This Saturday, December 3, 2011, The Roundup staff will take a trip to St. Louis to learn more about Jesuit’s role in integration history. Payton Maher ’13, aided by English teachers Sheryl Row and Michael Degen, government teacher Fritz Asche and senior editor Clark Durham ’12, will be interviewing Charles Edmond, one of the two first black students at Jesuit and the first to graduate.
In January Payton will release a three part feature piece exploring the extraordinary time when Jesuit became the first school in Dallas to integrate. So, I sat down with Payton to get an insider look at the trip to St. Louis and his upcoming series.
Q: What motivated you to pursue this topic?
A: Well, Ms. Row, who is also the school’s archivist, knew that Jesuit was the first high school to integrate in Dallas, but she and others did not know many of the steps that led to this decision. Not many people are aware of Jesuit’s role in integration and we want to make it known. It’s a story I hope we all can learn from and be aware that the 1950’s era of segregation wasn’t as long ago as it seems.
Q: So Payton, what do you already know about Charles Edmond?
A: He describes himself as a fairly quiet young man from a poor, single parent home in south Dallas. Almost unbelievably he had the courage to attend Jesuit as a sophomore in 1954 and, along with Arthur Allen ’59, began school integration in Dallas. We are making this trip to meet this extraordinary man and find out more about his day-to-day life and what he went through.
Q: What was Dallas like at this time?
A: It wasn’t much different than other cities in the South. It had the same Jim Crow laws and life for blacks was just as bad as most everywhere else. So, when Jesuit decided to integrate, it can be inferred that there might have been some controversy. Yet, the New Orleans province chose Dallas as the place to start integrating their high schools.
Q: What do you hope Jesuit will take from your feature?
A: I think it will give Jesuit a better understanding of life at that time and teach us not to make the same racial stereotypes. This article is very relevant because we have been discussing gender dialogue, and it’s a good way to help the students and community of Jesuit grow morally. I mean, they made mistakes and grew from them, so why can’t we grow from our mistakes?
Q: What other sources do you have available for the making of this piece?
A: We have newspaper clippings and interviews with Arthur Allen and Charles Edmond. We’ve held phone conferences with priests who were part of the province at that time who taught at Jesuit. We have many primary source documents from the President of Jesuit and the Provincial. Fr. Billy Huete,
S. J.; the New Orleans archives; and the Dallas Jesuit Archives have been important resources for many of these. Another first-person primary source is Mr. Jack Eifert, who began teaching around the time of integration at the school.
Q: This seems like a very exciting project. When is it scheduled for release?
A: Well, we are planning for it to be released around Martin Luther King Day or during Black History Month in February, and it will be a series of three articles, which will be released each week of that month.
