Black, white students across Marshall joined in civil rights demonstrations

story by Meredith Shamburger

Marshall’s legacy of civil rights activism is long and storied.

Among the many stories of Black residents and students working to end the racial divide is a special one recalled by two former Bishop College students that highlights how students across the city, both Black and white, joined forces as activists tried to desegregate downtown lunch counters.

In a 1992 article titled “Bishop students recall civil rights protests,” reporter James Osborne discussed how Willie Bruce Mooring Jr. and Carl L. Frazier visited the News Messenger to seek information about the sit-in demonstrations they participated in 31 years earlier. The two men shared their recollections.

Mooring and Frazier were freshmen during the two-week demonstrations led by Bishop and Wiley students at downtown Marshall businesses in 1960. About 100 students staged peaceful demonstrations at lunch counters at the F.W. Woolworth store, the Fry-Hodge drug store and the bus station. The protests were met with hostility from white city leaders, with students’ being jailed, soaked with high-pressure hoses or met with police dogs in the courthouse square.

Mooring, a Dallas native, told Osborne that while Jim Crow laws existed in Dallas, they were not as blunt as the segregation he and other students felt in Marshall.

“Oh sure, there were places in Dallas that treated blacks much the same as blacks were treated in Marshall back then,” Mooring said. “I just didn’t feel the situation struck you in the city as dramatically as it did here, in Marshall.”

So, Mooring recalled, “a number of upper-level student leaders decided to challenge Marshall’s ‘lunch counter closed to blacks’ policy.”

“When I went in and sat down at the lunch counter, the waitress asked if she could help me,” Mooring recalled. “I told her I wanted to buy a sandwich and she told me that Negroes were not served at her establishment.”

More black students filed in, filling all the seats at the lunch counter. Mooring recalled the police showing up and taking the students to jail.

“Every college student in the city was trying to get into the courthouse to join us,” Mooring recalled. “On the way up to the courthouse, the dogs which had been brought in to assist the police in controlling us – although we were peaceful – strained at their handlers’ leashes, snarling and barking at us.

“It was an emotional time. There were even students from East Tex as Baptist College there, at the courthouse, singing songs as we were being herded into the court house.

“We were singing tradition al songs… evidently the ETBC students heard us singing from inside, because the moment we stopped, the white students continued singing – they were on the same key, the same note, it was just an emotional, moving experience.”

Frazier recalled then-District Attorney Charles Allen getting angry by the students’ actions.

“Oh, he was upset, he started yelling for us to stop singing, and when we stopped, the students outside continued singing, and he yelled at them outside from inside the courthouse to stop singing, too.”

Allen’s yelling had no effect. Only when Al Campbell, a student leader from Philadelphia, stood up and raised his hands did the singing stop.

“That was when we could hear the rest of the students outside from Bishop and Wiley and ETBC singing,” Mooring recalled.

“The district attorney asked us, ‘what do you want,’ and we all replied, ‘we want you to let all of us go.’

“We told him ‘we want you to try to understand us, and to give us some understanding of the changes we are seeking.’”

The students ordered a halt to their sit-ins after Bishop College President M.K. Curry and Wiley College President T. Winston Cole Sr. asked them to convince the students to end the demonstrations.