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Houston Blue : The Story of the Houston Police Department Houston Blue offers the first comprehensive history of one of the nation's largest police forces, the Houston Police Department. Through extensive archival research and more than one hundred interviews with prominent Houston police figures, politicians, news reporters, attorneys, and others, authors Mitchel P. Roth and Tom Kennedy chronicle the development of policing in the Bayou City from its days as a grimy trading post in the 1830s to its current status as the nation's fourth largest city. Combining the skills of historian, criminologist, and journalist, Roth and Kennedy reconstruct the history of a police force that has been both innovative and controversial. Readers will be introduced to a colorful and unforgettable cast of police chiefs and officers who have made their mark on the department. Prominent historical figures who have brushed shoulders with Houston's Finest over the past 175 years are also featured, including Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, O. Henry, former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, hatchet wielding temperance leader Carrie Nation, the Hilton Siamese Twins, blues musician Leadbelly, oilman Silver Dollar Jim West, and many others. The Houston Police Department has been at the cutting edge of police innovation. It was one of the first departments in the South to adopt fingerprinting as an identification system and use the polygraph test, and under the leadership of its first African American police chief, Lee Brown, put the theory of neighborhood oriented policing into practice in the 1980s. The force has been embroiled in controversy and high profile criminal cases as well. Among the cases chronicled in the book are the Dean Corll and Dr. John Hill murders; controversial cases involving the department's crime lab; the killings of Randy Webster and Joe Campos Torres; and the Camp Logan, Texas Southern University, and Moody Park Riots. Roth and Kennedy reveal that most of modern Houston's issues and problems are rooted in many of the challenges that faced police officers in the nineteenth century. Anyone who drives in Houston will not be surprised that the city's reputation for poor drivers was already cemented in the 1860s, when ordinances were passed to protect pedestrians from horse-drawn carriages. Likewise, the department's efforts to overcome funding and manpower shortages, and political patronage, are a continuing battle that began a century ago. In the end it is a story about the men and women in blue and the role played by the Houston Police Officers Union in creating a modern 21st-century police force from its frontier roots.
Make Haste Slowly : Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston When faced by the Court-ordered "all deliberate speed" time frame for school desegregation, a fearful Houston school board member urged the city to "make haste slowly," in order for the school system to receive decisions based on sound judgment and discretion. Houston, Texas, had what may have been the largest racially segregated "Jim Crow" public school system in the United States when the Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1954. Ultimately, helped by members of its business community, Houston did desegregate its public schools and did so peacefully, without making the city a battleground of racial violence. In Make Haste Slowly, William Henry Kellar provides the first extensive examination of the development of Houston's racially segregated public school system, the long fight for school desegregation, and the roles played by various community groups, including the HISD Board of Education, in one of the most significant stories of the civil rights era. Drawing on archival records, HISD School Board minutes, interviews with participants in the process, the oral history collection of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, and a variety of other sources, Kellar constructs a detailed account of the development of Houston's segregated public school system and the struggle of Houston's African American community against the Number Eighty:The Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University oppression of racial discrimination in the city. Kellar shows that, while Houston desegregated its public school system peacefully, the limited integration that originally occurred served only to delay equal access to HISD schools. Houstonians shifted from a strategy "massive resistance" to one of "massive retreat." White flight and resegregation transformed both the community and its public schools. Kellar concludes that forty years after the Brown decision, many of the aspirations that landmark ruling inspired have proven elusive, but the impact of the ruling on Houston has changed the face of that city and the nature of its public education dramatically and in unanticipated ways. Make Haste Slowly fills a longtime void in the literature on the civil rights era in Texas. Those interested in Texas history and African American history will find this book essential to understanding one of the most reactionary periods in American history.
People's War on Poverty : Urban Politics, Grassroots Activists, and the Struggle for Democracy in Houston, 1964-1976 In A People’s War on Poverty, Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend, and who should benefit from it. Many of the program’s implementers took seriously the federal mandate to empower the poor as they pushed for a more participatory form of democracy that would include more citizens in the political, cultural, and economic life of the city. At the center of this book are the vitally important but virtually forgotten grassroots activists who administered federal War on Poverty programs, including church ministers, federal program volunteers, students, local administrators, civil rights activists, and the poor themselves. The moderate Great Society liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal programs certainly galvanized local antipoverty activists in Houston. However, their antipoverty philosophy was driven further by prophetic religious traditions and visions of participatory democracy and community organizing championed by the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. By focusing on these local actors, Phelps shows that grassroots activists in Houston were influenced by a much more diverse set of intellectual and political traditions, fueling their efforts to expand the meaning of democracy. Ultimately, this episode in Houston’s history reveals both the possibilities and the limits of urban democracy in the twentieth century.
Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990 : A Change Did Come In Houston, as in the rest of the American South up until the 1950s, the police force reflected and enforced the segregation of the larger society. When the nation began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, this guardian of the status quo had to change, too. It was not designed to do so easily. Dwight Watson traces how the Houston Police Department reacted to social, political, and institutional change over a fifty-year period--and specifically, how it responded to and in turn influenced racial change. Using police records as well as contemporary accounts, Watson astutely analyzes the escalating strains between the police and segments of the city's black population in the 1967 police riot at Texas Southern University and the 1971 violence that became known as the Dowling Street Shoot-Out. The police reacted to these events and to daily challenges by hardening its resolve to impose its will on the minority community. By 1977, the events surrounding the beating and drowning of Jose Campos Torres while in police custody prompted one writer to label the HPD the "meanest police in America." This event encouraged Houston's growing Mexican American community to unite with blacks in seeking to curb police autonomy and brutality. Watson's study demonstrates vividly how race complicated the internal impulses for change and gave way through time to external pressures--including the Civil Rights Movement, modernization, annexations, and court-ordered redistricting--for institutional changes within the department. His work illuminates not only the role of a southern police department in racial change but also the internal dynamics of change in an organization designed to protect the status quo.
Red Scare : Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas Winner of the Texas State Historical Association Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History, this authoritative study of red-baiting in Texas reveals that what began as a coalition against communism became a fierce power struggle between conservative and liberal politics.

Featured Print Books

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Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1880 This is an examination of Reconstruction in six counties in Texas between 1865 to 1880. It reveals a diversity of experience that challenges popular generalizations. The author concludes that generalizations must be qualified to recognize the ways in which localities experienced the period.
No Color is My Kind : the life of Eldrewey Stearns and the integration of Houston No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity, fate, and compassion as two men--one Jewish and one African American--set out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism. In 1984, Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns, a fifty-two-year-old black man, complained that although he felt very important, no one understood him. Over the course of the next decade, Cole and Stearns, in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration, recovered Stearns' life before his slide into madness--as a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houston's desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. While other southern cities rocked with violence, Houston integrated its public accommodations peacefully. In these pages appear figures such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leon Jaworski, and Dan Rather, all of whom--along with Stearns--maneuvered and conspired to integrate the city quickly and calmly. Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event, Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America, and especially on issues of power, authority, and mental illness.
A People's War on Poverty : urban politics and grassroots activists in Houston In A People’s War on Poverty, Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend, and who should benefit from it. Many of the program’s implementers took seriously the federal mandate to empower the poor as they pushed for a more participatory form of democracy that would include more citizens in the political, cultural, and economic life of the city. At the center of this book are the vitally important but virtually forgotten grassroots activists who administered federal War on Poverty programs, including church ministers, federal program volunteers, students, local administrators, civil rights activists, and the poor themselves. The moderate Great Society liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal programs certainly galvanized local antipoverty activists in Houston. However, their antipoverty philosophy was driven further by prophetic religious traditions and visions of participatory democracy and community organizing championed by the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. By focusing on these local actors, Phelps shows that grassroots activists in Houston were influenced by a much more diverse set of intellectual and political traditions, fueling their efforts to expand the meaning of democracy. Ultimately, this episode in Houston’s history reveals both the possibilities and the limits of urban democracy in the twentieth century.