Waco civil rights activist who fought for integration urges next generation to “keep up the fight”

5e51eccf6ec21-image_

Arthur Fred Joe never found out who had called him to tell him a 6-foot-tall cross was burning in his front yard on Dawson Street in East Waco. The unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line told him to look outside. It was Joe’s first encounter with common Ku Klux Klan intimidation tactics.

He also remembers being anything but intimidated.

Joe, who served as secretary of Waco’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter in the late 1950s and early ’60s, had earned a reputation as an outspoken, confrontational and daring civil rights leader. At a time when Waco’s white leadership was trying to avoid the issue of desegregation, Joe made a name for himself as an agitator, and a proud one at that.

Now 94, Joe is among the surviving few who fought on that front. Now retired from the nonprofit he co-founded, he lives in Dallas with his wife, Daisy. When he sat down for an interview with the Waco Tribune-Herald last week, he said he’s proud of the resilience he’s shown over the course of his life.

“I came through unscathed, unhurt and still living,” Joe said.

I came through unscathed, unhurt and still living,” Joe said.

Arthur Fred Joe
Arthur Fred Joe in his Navy uniform. Joe left college to enlist during World War II.

After being drafted into the Navy during World War II, Joe returned home to Waco in 1948, enrolled at Paul Quinn College as a political science major, joined the NAACP and began organizing protests and sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and businesses, which made him a target for groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council.

“Partially, that was picked up in the Navy, my attitude,” Joe said. “But I wasn’t ever afraid, so that gave me a lot of stamina to go forward.”

James SoRelle, an African American history professor at Baylor University, said Waco’s white leadership mirrored a lot of Texas towns in the years after the 1954 Brown V. Board decision: nervous, conflict-averse, resisting integration and desperate to avoid any attention.

“The restaurants and department stores that had diners and cafeterias, there were concerns those would become targets,” SoRelle said. “My sense is, in Waco and many other Texas cities, the hope was that you could avoid the publicity of a demonstration.”

SoRelle said the local Ku Klux Klan wasn’t nearly as active in the 1950s and ’60s as it had been in the 1920s, but their anti-integration letters to the editor ran regularly in the pages of the Waco News-Tribune. The threat of violence was never far away, but he said financial intimidation was much more common at the time.

SoRelle said before integration, black employees could lose their job for trying to organize politically. But there were two groups that were afforded a degree of protection from that form of financial intimidation: federal employees and black ministers. Joe was the former.

As a postman in Waco, he helped charter the local branch of the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees in 1955. Joe said the postal alliance fought discrimination in post offices in Waco, which met resistance from white workers who belonged to a postal union.

“We got the first black clerks in the Waco post office. I happened to be one of the first blacks to serve on a window,” Joe said, a “window” being the customer service position that would work directly with customers and make sales. “The first morning it happened, there were people lined up like a circus in the lobby to see this black man wait on a white woman.”

Some of Joe’s sit-ins were one-man efforts. He’d sit in downtown restaurants, ignored by the waitstaff until someone asked him to leave, only to return the next day with a group or with his mother, Leetisha.

Joe got a reputation for his daring. He was also swiftly labeled a troublemaker. Black critics thought he was kicking a hornet’s nest, and the White Citizens Council sent him letters, including a bizarre, racist parody of Psalm 23 Joe still keeps in an attache’ case.

“Lyndon is my shepherd,” the letter reads. “I shall not work. He maketh me lie down in front of theaters. He leadeth me into white universities. He restoreth my welfare check. He leadeth me in the paths of sit-ins for communism’s sake.”

Undeterred, Joe befriended local white businessman Jack Kultgen after buying a Ford from his dealership, and Kultgen became one of Joe’s behind-the-scenes supporters.

“He was a staunch white guy that was one of our backups, but there were several more,” Joe said. “We got close then, and it just lasted. I could say he was a pretty good friend of mine.”

In 1961, he and his white friends, Arthur and Linda Goolsbee, escorted a group of black children to the largest public swimming pool in the city for a demonstration, one that sticks with him to this day.

“We went in there and cleaned it out,” Joe said. “In other words, we went in there, stripped down to our swimsuits and watched them all leave the pool. It was kind of a funny thing, to watch them scatter like snakes.”

The three adults and the black kids laughed at the sight, but Joe could tell the white families were fleeing the pool purely out of racist fear.

Anticipating the day a protest would be met with violence, the NAACP took precautions. Joe ran drills, gathering protesters together to practice nonviolent marching at the local YMCA and in church basements. The few participating whites would play the role of a hostile crowd, harassing the black students in an effort to prepare them for what might come next.

“It kind of surprised us, because we kept them from [retaliating],” Joe said. “In other words, it was not to be violent.”

Though they were excited to be there and no fighting broke out, protesters stayed on their guard. Joe said there were only a few instances where they nearly came to blows with hostile groups, but they managed to keep control of the situation.

“We were more or less direct in what we did,” Joe said. “We didn’t have any rock throwing or police shooting, we were fortunate enough to organize our protests without any [violence]. It was kind of fun to us. I guess that meant that we just weren’t really angry. We didn’t like what was going on, but we just weren’t fighting angry.”

Arthur Fred Joe
Joe and Vivienne Malone-Mays were among protesters outside of a 7-Eleven store on Elm Street during the summer of 1963. Malone-Mayes, who went on to be the first black professor at Baylor University, became the protest’s main organizer, coordinating schedules and assigning times to each group.

Arthur Fred Joe
A pamphlet from an NAACP protest urging a Waco 7-11 store to hire black workers for more than just menial tasks.

Joe coordinated a much more elaborate picket line in front of a 7-Eleven store on Elm Street during the summer of 1963. At the time, the chain hired very few blacks, and those it did hire worked in the most menial positions. Vivienne Malone-Mayes, who went on to be the first black professor at Baylor University, was among the picketers after Joe volunteered her for the first shift.

“He got her to go out there on the picket line,” said Daisy Joe. “She’d laugh about it and say he made her brave.”

Malone-Mayes went on to become the protest’s main organizer, coordinating schedules and assigning times to each group.

The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 ended school segregation, at least on paper. But by the early 1960s the effort to desegregate Waco ISD had stagnated, leading to an uneasy stalemate.

Former Waco City Councilman Noah Jackson, 80, was a teenager attending A.J. Moore High School when the Brown decision came down. He said he was only just beginning to take notice of the brewing integration movement around him, but he remembers looking up to Joe for his direct tactics and outspokenness.

“He was very aggressive in his position he took against segregation, and the way he approached situations,” Jackson said.

Jackson returned to Waco from the Air Force in 1959 and enrolled at Paul Quinn. He said he remembers Joe leading meetings at black churches, trying to get people involved.

“He had his hands in everything, setting up meetings at different places and explaining [the situation] to people,” Jackson said. “These were the types of things I was seeing.”

Demonstrations began in February 1960 and continued throughout the early ’60s. The NAACP’s demonstrations at 7-Eleven were successful, but the Waco News-Tribune seemingly ignored them. Only the Waco Citizen, owned by Bill Foster, would write about them. Meanwhile, Joe befriended Tommy Turner, a reporter who covered Waco for Dallas newspapers, and word of the Waco protests spread.

1963 Trib article
It wasn’t until June 13, 1963, that the Waco News-Tribune ran a story explaining the Waco Chamber of Commerce had voted to form a biracial committee to work through integration on a local level. It appeared on Page 15A.

It wasn’t until June 13, 1963, that a News-Tribune ran a story explaining the Waco Chamber of Commerce had voted to form a biracial committee to work through integration on a local level.

In reality, the committee had been meeting for two years in secret. Waco News-Tribune editor Harry Provence was among its members. The media blackout had been part of the effort to keep control of the situation.

“There were a lot more moderate voices among black ministers willing to support the efforts of this white-led group,” SoRelle said. “They weren’t fully committed to demonstrations.”

There was something much more tangible at stake. A private correspondence from Washington alerted the committee that unless all public facilities in the city were available to all Air Force personnel, both James Connally Air Force Base and the headquarters of Twelfth Air Force would shut down and leave Waco.

“This ultimately occurred, but not both at the same time, and, although in each case it was a severe blow to the economy, the town managed to overcome the loss,” Ward later wrote in the Waco History Project.

Rev. Marvin Griffin, a black minister at New Hope Baptist Church, sat on the committee. Griffin died in 2013 and has been lauded for his role in peacefully desegregating the city. But Joe thought Griffin’s sermons were steering people away from taking direct action and saw him and the other black ministers involved as sell-outs.

“He wasn’t direct about it, but it was implied and it got all over Waco that he didn’t agree with the way Arthur was doing things,” Daisy Joe said. “He was one of those Negroes that white people had brought into the fold. He was one of those people they could manipulate, and they did.”

The NAACP was kept out of the conversation. Joe found the whole thing disingenuous.

“We couldn’t trust them,” Joe said of the committee.

Once the committee officially existed, members began selectively desegregating pre-selected businesses by sending in small groups of black patrons, usually black committee members. Baylor President Abner McCall called Joe to urge him to hold off on demonstrating at Baylor Stadium. The committee had a plan to let in small groups of black spectators at a time, and ease into desegregation on the university’s terms.

“He would say ‘don’t go to the Negro churches and tell everyone, let’s just do it a little bit at a time,’ ” Daisy Joe said. “They wanted it kept quiet even though some of them didn’t like it.”

Arthur Fred Joe
Arthur Fred Joe (left) and Ed Washington co-founded the nonprofit group Black Citizens for Justice Law and Order in Dallas with Dr. Emerson Emory.

Joe eventually left Waco for Dallas, where he met Daisy in 1976. They went on to form Black Citizens for Justice Law and Order, a nonprofit that helps victims of racial discrimination navigate the legal system.

Daisy and Arthur founded the organization with Ed Washington and Dr. Emerson Emory, who spent years pushing for proper recognition for World War II hero and Waco native Doris Miller. Emory passed away in 2003, not living to see the U.S. Navy name an aircraft carrier for Miller.

Joe and Daisy moved into their new roles as legal advocates through their nonprofit, but found new forms of discrimination within the system, and their fight began again on new territory.

They dealt primarily with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, formed in 1965 to help end workplace discrimination. Daisy said instead, the commission began to reinforce it, turning victims of color away and dismissing their complaints.

In 1997, Daisy would testify in front of the U.S. House of Representatives about the transgressions and mismanagement her clients encountered at the EEOC’s Dallas office.

Daisy said the resurgence of overt racism throughout the country makes her wonder how much has really changed. According to the FBI, there were 5,850 hate crime incidents in 2015, 6,121 in 2016, 7,175 in 2017 and 7,120 in 2018.

“Some young people think that because they can go out and buy what they want to buy now, and they can possibly, not definitely but possibly, live where they want to and get certain jobs, that they’ve overcome,” Daisy Joe said. “But they haven’t, unless people realize that we are all people.”

Joe agreed, saying young people will have to take up the same fight he and his wife did.

“Keep up the fight, don’t look back, keep looking forward, because times are not changing and it’s going to take black people who are young now to keep going,” Joe said.