Separate but equal

<blockquote><p align=justify><li>Clara Constantine Broussard
<li>Shirley Taylor Gresham
<li>Charles Vincent Singleton
<li>Martha Jane Conway Bossett<hr>
<b>Clara Constantine Broussard</b>
Her mother started it all.

Fifty years ago, Helma Constantine didn't think it made much sense that her daughter, Clara, had to leave home for a college education just because she was black.

Broussard was 21 years old when she started at Southwestern Louisiana Institute.

"It wasn't something that was easy," Broussard said. "It's nice to be recognized for what we did."

She stayed in school one year before she decided that she really wanted to go to beauty school.

She looks to her mother as the driving force behind the lawsuit and changing the course of the lives of the students that followed her. It is a strength she wants her grandchildren not to forget.

"I want them to know what their grandmother and great-grandmother did," Broussard said, turning to look at her mother. "She was so determined."

Shirley Taylor Gresham
Shirley Taylor was 19 when she first set foot on SLI's campus. She didn't think twice about the prejudice she would face.

"I wasn't thinking," Gresham said. "I just wanted an education and to register. That was it."

She attended the university for one year before she left to join the Army.

"I always wanted to be in law enforcement," she laughed, "but there was a height and weight requirement and I didn't have either."

While in the service, she was in the signal corps.

"I left as a sergeant," she said. She went on into the banking business where she retired after 40 years.

Friday was her first time back on UL's campus since she was a student. Today, she'll receive an honorary degree in humanities for her courage that first semester.

"It hasn't hit me yet," she said. "I am just so honored and pleased. They always say good things come at last. It's good to know that our fight was not in vain."

<center><p><a href="http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041218/NEWS01/412180329/1002">The rest of the story</a><!--

Charles Vincent Singleton
Charles Vincent Singleton shared the fight to integrate Southwestern Louisiana Institute. He was a party to the lawsuit, but was never afforded the opportunity to attend the university.

Singleton's parents were dead, and he didn't have the financial means to attend college, said his niece, Gerri Singleton Harris.

A year later, Harris attended the university her uncle fought to open to black students.

Harris went on to graduate from the university and later earned her master's degree elsewhere. At first, Harris said she wanted to attend Southern, but her mother wouldn't have it.

"When my mother spoke, you listened," she said.

Martha Jane Conway Bossett
Growing up around the world as an Air Force brat, Dr. Charles Bossett didn't hear many stories about what his mother went through to integrate a school in Louisiana.

"My mother was such a humble person. We knew it, but she never went into the particulars," Bossett said in a phone interview from California.

Now 71, Martha Jane Conway Bossett attended SLI for two years studying education. While in college, she met her husband, who was in the Air Force, and left school to support his career. But her determination has been instilled in her five children and 16 grandchildren, said her son. The family traveled the world.

Charles Bossett said his mother didn't view her actions as revolutionary or noteworthy.

"She just wanted to go to school," he said. "There wasn't the idea, 'I'm going to fight this.' She had a goal and wanted to fulfill her aspirations."


Originally published December 18, 2004

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<blockquote><p align=justify><b> Shawn Wilson/UL Lafayette Alumni President</b>:

"That was a very monumental occasion. But, in actuality, the fact that we had 72 students enroll that following September made it the largest desegregation in the deep south. After us, other universities slowly began to desegregate..."

<center><p><a href="http://www.klfy.com/Global/story.asp?S=2710014">The KLFY story</a>

<blockquote><p align=justify><i>University of Louisiana honors desegregation students</i>

More than 50 years ago, Clara Constantine, Shirley Taylor Gresham, Martha Jane Conway and Charles Singleton set foot on the campus of Southwestern Louisiana Institute wanting to attend college there.

They were told no based on the color of their skin, but didn't take that for an answer. They filed a lawsuit against the university and won the right to enroll.

On Saturday, that same university, now known as the University of Louisiana, awarded the four students honorary degrees during graduation ceremonies for their fight to integrate the school.

"It made us feel so proud," said Gresham, who now lives in California. "I never thought I would get speechless, but I am."

Gresham and Clara Constantine Broussard stood dressed in their caps and gowns glowing with the same excitement as the twentysomethings buzzing about them.

"It feels so great," Broussard said.

For different reasons, each of the three women left college to pursue different careers or to start families. Singleton never attended classes because he could not afford the tuition.

UL President Ray Authement told students of stories he heard from Norman Francis, now president of Xavier University, about what it was like growing up in Lafayette more than 50 years ago.

<center><p><a href="http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041219/NEWS01/412190342/1002">The rest of the story</a>

Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com <!-- SLII SLI USL southwestern UL ULL Lafayette UL-Lafayette


"He told me, 'Ray, it was very, very hard to ride my bicycle through that campus ... because of the color of my skin. I was denied (attendance to) the university a few blocks from my father's barber shop ...'," Authement said.

It was the four students and their families who filed the lawsuit challenging SLI and the Jim Crow South that began to change the climate on the campus, Authement said.

"(I) say to them from all of us, thank you, thank you, thank you," he said. "You've made our lives more pleasant and our country more free and for that we're eternally grateful."

The students integrated the campus in the fall of 1954. There were more than 70 blacks on the registration rolls. There were no riots, no fights, but there was ridicule, leering stares and even avoidance from their white classmates. The university did its part to keep the integration low-key. The press was asked to leave during registration. The university has few records of the event, which presented a challenge to UL history professor Michael Martin and other historians. To help remedy the gaping hole in the school's history, he organized a symposium in September on the anniversary of the first integrated fall semester.

History books rarely mention SLI in timelines, Martin said. And why is that, he asked the crowd. He answered by way of one of his mentors who once explained, "Historians are like children. They're fascinated (by) fireworks."

The university's integration occurred without violence. No "fireworks" like the ones witnessed on the campuses of Ole Miss or Alabama, he said. But what makes SLI's integration important is it was a model for other universities in the South, he said.

Dr. Charles Bossett, son of Martha Jane Conway Bossett, said Martin's efforts have brought his mother's contributions to the forefront.

"It's brought a new light to my life knowing what my mother has done," Bossett said following the ceremony. He accepted his mother's honorary degree on her behalf. Singleton also couldn't attend the ceremony. His niece, Gerri Singleton Harris, accepted his degree.

Just as parents whooped and hollered for their twentysomethings marching toward the dean, Helma Constantine, mother of Clara Constantine Broussard, and other family members of the four students shone with pride. Helma Constantine is considered the driving force behind the lawsuit.

"It was wonderful," said Helma Constantine. "I was full of tears almost. It's a long time coming. I didn't think I'd live to see it. I turn 91 in March."
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Class act Baby! Class act!.~.

Tastefully done too! I was at graduation to see my niece and this was a very well done presentation. Congratulations, and THANKS to those first black students.
Shof

<center><table border=6><td><img src="http://img.horvitznewspapers.net/mir/masthead.jpg"></td></table>
<table border=6><td><img src="https://forumeus.com/images/people/reaux-helen-elizabeth-1955-56-yb.jpg"></td></table>Helen Elizabeth Reaux, UL Student 1950's</center><blockquote><p align=justify><b><a href="http://www.seattlerentals.com/737.html?page=737&SESSION=45cff42219850cdf25588ffde75cbcfc&s=0">Mercer Island</a> resident was one of the first African American students to integrate a Southern college in the 1950s</b>

In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace stood with armed state troopers on the schoolhouse steps of the University of Alabama to bar black students from registering for classes. Captured on television, the event and the ugly conflicts about race that followed in the segregated South, shocked the nation.

But years earlier, two dozen or so African American students registered for classes at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, to little notice or fanfare. They were among the very first to attend and integrate a white college in the South.

Simply in search of an education, Islander Helen Reaux Gordon, then a resident of nearby Abbeville, La., was one of those students.

A group of four black students had sued the school in 1953 when administrators refused to enroll them. The students prevailed in their suit, opening the way for the first African American students to attend classes on the campus.

In the fall of 1954, Gordon wasn't afraid to be first. She was determined.

The local newspaper reported then that the assistant state attorney general at the time felt that the black students in Lafayette should be willing to commute to the black college, Southern University in Baton Rouge, 80 miles to the east.

``If I didn't go to Southwestern to college, I wouldn't go to college at all,'' she said of the school just a few miles away from her hometown. ``There was no money for me to go across the state to one of the black colleges.''

It is difficult to imagine how anyone could be afraid of Gordon.

Barely 5 feet tall, with a smattering of freckles, the once red-haired Gordon says she is probably Creole, a mix of French, American Indian, Irish, Scotch and maybe Jamaican heritage.

``You name it,'' she laughs with a wave of her hand. Gordon's family name, Reaux, is French.

This fall, 50 years after those first students set foot on the campus amid the very mixed emotions of its administrators, the courage of those first students was recognized by a conference and memorial to the students at the university now called UL Lafayette.

She said the black students did not realize the larger implications of their enrollment at the college at first.

``We were young,'' she reminds a visitor.

``We knew we were paving the way,'' she said, ``but I didn't know the great price we were paying.''

Getting into the school turned out to be the easy part.

The hardest part was the isolation, she remarked. ``We were invisible.''

<center><p><a href="http://www.mi-reporter.com/sited/story/html/181619">The rest of the story</a>

Mary L. Grady
Mercer Island Reporter <!-- Soutwestern SLII SLI USL ULL UL-Lafayette Louisiana-Lafayette UL

She shook her head, remembering. ``We never got the grades we deserved. Our hand always went up in class. But many professors would not call on us.''

There was never any socializing with other students. Contact was kept to a minimum. African American students were not allowed or asked to participate in fraternal organizations, sports or social events. There was no sense of school spirit or identity with a place or experience. No one encouraged or mentored the students. They were simply ignored.

``You are here and not here,'' she said of the experience. ``No matter where I sat, I sat alone.''

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did come by to see if the students were eating in the school cafeteria.

``Most of the time we couldn't afford it,'' Gordon chuckles. But just like any teenager, she would find a nickel for a Coca Cola.

When the black students finally came to campus to register, Life Magazine came to take pictures. College administrators sent them away for fear the publicity would endanger everyone.

But if they wanted to, the press could have come and found out how the black students were treated there, Gordon said.

She rented a room with an elderly couple in the town and worked for a family who lived near the campus. She worked as a part-time nanny to the children and as a maid. She would go to the home very early each morning, spend time between classes at the college library and return in the evening to help with the children. She became ill trying to do it all.

Her real fear, she said, was that she would get sick and not be able to work and to finish her education.

After a time, Gordon made a few white acquaintances. One girl that Gordon got to know told her ``our parents have told us so many awful things about Negro people. And they just aren't true.''

Gordon and her twin brother, Allen, grew up in a family of seven children. They lived in a poor, but orderly, neighborhood in a town near a bayou just a few miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico.

``We were all poor,'' she explained of the neighborhood where she grew up. ``There were poor black and white families and we all just lived together. The children played together. And there was always someone out on the street looking out for us.''

The family was Roman Catholic. Gordon remembers her father wearing a suit and tie to Mass each Sunday at the parish where the children attended school. Her parents and relatives spoke French and Creole. Her father had just a second grade education and many of her aunts could not read.

In high school, Gordon had excellent grades, was popular and happy.

An attorney had come to talk with Gordon's parents in 1953 about having her join the class action lawsuit. But her father reluctantly said no.

``My father had worked at a rice mill and had led a strike there,'' Gordon explained. ``He lost his job and never got it back. He said there would be repercussions.

I said, `Daddy, I understand.'''

Gordon, now 68, has lived with her husband, Leroy, in the same small stone house on the north end of the Island for 38 years. After they moved here in the mid-1960s, she taught elementary school for Seattle Public Schools for 25 years and became a bit of an activist herself. She campaigned for fair housing laws in Seattle in the 1960s. She and her husband had three children.

Slowed by a car accident a few years ago and a broken wrist from a fall, she laments that she can no longer be called the ``Energizer Bunny.''

She feels validated about the recognition after all these years. Students who attended the school in the first wave were given honorary degrees. A college professor is writing a book about the first black students and their experiences.

``Our presence, our isolation, counted for something,'' Gordon said.

A well-read Bible is at her side where she sits in her living room full of art and favorite things. Outside the window the houses nearby are morphing into large elaborate structures.

She smiles and laughs easily, too polite to even remember what she has put up with as an African American.

In the true spirit of a not-so-mythical Southern belle, Mrs. Gordon is made of sterner stuff.

She doesn't dwell on the past.

Instead, she is packing for a trip to visit relatives in the Bayou, then to L.A. to visit her daughter. There are Mary Kay cosmetics to sell, gift baskets to deliver and homemade soup to make The former teacher is learning Portuguese to be able to speak with her daughter-in-law from South America.

``God still has work left for me to do, she said. -->

<i>
Werely Gobar, of Port Arthur, was one of 70 black students who started integration at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in the fall of 1954.</i><center><img src="http://www.panews.com/content/articles/2005/02/26/news/01news.jpg"></center><blockquote><p align=justify>PORT ARTHUR - Before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 70 brave black students stepped on the Southwestern Louisiana Institute campus and ignited the spark of desegregation that would later spread throughout the South.

Junior Werely Gobar, one of those courageous students, enrolled in S.L.I. in the fall of 1954, paving the way for millions of aspiring black scholars to enroll in equal education universities.

Born in Beaux Bridge, La., Gobar grew up in the segregated deep South where he was limited to riding in the back of public buses, drinking from "black only" labeled water fountains and attending segregated schools.

"I attended Southern University in Baton Rouge from Sept. 1953 to May 1954," Gobar said. "It was an all black school. In 1954 two men spoke to my mother and when I got home she said two men were looking for me. Two lawyers, Tourneau and Thurgood Marshall were handling a desegregation suit against S.W.L. Institute and asked me if I would be available to go to school there that year if it was to become desegregated."

The lawyers were trying a desegregation case against the institute following the denial of admission of four black students in 1953. During litigation, Marshall and Tourneau recruited young adults from the surrounding Lafayette black communities to attend the all white institute. It would be the first of many attempts to break down race barriers in higher learning institutions.


"They won the case and it was feasible for me to register in the fall of 1954," Gobar said. "I was excited about the opportunity to stay at my momma's house. Mmmm, I couldn't pass up my momma's good cooking."

Despite the comfort of remaining at home, Gobar was now forced to face the racism and cruelty of his white peers that he had not dealt with while attending Southern University.

"The atmosphere was not too nice," Gobar said. "You know, there was name calling and teasing, no violence though. Some of the men were belligerent, but I am grateful to the young ladies that went to school there. They were the peacemakers. The ladies held the guys back, they soothed tense situations."

The ugliness of racism extended beyond name calling for Gobar, however, as he and the other students were ostracized by white students and organizations.

"It hurt bad that we could not play sports or participate in school activities," Gobar said. "Other schools would not have participated if a black man was allowed to play on a sport's team. I was strictly there for the school, for the education."

Gobar said despite the alienation by white students, that he valued his time at the institute and would never regret the close friendships that he developed with his black peers.

"We formed our own groups," Gobar said. "There were some very good days at that school. I made friendships there with a lot of the guys and girls."

Looking back on his experience at S.L.I., Gobar said he feels the school did both he and the other students a service and a disservice by keeping the publicity about the integration quiet.

"I am 71 years old now and I just want to say that I am very highly grateful for my time at S.L.I.," Gobar said. "I will cherish my time there for the rest of my days. I want to thank the courageous teachers that took a chance on us. I want to thank the people of Lafayette for their cooperation and for not allowing violence or brutality. I thank them all from the bottom of my heart."

Gobar said he feels that it is now time for the intrepid black students who took a giant leap of faith for freedom to gain the recognition that they deserve for integrating an all white school, two years before Brown vs. The Board of Education was finally enforced.

<center><p><a href="http://www.panews.com/articles/2005/02/26/news/01news.txt">The rest of the story</a>

By Ashley Sanders <!--

According to Gobar, S.L.I, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, did not fully integrate until the 1970s. Gobar said that although it has been 51 years since he began course work at the institute, that it was a wonderful experience to be recognized recently by the school for his dedication in fighting for equal education.

"On December 17, 2004, the school communicated to me and my family that they were about to honor the class of 54 students," Gobar said. "They dedicated a building in all our names. It is called The Pillars of Progress."

Following his graduation in 1957, Gobar joined the Army and worked in numerous jobs, including as an inspector for the Brach Candy Company in California. He relocated to Port Arthur during the 1960s and has called the port city home ever since.

"I moved to Port Arthur in the 60s because my mother was ill," Gobar said. "I got a job here and I married my wife Christine in 1968. We have great children. Three boys, Kevin, Leo and LeVon and one daughter, Aquenette. I thank God for my children, wife, cousins, nephews and nieces."

Gobar, a proud pillar of his community, said even with all of his personal accomplishments that he is most proud that he was able to participate in such an important movement for the benefit of all black people.

"We served this movement. We were the first in the South to integrate. We served as a model, as desegregationists. We were the pilgrims, the forerunners, the dreamers." -->

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Early 1950s -- Federal judges begin ordering black students be admitted to graduate and professional schools founded for "white children of Louisiana."

1956 -- Louisiana Legislature passes a law to remove teachers or state employees who advocate integration at colleges and universities.

1964 -- All-white LSU ordered to admit black undergraduates; all-black Southern University New Orleans ordered to admit white undergraduates.

1973 -- Federal government tells Louisiana to submit college desegregation plans or risk losing federal dollars.

1974 -- U.S. Justice Department sues Louisiana's college management boards to dismantle dual university system for black people and white people.

1975-1980 -- Lawsuit lies essentially dormant.

<center><p><a href="http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/120405/new_decree2001.shtml">The rest of the story</a>

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1981 -- Parties agree to a compromise, a "consent decree" committing Louisiana to spend millions over a six-year period to improve black colleges.

1988 -- Three-judge U.S. District Court panel rules that the consent decree hasn't worked and that a "drastic change" may be required to desegregate schools.

1989 -- A consultant recommends sweeping changes, including a single governing board, classifying colleges by role, admission standards and a system of community colleges. The court adopts most of the plan.

1990 -- Federal appeals court rules in favor of Mississippi in a similar higher-education desegregation case. Louisiana authorities figure that means they win their case too.

1992 -- U.S. Supreme Court overturns Mississippi decision. U.S. District Judge Charles Schwartz issues an order overhauling Louisiana higher education. The plan includes consolidating colleges under one board and creating a community college system.

1993 -- Federal appeals court strikes down the lower court's desegregation plan and orders a trial.

1994 -- Judge Schwartz delays trial so parties can negotiate. Louisiana's four college management boards agree on a settlement that gives more money to historically black schools and strengthens all schools' efforts to recruit other-race students. Court approves settlement.

1997 -- Board of Regents approves collaboration of engineering programs between LSU, Southern, Nicholls, McNeese and University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It's one of 50 programs slated for inter-campus collaboration.

1998 -- Baton Rouge Community College opens in a single state-of-the-art building. The school enrolls 1,866 students. About 57 percent are white and 32 percent are black.

1999 -- New dorms are built at Southern University campus, one of four projects completed on the campus that year.

2004 -- Except for LSU and Southern, all schools with admissions requirements exceed the mandate of 10 percent other-race enrollment.

2005 -- With the settlement period drawing to a close, Southern University Board of Supervisors discusses asking for an extension. Board members argue that goals for Southern University in New Orleans were not met.




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