Browse Exhibits (3 total)
Jim Crow Mansfield
The effects of Jim Crow were evident all over Mansfield, Texas, from Farr Best Movie Theater where African Americans were only allowed access to the small balcony, to the colored school, which was for all black students up until ninth grade. The high school in Mansfield was for whites only; black students were bussed to I.M. Terrell in Fort Worth. These Jim Crow laws and customs directed the daily lives of the citizens of Mansfield. Although one Mansfield resident, Floyd Moody, remembers spending the weekends playing with some of the white Mansfield students, that all changed for him after August 1956, when he and three other students, with the help of T.M. Moody, a local black leader, and L. Clifford Davis, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), tried to desegregate Mansfield High School.
Mansfield Crisis, 1956
On August 17, 1956, a mandate of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the case of Jackson v. Rawdon stated in part “Nathaniel Jackson, Charles Moody, and Floyd Stevenson Moody, and all other negro minors of the same class as the named minor plaintiffs, have the right to admission to, and to attend the Mansfield High School on the same basis as members of the white race, and that the refusal of the defendants to admit plaintiffs thereto on account of color or race is unlawful.” Floyd S. Moody, one student named in the case, recalled that thirteen days later on August 30, 1956, the three named students along with L. Clifford Davis, T.M. Moody, and John Lawson went to register at Mansfield High School where Superintendent R.L. Huffman told them, "That would never happen." The following day, August 31, 1956, residents of Mansfield and surrounding areas gathered at the high school, joined by Texas Rangers, sent by Governor Allan Shivers to “maintain law and order.” Oral histories, area newspapers, NAACP regional archives, and documents in the Mansfield Historical Society and Mansfield Library convey the anxieties of the town, the curiosity of outsiders, the anger of radical segregationists, and the fears of local African Americans.
Jackson v. Rawdon
in 1955, following the U.S. Supreme Court's two Brown v. Board of Education decisions, Mansfield High School in Mansfield, Texas, was still for whites students only. Mansfield ISD only provided schools for African Americans through the eighth grade, so African American students who wanted to continue their educations had to ride a bus to I.M. Terrell high School in Fort Worth. Some African American residents on Mansfield, including T.M. Moody, began work in hopes of integration at the local high school. They hired Clifford Davis, a young Fort Worth attorney who had previously succeeded with similar suits for the NAACP in Arkansas. On October 7, 1955, Davis filed a lawsuit against Superintendent O.C. Rawdon and the Mansfield School Board on behalf of three African American students requesting admission to Mansfield High School.