been living with an older brother in Abilene. The two didn’t always get along, he said, and he asked ACU for a place to live. When Bonner was told the college had found a place for him to share with new arrival Curl, he expected a room in a residence hall. Instead, ACU offered the students room in a remodeled barn near Judge Ely Boulevard, north of the main campus. The phone directory listed their residence as the “ACC Farm.” The reason the students lived off campus may never be fully known or remembered.
Curl said he recalls provision of the barn itself as an act of generosity by Dr. Keith Justice, ACU professor of agronomy, former Nacogdoches resident and a friend of Hanna. As chair of the agriculture department, Justice oversaw the farm. “It worked out really well,” Curl said. “From the outside it looked horrible; from the inside it was really nice. I had a nice place to stay. It’s just the symbolism of it was really awful.” Bonner seemed to have a harder time, struggling to look past the situation and focus on the positive aspects of his time at ACU. “You have to have something to get yourself immune from this stuff,” he said.
“It is what it is. … There was a lot of negative, but I didn’t have time [to dwell on it]. I was working all the time.” Indeed, the contrast between the two students at Southwestern carried to Abilene, where Bonner worked at the Petroleum Club all four years to pay his way through college, while Curl worked weekends as a dishwasher and studied hard to keep up his grades. In addition to the challenge of upper-level classes in a new educational environment, both men dealt with the curiosity, pressure and resentment that came with blazing a trail for racial equality in West Texas. The results sometimes were amusing: For example, Bonner one day noticed a classmate following him on campus, and
ACU TODAY
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Fall 2012
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