Fair Ways: How Six Black Golfers Won Civil Rights in Beaumont, Texas.

Fair Ways: How Six Black Golfers Won Civil Rights in Beaumont, Texas. By Robert J. Robertson. Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 232. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-442-1.)

Robert J. Robertson has written a short, readable community study of race and the struggle for civil rights in the oil-rich Texas city of Beaumont. He effectively describes segregated black Beaumont in 1955, where 29 percent of the population lived in a handful of black residential areas where the median income was only 53 percent of the median income for whites. Despite having been the site of a major white-against-black race riot in 1943, like many U.S. cities, post--World War II Beaumont had begun to provide more services to its black residents, albeit segregated services. In 1954, just a month after the Supreme Court's first Brown v. Board of Education decision, four black golfers--three of whom were World War II veterans and members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)-requested that the city desegregate two city parks.

The mayor established an interracial council to look into race relations, a strategy widely used at this time when blacks, led by returning veterans, had intensified their requests for change. The council with the NAACP agreed on a gradualist approach, seeking desegregation of one park (Tyrell Park), including its public golf course--a solution the mayor endorsed until the white Beaumont Golf Association campaigned to get that endorsement rescinded. In September the mayor halted his promised desegregation of Tyrell Park. That action escalated black protest and led the black golfers--along with two additional plaintiffs--to sue the city in collaboration with the national NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Here Robertson's account changes direction to emphasize the role of Lamar Cecil, a white former Beaumont-playboy and Republican lawyer who became the judge to hear the case of Fayson, et al., v. Beard, Mayor of Beaumont, et al. Robertson tells of the fledgling Republican Party in Texas challenging the Democratic establishment, playing the power-broker role in Eisenhower's presidential nomination at the 1952 Republican National Convention, and winning 53 percent of Texas's presidential popular vote--and Texas's electoral votes--for Ike. While fascinating, the connection to the desegregation story is fuzzy. Three of the eight chapters focus on Lamar Cecil, seeming to imply that desegregation came to Beaumont because of this one white judge who cared little about civil rights. This reader wanted more on the work of the NAACP locally and the larger southern context. Discussion of the changing responses across the South to Brown during the year between Brown I (1954) and Brown II (1955) is missing. That year is critical to the story of Beaumont and important to understanding the social change that occurred in September 1955 when Cecil ruled that the city could not discriminate against blacks' use of the two city parks and golf courses.

GRETCHEN CASSEL EICK

Friends University