Figure 12. Austin, Texas. Map created by the author.
2 The City Limits
The evening of May 27, 1923, an oil driller’s bit passed the depth of three thousand feet after nearly two years of drilling into arid West Texas land near Odessa. Gas bubbled up into the Santa Rita well, named for the patron saint of impossible causes, and the drillers stopped their rig, realizing they had found oil where investors had been searching since 1919. The drillers hurried to lease more lands nearby before the news broke. The next morning, crude oil erupted from the well and sprayed over the top of the derrick: the drillers’ bet paid off. Oil honeycombed the land, and the strike instantly made the acreage, which belonged to the University of Texas (UT), worth hundreds, even thousands of times more than when the school leased it as ranching land.1
Federal policy and new technology made crude oil an essential commodity in the American economy. Transportation policy shifted early in the twentieth century from emphasizing rail to automobility. Gasoline-powered internal combustion engines moved goods and people from farm to market, from city to city, and from producer to port. American oil consumption increased steadily throughout most of the twentieth century, and the University of Texas sat on a large pile of royalties that grew larger every year.2
That wealth held the potential to lift the University of Texas, and the city of Austin with it, to a new elite rank. However, its Southern, segregationist practices and its national aspirations were in conflict. In the midcentury decades, the university’s northern peers increasingly looked askance at Jim Crow segregation, and national policy chipped away at it until, by the mid-1950s, explicit segregation was no longer viable policy for either a great university or a major city.
Discussions of segregation and the influence of the civil rights movement on higher education often center on legal battles and flash points like the one that erupted over James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi in 1962: famous clashes over enrollment decided in favor of integration.3 George Wallace’s 1963 symbolic blockade of the door of the University of Alabama promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and propelled him to national prominence as a part of the “massive resistance” movement.
Urban development, however, was also a key mechanism of racial segregation—a “passive resistance” counterpart. Robust suburbs at the metropolitan periphery of cities like Atlanta and Detroit were often populated by and usually limited to white, middle-class professionals.4 Universities helped drive this suburban growth at midcentury. On the outskirts of Chicago, the University of Chicago helped build and manage a national research laboratory in DuPage County after World War II that led to growth in the nearby suburbs of Naperville and Downers Grove. Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, created a research park that was central to the development of Silicon Valley far outside the largest Bay Area cities of San Francisco and Oakland.5 The state of New York incorporated the University of Buffalo into its state higher-education system and created a new, second campus in suburban Amherst, exacerbating urban disinvestment and peripheral expansion in Buffalo. In all of these places, suburban growth exacerbated racial segregation, and universities were part and parcel to suburban growth. In Austin, understanding the the relationship among segregation, metropolitan growth, and higher education is essential to understanding the development of the city.
The University of Texas helped pave the way in the 1930s and 1940s to a new kind of sprawling, segregated metropolis, just at the moment Austin was becoming a major American city. In this era, the university drew on federal resources to promote growth in Austin, reinforced Jim Crow in central Austin before the antisegregation Sweatt and Brown cases, and, fueled by oil, helped drive a less explicit metropolitan segregation afterward. Suburbanization, highway building, and metropolitan expansion after World War II provided opportunities to sidestep political opprobrium and seemed to leave behind the legacy of Jim Crow, especially after a losing court battle over segregation. Postwar metropolitan growth allowed UT leaders to partner with Austin’s civic elite and develop sprawling greenfield and automobile-oriented sites that were functionally segregated by race while they advanced a race-neutral ideology of scientific discovery, regional economic growth, and consumer choice in the national interest. University president Theophilus Painter, politicians James “Buck” Buchanan and Lyndon Johnson, mayor Tom Miller, publisher Charles Marsh, and chamber of commerce head Walter Long—all worked together to draw federal funds, to bring economic growth to Austin, and to make it one of the boom cities of the twentieth century. Many large cities during the century lost population, tax base, and civic optimism as they suffered from urban crisis. Austin was one of the winners, with a growing population and a tech economy that made it a model for other cities at the end of the century.
The University Landscape
The University of Texas opened in 1883 after the state’s constitution authorized the creation of a “university of the first class.”6 The impoverished state could not provide the resources necessary to realize this ambition, and the modest income from the West Texas ranch lands limited the university’s growth. Dirt paths crisscrossed campus as students wore down the grass and their trails became permanent, dusty walks. At the turn of the century, a Victorian-Gothic structure, built wing by wing in the 1880s and 1890s, was the university’s signature building, but after just a few decades, it seemed antiquated and unfashionable.7 The need for classroom space was so dire that a set of rickety wooden structures built during World War I remained for more than a decade, stretching in lines across the campus.8 Students reviled them as “the shacks,” and campus wags joked that the university featured “shackeresque” architecture. A faculty member called them “hideous and uncomfortable, the shame of Texas.”9 The university sought to use oil revenues in the 1920s to begin expanding, bypassing a constitutionally created endowment fund. The state attorney general challenged this action, prompting the state supreme court to acknowledge that “a shackless campus is much to be desired,” even though it ruled in favor of the attorney general (Figure 13).10
In 1928 the university constructed a new sculptural gateway on the campus as a monument to the Southern Lost Cause. Statues of George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee, James Hogg, John Reagan, and Albert Sidney Johnston lined the main campus walkway from the south. A dispute that began in 1919 had led to their erection, as two regents, George Brackenridge and George Littlefield, battled for control of the campus location and its appearance.11 Brackenridge was a northerner, a Republican, and a longtime UT Regent. He was a banker who had made a fortune evading the Confederate blockade on cotton exports during the Civil War.12 He donated land along the Colorado River to accommodate a new, larger campus for the university, but Littlefield, a staunch segregationist, Confederate veteran, and native Texan, opposed the move. Littlefield had fought and been wounded in the Civil War and was saved by his slave. After the war, Littlefield moved to Austin along with his wife, Alice, and Nathan Stokes, the slave who remained as a servant for more than fifty years.13 The Northern–Southern dynamic of the campus debate set the tone for decades of imagining the future of the UT campus.
Figure 13. “The Shacks” in Austin. The University of Texas suffered from limited state funding from the time of its creation, relying on the leasing proceeds of ranch lands in West Texas. These buildings were constructed for temporary purposes in World War I but continued to be used for more than a decade. Austin wags dubbed the buildings “the Shacks.” The discovery of oil on the ranch lands gave the university the resources to remake its campus despite the economic crisis of the Great Depression. UT Texas Student Publications, Prints and Photographs Collection, di_06442, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
George Littlefield donated $250,000 for a fountain and the sculptures that would embellish the approach from the state capitol,