Jesuit Pioneer

From today’s Dallas Morning News:

Arthur Allen, one of the first black students to integrate a Dallas school, overcame discrimination to earn an education that would shape his life.

Allen, 72, died last week after a long illness. A memorial service will be at 3 p.m. Monday at the Aria Memorial Chapel on Preston Road in Dallas.

Allen was one of two black students who enrolled in 1955 at Jesuit High School, which is now Jesuit College Preparatory School. They were the first black students to

attend a white school in Dallas, said Kevin Mullan, director of alumni relations for Jesuit.

Allen endured racism during his years at Jesuit, but over time, he grew to love his high school, where he was later honored as a distinguished alumnus and top

athlete.

"As he grew older and things kind of came into perspective … he realized that it was a good experience for him," said his wife of 47 years, Dee Allen of Carrollton. "It

sort of shaped who he was as a person."

At first, Allen didn’t want to attend the all-white boys school, which was far from his South Dallas neighborhood. But he enrolled as a freshman at the insistence of his

father, George Allen Sr., who became the city’s first black City Council member.

For the entire obituary see  http://www.dallasnews.com/obituary-headlines/20130210-arthur-allen-one-of-first-black-students-to-integrate-dallas-schools-dies-at-72.ece  (might need a subscription, but it’s in the print edition, also).

All of the  class of 1963 who grew up here remember the "white" and "colored" signs, that the back of the bus was for "colored" only, as were public rest rooms and even drinking fountains. Jesuit was one of the first schools in Dallas to admit black students. We called black people "Negroes" in those days, a name not favored today but not a slur, after all it means "black" in Spanish. The Dallas public schools were not fully desegregated until the late ‘60s Some private schools remained so even later.

We had a few black kids in our class. Don’t remember thinking too much of it, at least most of the time. I do remember a city bus driver on the Oak Lawn/Ervay route expressing incredulity than we went to school with "niggers" – a word we were not allowed to use at home, even then. I considered the source, and resented that a bus driver had the temerity to question who could attend my school. ("Temerity" was probably not in my vocabulary then, but the thought was.) Didn’t do more than resent it, maybe I should have. I suppose that one reason Jesuit didn’t have more black students was that here in Texas few were Catholics. I suppose a number of Jesuit students weren’t either.

To its everlasting credit, the Catholic Church was in the forefront of the civil rights and one of thee earliest institutions to desegregate. Around our time in school, the New Orleans archbishop even went so far as to excommunicate the more virulent protestors against desegregation there. John Steinbeck related some of that in his Travels with Charley. Seems like Dallas escaped much of the unpleasantness back then, after all racial segregation was bad for business, and many of our leaders recognized it as such. (I do NOT mean that pejoratively – good merchants and industrialists care about what one can do, not who they are or the shade of their complexion.)

Arthur’s dad, George Sr., as the obit states, was a Dallas City Council member in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. He was appointed to be a Justice of the Peace @ 1977. My one contact with Judge Allen was requesting a search warrant when I was DPD detective. The County Civil Courts building is named after him.

Rest in Peace, Arthur.