors who refused to call on them in class, and the difficulty of finding a place to eat dinner when all the restaurants surrounding the campus were whites-only. They also talk about forming lifelong friendships, discovering new interests and careers, and finding allies in unexpected places. And they nod in recognition when Calep Smith, a 20-year-old junior studying corporate communication, describes what it’s like to be black on the Forty Acres today. “You feel like you have to mask yourself,” Smith says. “You don’t want to be seen as ‘too black,’ but you also don’t want to cover it up too much. It can get lonely.”

At the end of the evening, someone asks if there are any black UT freshmen in the audience. Two young women stand and smile shyly. The applause is thunderous, and as the generations regard each other from across the room, 60 years of history are suddenly made visible.

“The environment even today is still charged,” says Cloteal Haynes, BM ’72, MPAff ’77. “Not only here, but around the country, we are dealing with racially motivated behavior. So I can’t imagine what it was like for those 75 or so men and women who came in 1956.”

Haynes is president of the Precursors, Inc., a group composed of the first generation of African Americans to attend UT-Austin. While the organization was founded by the first undergraduate class that entered in 1956—graduate students were admitted earlier, starting with Heman Sweatt in 1950—membership is now open to all black alumni who graduated 40 or more years ago. In addition to gathering socially, the Precursors are now collaborating with UT administrators to improve recruitment and retention of black students and faculty. (Today, the state of Texas is 12.5 percent black, but only 3.6 percent of UT-Austin faculty and 4.5 percent of students are.) With support from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Black Alumni Network, and many other parts of the university, Haynes led the effort to recognize the 60th anniversary of the first class this fall. “The Precursors means ‘those who came before,’” she says, “and we want to say thank you for everything they made possible for those who followed.” —Rose Cahalan