14 Texas Southern University students walked into Weingarten supermarket on the afternoon of March 4, 1960. The Black students asked to be served at the whites-only lunch counter at the height of racial segregation in Houston. They expected the worst. A month prior, students in Greensboro, North Carolina started the sit-in movement and were harassed by many, including members of the Ku Klux Klan. Confused, Weingarten staff closed the lunch counter for the day. Heckled yet unharmed, the students felt encouraged to continue pushing the bounds of segregation.
Similar moments of Civil Rights era youth disobedience are on display in John Akomfrah: The Hour of the Dog, an immersive, six-channel video installation on exhibition at the Menil Collection. Viewers are suspended in a 51-minute collision of Black freedom dreams and white supremacist declarations. I'm still lingering over a question offered during the screening: "Do we exist in time or does time exist in us?"
This year's Menil Summer School revealed to me that Houston lives in George Wallace's time. That's right, George Wallace, the long-dead former Governor of Alabama. You're likely familiar with his infamous 1963 phrase, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever." From over 600 miles away, the incantation seems to echo through Houston's modern memory infrastructures, class warfare, and organizing culture.
Sensationalism was a key component of the sit-in movement across the nation. TSU students wanted their encounters with segregation to rattle the consciousness of local residents. But white business leaders had different plans. They feared that, if white residents learned of the ongoing student protests, a "race riot" would take place. So Bob Dundas, an executive of retail giant Foley's, coordinated a media blackout. He worked with the late John T. Jones Jr., former Houston Chronicle publisher and Houston Endowment chair, and others to quietly integrate downtown lunch counters while all major news networks ignored protests. "Like the cowboy Westerns, you know," Jones said in the documentary The Strange Demise of Jim Crow. "Before you can lynch somebody and hang him [and] break him out the jail, you've got to go to the saloon and talk to each other and get drunk." Jones didn't want news of the student demonstrations to hit the "saloons."
Many consider the quiet coordination clever because it likely prevented large-scale destruction. Others express disappointment with the media ecosystem's willingness to ignore Black-led protests. Adopting Akomfrah's concern with "how bodies migrate from matter to being" across time, I wonder how the blackout kept white residents from experiencing the weight of their domination. The blackout wasn't just a barrier to critical news or a paternalistic favor to Black people. It was a white-led refusal of transformation. "How do you get [an oppressor] to take you seriously as something that has just become being or at least momentarily left the space of non-being," Akomfrah asked at the opening of The Hour of the Dog.
George Wallace's segregation song echoed through the Houston Chronicle's decision not to cover a May 2021 event where thousands of residents observed 73 years of the Nakba, the mass displacement event that jump-started ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by zionists. The Houston Landing also sang Wallace's song. Presenting itself as an innovative solution in a racially diverse city, the Landing was partly created by an institutional funder connected to the 1960 media blackout. After I spent months expressing frustration with the Landing's silence on the local Palestine solidarity protests, the organization featured a former israel defense force (IDF) soldier in a November 3, 2024 piece. Yes, the same IDF that dropped white phosphorus on southern Lebanon a year prior, bombed refugee children in the Al-Awda school shelter four months prior, and killed dozens in bombings of An Nuseirat refugee camps hours prior.
On the first day of The Menil Summer School, I learned of the 1960 media blackout during the Menil Collection's screening and discussion of The Strange Demise of Jim Crow. The summer school was a four-week-long public program series that explored the legacy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) through the lens of Houston's Civil Rights history and the broader African Diaspora. It was a complement to Akomfrah's exhibition and functioned as a psychic intervention for a city that doesn't remember its involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
Wealthy white businesspeople weren't the only folks against the TSU students' nonviolent direct action. Plenty of Black people across the country instead favored a politics of gradual advancement. Menil Summer School panelist Dr. Karen Kossie‑Chernyshev reminded us of the National Baptist Convention's decision to promote "progress, not protest" while under the leadership of its president Joseph H. Jackson. The gradual approach is best symbolized throughout Jackson's address to the 1964 National Baptist Convention. "We cannot win our battle through force and unreasonable intimidation," he said. "As a minority group we cannot win outside of the protection and power of the just laws of this land."
Jackson expressed discontent for nonviolent direct action—what he considered a "spirit of revenge, blind emotions, and uncontrolled temper"—in the middle of a class war. Several Jim Crow laws limited Black folks to low-wage jobs and often excluded them from skilled trades and unions. Redlining also prevented homeownership that would've increased wealth among Black people. Like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-in movement was an attack on capital. The Weingarten lunch counter closure incurred costs to the business. "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever" is also code for Black poverty now, Black poverty tomorrow, Black poverty forever.
Former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner represented Jackson's gradual approach in November 2021 when he opposed the movement to establish a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) for the Innovation District. The Houston Coalition for Equitable Development Without Displacement was a group of neighbors, community leaders, scholars, students, and organizations from Third Ward and across Houston that aimed to develop, secure, enforce, and sustain a CBA with Rice Management Company as it develops the Innovation District on the edge of Third Ward. The group was concerned that the massive influx of unchecked capital for a new tech economy would exclude residents, exploit workers, and displace families.
The CBA movement began as a grassroots effort to secure a binding agreement that would ensure Rice University could positively impact areas like schools, Black business, and cultural preservation efforts. After two years, the effort ended with Turner strong-arming the city council to approve a $15.3 million gift of public funds to Rice Management Company. Residents were left with the loss of the only grocery store in the area and a massive building (the Ion) that's closed off to unhoused folks in the area. The responses from Turner during public comment demonstrated that his personal relationships and interests with Rice University would not survive ongoing protests. He moved fast to get Rice staff everything they wanted, with no concern for intellectual honesty.
This is the plantation politic that defines Houston's power structure. The strong donor class often straps non-white people into political leadership as managers of non-white dissent. Hobart Taylor, esteemed Black attorney, helped Bob Dundas and John T. Jones coordinate the 1960 Houston media blackout. I'm not surprised today's majority-non-white city council isn't giving Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, answers about the city's collaboration with ICE after agents murdered Salgado's father.
What startles me is how dependent Houston's organizing culture is to elected officials and institutional philanthropy, despite years of lessons that proximity to state power is a zero-sum game. What do you do when a large local foundation denies your funding request for a skill-based youth program because the funder only supports programs compatible with state standards for school? What do you do when that same foundation funds an organization that supports the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District? How about when one of that foundation's board members oversaw the suppression of the city's largest, Black-led fight for a Community Benefits Agreement? These aren't rhetorical questions. These are real situations I'm faced with. And most of the modern models I have are organizations that sew elected officials and foundation staff into their organizational leadership.
This isn't the organizing Kwame Ture encouraged when he visited the University of Houston and Texas Southern University in 1967. Menil Summer School co-organizer Dr. Lindsay Gary reminded us that Ture's politics were formed amidst the various national liberation struggles on the African continent. Those struggles informed Ture's focus on Black power—organized political and economic strength—as a vital precedent to meaningful integration. "America has asked its Negro citizens to fight for opportunity as individuals," he said at the University of Houston. "Whereas at certain points in our history, what we have needed most has been opportunity for the whole group, not just for selected and approved Negros."
In May of 1967, a month after Ture's TSU visit, students joined with residents in Sunnyside to protest poor living conditions and city government neglect after 11-year-old Victor George drowned in an unfenced city garbage dump. After days of protests, police officers blockaded TSU and ended up invading campus after a couple of students threw rocks at officers. Remembered as the TSU riot, officers arrested nearly 500 students and shot an estimated 3,000-5,000 rounds into a dormitory. Several students were shot during the raid and one officer was killed, likely from a ricocheted police bullet.
"Activism is not confined to what happens in the streets," John Akomfrah told the Menil. "It's bound up with who and how we remember, who and how we mourn, and how we dream forward." Although Houston can feel stuck on Wallace's segregation song, we have what Dr. Kossie‑Chernyshev would refer to as "pressure valves," spaces of reprieve to remember, mourn and dream forward. Dr. Gary's two books The New Red Book and AncesTree help us remember what Houston often forgets. Places like Friends Gallery give us space to process loss and cultivate hope. Organizations like the South Central collective of the All-African People's Revolution Party are dreaming forward, centered on dignity. What remains to be seen is if we're willing to make these pressure valves commonplace, societal infrastructure.