Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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Cause, and keep the main campus in central Austin. Littlefield and Brackenridge both died in 1920, and Texas politicians battled over the plan to relocate the campus to the banks of the Colorado. With the key patron for relocation dead, city business interests rallied to keep the university downtown. The campus remained centered on the original forty acres, just a few blocks north of the state capitol, while the university used the Brackenridge tract as a golf course it leased to the city of Austin until the 1970s.14
The sculpture commission conformed to a broader agenda within Texas to emphasize a Confederate identity for the state after Reconstruction.15 Littlefield had contracted with Pompeo Coppini, an Italian sculptor based in San Antonio. Coppini provided the design, even though his vision did not entirely conform to his patron’s. The sculptor hoped to show how World War I unified the national rift of the Civil War, while Littlefield sought images of Southern heroes.16 The Southern military and political heroes depicted in the statues (as well as Woodrow Wilson, a Southern segregationist) made a clear statement, visually and symbolically asserting white supremacy to the next generation of Texas leaders. Thus, the Confederate veteran’s gift affirmed Texas as a self-consciously Southern state and implicated the university as a fundamental part of this racially segregated ideological project. Jim Crow, however, would not be limited to symbolic statements, either on campus or in the city of Austin (Figures 14 and 15).
Segregation in Austin
Austin in the 1920s was a small capital city perched on the verge of tremendous growth. It was bigger than Muncie, Indiana, but smaller than El Paso and Fort Worth, Texas cities that were double and triple Austin’s population, respectively.17 Railroads, including the International–Great Northern and the Southern Pacific railways, passed by lumberyards and warehouses along Third and Fourth Streets and crossed the Colorado River west of the Congress Street Bridge. These rail networks connected Austin producers and merchants to regional and national markets for agricultural goods such as animal hides and pecans.18 The national highway system touched urban Austin in name but hardly connected points within the city, let alone across the state. State institutions besides the university provided employment stability, including the school for the blind in the city proper and military camps in the region. Most of the business economy in Texas, the nation’s fifth most populous state, flowed elsewhere, however. Oil money funneled through Houston and banking through Dallas; Galveston had long served as the state’s chief port. As the Texas capital, Austin’s top commodity was politics. Like the state’s position in the region, it served as both a geographically central point and a metaphorical one where east Texans of the Old South mindset brokered compromises with politicians from the urban centers, the ranching hill country, and the agricultural panhandle.19
Figure 14. Littlefield Fountain. Pompeo Coppini sculpted Littlefield Fountain as a gateway from downtown Austin and the state capital to the campus. It was a symbolic statement depicting Columbia aboard a ship representing the American project. Along with a series of statues of Southern and Confederate heroes, the fountain represented the resolution of sectional difficulties but affirmed the university’s commitment to white supremacy. Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/kewing/8702417281/sizes/l.
Figure 15. Jefferson Davis statue. The president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was one of the Southern heroes depicted in statues at the campus gateway. Larry Murphy, UT News and Information Bureau, Prints and Photographs Collection, di_02469, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
Census Day 1930 documented the segregation of the era. Two white Austin census takers, Bessie Carpenter and Flossie Pluenneke, traveled to different parts of the city and wrote down demographic data for Austin residents. Carpenter was the wife of an auto salesman and mother of two children, an eleven-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl; they lived in Nowlin Heights, a comfortable subdivision of white residents near the university campus, and owned a home worth $5,000, which put it among the top third of Austin homes.20 Over the first two weeks in April, Carpenter started going door to door, taking the census from the southeastern corner of campus, snaking through a white working-class neighborhood that shifted to white collar farther north. Walking the surrounding blocks on the eastern and northern edges of campus, she knocked on doors of homes almost exclusively filled with white residents. Along the way, she moved through just one black neighborhood centered on Swisher Street. It was one of the few remaining clusters of African Americans outside East Austin that had once been dominant areas of black life.21 Carpenter also surveyed a handful of isolated Hispanic households in the course of her work. Most rented modest apartments, while a handful of the black Austinites on Swisher and Cole Streets owned their homes. Though her house was in the top third in Austin, it was more expensive than all but two Mexican American–owned homes in the city, and fewer than thirty African American families owned houses more valuable than her comfortable but by no means ostentatious house.22 The fruits of a growing economy were out of the reach for almost all of the city’s black and Hispanic population.
Flossie Pluenneke, who surveyed East Austin, rented her home in Hyde Park, an exclusive development far north of the UT campus.23 She and her husband, a physician, had a fourteen-year-old daughter. Platted in the 1890s, Hyde Park had been a suburban neighborhood with Victorian and Craftsman homes at the very outskirts of Austin, but by 1930, it was well within the city limits. Most residents were white-collar professionals—the two neighbors across the street were a lawyer and a pharmacist—and of its 1,500 residents, the only one who was not white was a live-in domestic worker, Rose Gooden, a black cook who worked for a prosperous lawyer.
Pluenneke’s daily path illustrated the city’s racial stratification. She began her two-week walk on the 1800 block of East Avenue, the large north–south street that was one of the city’s transportation arteries and the boundary between East Austin and downtown. The first block of East Avenue was all white—clerks and grocers and office printers—except for one black family. A block south, every house on both sides of East Avenue was occupied by African Americans who worked in the service class. As she moved farther into East Austin, the most heavily segregated of the city’s African American neighborhoods, her path snaked around the city’s black schools and churches and a handful of Hispanic neighborhoods in East Austin, a neighborhood of cottages and small bungalows. Pluenneke tallied black income and jobs in Austin’s Jim Crow society that were lower than whites’ and reflected constrained job opportunities. Indeed, more than 85 percent of working black women held jobs as maids, cooks, servants, or laundresses for white families or white institutions.24 Black men hardly fared better: two thirds of the black workforce in Austin were either laborers, porters, servants, cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, or launderers.25 In a city with two African American colleges in East Austin, even those with higher education had low-prestige jobs. Black home values were also lower than those of white-owned homes, thwarting a key means of accumulating wealth and concentrating that disadvantage in black neighborhoods. The census revealed the spatial aspects of racial segregation as well as its social and economic implications.
Residential racial segregation was part and parcel of the project of urban development in Austin. In the 1920s, it was a city in transition. Civic leaders pursued a Progressive-type agenda of good government and urban order, including adoption of a council-manager form of government in 1924, establishment of the Austin City Plan Commission in 1926, and a civic improvements campaign called “Onward Austin” that drew on emerging ideas about economic development and urban planning practice. The civic agenda included the preservation of segregation but advanced in fits and starts. The Austin Chamber of Commerce helped promote passage of the Love Bill, which enabled Texas cities to pass racial segregation ordinances.26 Throughout the 1920s, Southern cities including Dallas and New Orleans