In the run-up to today’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, now a US federal holiday, I recollected about segregation in my childhood in New Braunfels, a small Texas town.
We were one of five Jewish families. We had no synagogue and little kosher food, but my parents brought a melamed (a teacher) from San Antonio to teach us Jewish children Hebrew, the prayerbook, and the Bible.
I don’t remember overt antisemitism. In fact, I was voted senior class president in high school. The “white” high school, that is. The blacks were segregated in the “colored” Booker T. Washington school. The laws of segregation pained me.
During my senior year at New Braunfels High School in 1953, black students were still segregated. State law was specific, even to the point of forbidding any athletic competition between the races.
As class president, I was responsible for fundraising to pay for the publishing of the yearbook. To my great surprise, I heard that the “colored” high school had the same challenge: fundraising to defray their yearbook publication.
Combining efforts
I had a tantalizing idea: Why not combine the efforts? That very day, I went to the Booker T. Washington High School in the older part of town and found my opposite number, Bobby Hamm, senior class president. We hatched a plan: a basketball game between the two classes.
I knew about the law and sensed that the law was – at least in central Texas – only obeyed because it was still on the books and would be ignored by those attending the game. In addition, I hated the institution of segregation since I was a child.
The afternoon before the game, while preparing the gym, I saw the “Colored” sign marking off the seats at the end of the court. I told some guys to take it down and put it where it would not be found. To this day, I do not know its resting place. It was never found and never replaced.
WHEN THE doors opened, we sold tickets to both whites and blacks and informed all that they could sit wherever they pleased. I remember looking up from the game and seeing the crowd sitting shoulder to shoulder, many whites noting the change with a smile.
The blacks also were aware, but their reactions seemed more restrained. It should be noted that whites and blacks were not total strangers, but their points of contact were limited to service or commercial endeavors.
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Halftime was marked by another kind of fundraiser: a “cakewalk.” Mothers from both schools brought home-baked cakes. The southern cakewalk was a dance during halftime where the cakes were prizes won by a kind of raffle. The cakewalk alone brought in five hundred dollars.
I think the other team won that first game. We made so much money from the cakewalk, refreshments sale, and tickets that we decided to make it a five-game series. The money was divided equally.
I recently contacted old-timers from New Braunfels. This is what Kenneth Walker, from the Booker T. Washington School, wrote me:
“I remember the game – it was enjoyed by all participants. Our coach was Professor Johnson, and the [black] players included Louis Parker, Paul Goffney, Wilbur Hamm, and myself. The integration procedure began in 1955, with four students from Booker T. High School moving to New Braunfels High School. They were David Holland, Lydia Hamm, Billy Joyce Ball, and myself.”
In 1953, in a little town in Texas, we showed that the law was an anachronism. This is not to say there was unanimous goodwill. But I know what I saw – bleachers full of smiles and a focus on tight games.
A few weeks after the games, the principal called me to his office. He seemed reluctant to have to rebuke me for the games, saying hesitantly, “You know, there are some people in town who didn’t like what you did.” That was it. He never broached the subject again.
A little later in the year, letters from the universities began arriving. I was happy to see that I had been accepted to Harvard. Bobby Hamm also got his acceptance – to a Black college in Prairie View, Texas. I knew from a previous conversation that Bobby, like myself, was planning to ultimately study medicine.
A FEW days later, as I lay down to sleep, my thoughts turned to Harvard and Bobby Hamm in Prairie View, to my family who owned the Jacob Schmidt department store in town, and to Bobby’s family, who had socioeconomic challenges, to my chances of achieving my goal and Bobby’s chances of reaching his. I suddenly found myself starting to weep at the unfairness of life. I had never before focused on the immensity of that gulf in opportunities.
Hearing the crying, my mother came in. “What’s the matter?” she asked. I told her, and she understood immediately. She grasped what was changeable and what was not. She, therefore, urged me to work even harder with the hope of later changing things for the many other Bobby Hamms.
I finally calmed down and fell asleep, with my horizons widened. A year later, the law was changed. The Supreme Court issued a 9 to 0 decision in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education that marked the beginning of a slow but steady march to integration.
Recently, I tried to find out what happened to Bobby Joe Hamm. What I learned was that he served in the US Air Force from 1955 to 1959 as an Airman Second Class. In 1979, he married Hazel Louise Armstrong (Hamm), and they had several children. He passed away in 1990 at age 52. He is buried in the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio.
Desegregation, in practice and belief, has had a bumpy course. But living proof of its success was seen in 2008. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States and reelected in 2012.
It has been over 70 years since that basketball game. Racial discrimination and the various sins that go with it are faded shadows of what they once were. African-Americans have joined the rest of us and share the same challenges as every other grouping of society, albeit with each group having differing proportions of these problems.
However, the chief rule for every individual is to have enough discipline to get a diploma, acquire a profession, and build a family. That’s what puts anyone in the promised land, regardless of skin color.
The writer, 89, is retired as head of the Dept. of Surgery, Laniado Hospital, Sanz Medical Center, Netanya, and lives in Kiryat Sanz. Every few years, he returns to New Braunfels, TX, for a reunion with his 1953 high school classmates.