Midwestern University Desegregation

The lawsuit turned on distance as much as principle. Hardin Junior College was the only publicly supported junior college in the Wichita Falls district, one of thirty-three in Texas. The Black applicants' nearest alternatives were Prairie View A&M, 367 miles away, and Texas Southern in Houston, 411 miles, both four-year schools. The federal district court ordered the applicants admitted. The Fifth Circuit affirmed in 1953, finding the options not substantially equal and calling Hardin a state institution, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in 1954.

What the plaque says

Midwestern University Desegregation In 1948, Emzy Downing and James O. Chandler, both graduates from the African American high school in Wichita Falls, Booker T. Washington High School, applied for admission to Hardin Junior College, a division of Midwestern University. The Board of Trustees denied their admission. In 1950, with encouragement from local NAACP leader Professor C.E. Jackson, Willie Faye Battle, an honor graduate, applied by mail for admission to the two-year nursing school at Hardin Junior College. She was accepted. But when she and Professor Jackson went to the school to complete the application process, she was denied admission. Subsequently she was accepted to Prairie View A&M University. In the fall of 1951, MS. Battle along with Maryland Virginia Menefee, Helen Muriel Davis, Golden E. Mitchell White, Carl Lawrence McBride and Wilma Jean Norris were encouraged to apply in person. Each applicant received rejection letters in the mail. Following this incident, a meeting was held between the University Board of Trustees and Representatives of the Texas State Council. Alternative solutions were discussed such as a College at Booker T. Washington High School or Midwestern paying the tuition for African American students to attend African American colleges. These alternatives were rejected and a suit was filed in United States District Court, the first of its type. Initially, Battle, et al. V. Wichita Falls Junior College Dist., et al. was decided in favor of the students. But, with appeals and injunctions, the final decision came through the Supreme Court in 1954, following the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling. The first African American students were enrolled in the summer of 1954. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kell House Museum — 2.4 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 3.0 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 11 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 19 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• Wichita Falls High School — 1.1 mi
• Wichita Falls Traction Company — 1.6 mi
• Call Field — 2.0 mi
• Bethania Hospital — 2.0 mi