Breaking Barriers
Melanie Lawson

Growing up in segregated Houston during the late 1950s, I never imagined I would one day be on daily television in my own hometown. After all, I remember watching the news as a little girl—my father expected us to be informed about current events—and none of the newscasters looked anything like me. They were all white men with tailored suits, perfectly combed hair, and no trace of a southern accent. I assumed those were strict requirements for the job, and I didn´t fit any of them.

In fact, white people were mostly a mystery to me. I grew up in the heart of Third Ward after moving to Houston from Kansas when I was only a year old. My father had been offered a job as the new head of the Baptist Student Union at a college that was smaller than many high schools: Texas Southern University then boasted only a few buildings and a very modest campus. We lived in a two-story house next to a railroad track, and I learned to sleep right through the sound of freight trains roaring past in the night. I also learned to sleep through the loud sessions my father held with impassioned students in the downstairs living room, as did the two younger sisters and one brother who followed me in rapid succession.

As I got older, I came to realize that many of those regular sessions with students weren´t just about the Bible. They were about a movement sweeping through college campuses all across the South: civil rights for blacks. And my father, a young Baptist minister hoping to win more souls for Christ, could not avoid (or argue with) these newly urgent demands of his flock—the right to eat or shop anywhere they wanted, the expectation that their hard-earned education would get them something more than a menial job, and the desire to be treated like adult men and women.

I remember learning how to paint signs with words I didn´t even understand, like “desegregation” and “equality,” and spending my elementary school years doing something few of my classmates did: marching alongside my parents in organized protests down to Houston City Hall. I didn´t know why, but the marches were always crackling with excitement and passion, and tinged with more than a little bit of fear. I sometimes wondered why I needed to be there, but my dad assured me that someday I would know why it mattered so much.

This was also the time when I first began to see some white people. I discovered that not only was I different from them, but they seemed to be different from each other. Some whites made it quite clear they didn´t want us in their stores or restaurants or schools, and they would shout obscenities at us during the marches and sit-ins—I was told to never respond, no matter how upset I felt. Other whites, expensively dressed and often familiar looking, would show up at our house late at night to meet in whispered strategy sessions with my father and other protestors, trying to discover a way that “we could work this all out.” Still other whites would talk to me as they did to their own children, while they stayed up all night painting signs, then returned the next day to hoist the placards on their shoulders and join the marchers, seemingly oblivious to how much they stood out in the crowd.

Many of those marches were to force schools to integrate, a concept that meant next to nothing to me. After all, I thought my school was already pretty diverse—there were the light-skinned girls with long curly hair and hazel eyes that all the boys wanted to sit next to in class, and there were little girls like me who had dark skin and nappy hair that resisted my mother´s best efforts to comb it straight with a pressing iron. My bangs and braids never stayed straight when I played outside in Houston´s humid weather, and my little skinny legs always seemed ashy, no matter how much lotion or Vaseline I rubbed on them. This consciousness of my own differences from others grew even more acute when, as children of one of the movement´s most visible leaders, my sister, brother, and I became some of only about a dozen kids to integrate Poe Elementary School. Soon the curious stares and in some cases open hostility made me dread riding across town in our makeshift car pool.

One of my best friends and I were placed in a sixth grade class together on the first day. We huddled in adjoining desks in the back of the room, but our well-meaning teacher was not about to let us slide by unnoticed. “Boys and girls,” he drawled, “we have two new students in our class this year. They are colored girls. Now I donÍt want you to treat them any differently, just because they are colored.” We wanted to drop through the floor. Within minutes, several students in the back of the room were hissing at us: “Niggers, niggers, we don´t want you niggers here.” On the playground, they got louder and bolder, pushing and taunting us. But just like those whites who chose to march with us, one little boy took on our tormenters and reported them to the teacher. It made him an outcast for the rest of the school year, but I never forgot the lesson: not everyone is the same, no matter how they look.

Fast forward to Houston in 2000. In the years since I first crossed those barriers in the 1960s, our city has quietly changed in ways that I certainly could never have predicted. The mayor is African-American, as is the superintendent of the largest school district and countless public officials and private professionals. Only a few areas of the city remain where black families do not live alongside white, Hispanic, and Asian families, mingling with immigrants from around the world. Every professional sports team features players of all races, and kids of every size and hue worship superstars like basketball celebrities Hakeem Olajuwon and Cynthia Cooper.

More importantly, our city has become a place of opportunity for anyone who has built a better mousetrap. I´m not naive enough to think that being black or female doesn´t make the climb to the top harder or proving yourself more of a constant challenge, but I have seen enough of my peers succeed in unlikely fields to make me a believer. I lived some years in New York—first in law school, then practicing law on Wall Street—and while I went there assuming the largest and most diverse city in this nation would mean that no one faced barriers or discrimination, the truth was just the opposite. Many of the largest law firms and investment houses had only a few black professionals, if they had any at all, and most of those professionals tended to hit the “glass ceiling” early and hard.

Meanwhile, blacks in Houston were becoming millionaires as ranchers, architects, oil pipeline company owners, and car dealers, as well as in more traditional fields like law and medicine. When I moved back to Houston in late 1982 to take a full-time job with KTRK-Channel 13, black reporters and photographers worked at every station, covering events all over the city. In only ten years, my hometown had become a different place. There were certainly throwbacks, like the initially cool reception that the city´s first black police chief met from both the police department and the community. But by the time he left that post seven years later for a much bigger job, Lee Brown was one of the city´s most popular public figures. It was obvious to me that most Houstonians believed you proved your own worth, no matter who you were.

Now when I go as a guest speaker to local schools, including my alma mater Poe Elementary, I´m greeted by a rainbow of kids who look beyond their classmates´ skin when deciding if they want to be friends. I recognize that the current diversity in role models means that many kids don´t associate race or gender with a particular job or position—and most importantly, they don´t limit themselves because of it. They´ve seen black astronauts, Asian City Council members, Hispanic businessmen, white rappers, and women CEOs.

I see Houston entering the next millennium at the forefront of that change. We represent a city of so many different kinds of people, each with our own history of racism and turmoil, and now we can (and do) lead the way in opening doors for everyone. This has always been a city of mavericks with crazy dreams who went out and made them come true. As a landlocked city, we dug a ship channel to capitalize on port business. We hated the heat, rain, and mosquitoes during baseball season, so we dreamed up a domed stadium. We bet on space as the next great frontier. And throughout it all, we learned to live with the feast-or-famine life style of an oil capital. In Houston, success isn´t based on who you know or even who knows you. It´s based on how far you´re willing to go to realize your dream.

I wish I could say that we will never see another hate crime, or another child scarred by racism or discrimination. Unfortunately, I think there will always be those who want to sabotage progress of any kind. But I know this is a vital city, filled with opportunities for children of every race and ethnic background: this grows more apparent every year. I love Houston, despite my early history and because of it. And I know that without those shared years of learning how to break down barriers, I wouldn´t be what I am today, nor would Houston.

Copyright©2000 Melanie Lawson