Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History

Historian Ponton debuts with a deeply researched and illuminating exploration of mid-century civil rights history in Houston. Drawing on the theory of Afro-pessimism, which holds that racism is an intrinsic and permanent aspect of the modern social order, Ponton examines how Houston’s civil rights activism was defeated (in the sense that the city remains one of America’s most segregated) by Black activists’ unwitting enmeshment in the very ideologies that oppressed them. One example is Black newspaper editor Carter Wesley, who Ponton argues was undermined in his efforts to champion African Americans’ rights by an unproductive reliance on oppressive gender stereotypes; he often castigated his Black readership for their lack of manhood. Elsewhere, Ponton contends that efforts to desegregate higher education and housing were undercut by compromises that placed too much faith in untrustworthy ideals like “the rule of law.” For example, activists who settled for an all-Black public college (what later became Texas Southern University) rather than system-wide desegregation did not foresee how much pushback the institution would face—not just unequal funding, but also a ferocious May 1967 police attack on the men’s dormitory. Through his extensive scouring of Black newspapers, NAACP investigations, and other contemporaneous sources, Ponton provides a fascinating window onto how individual Black activists thought about their world. It’s a rigorous study of the ins-and-outs of civil rights activism and a significant contribution to the history of Houston. (Feb.)