18 - “Keep Negroes Out of Most Classes Where There Are a Large Number of Girls”

Summary

ADMISSIONS

Nine days after Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, The University of Texas's Registrar and Dean of Admissions – a man named Henry Y. McCown – wrote to President Logan Wilson with a plan to “keep Negroes out of most classes where there are a large number of girls.”

SIMKINS

William Stewart Simkins – a University of Texas (UT) law professor from 1899 until his death in 1929 – and his brother Eldred James Simkins, a regent of The University of Texas from 1882 to 1896, organized the Ku Klux Klan in several Florida counties after the American Civil War. The brothers Simkins were natives of South Carolina's Edgefield District, which also claims James Henry Hammond, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, and Strom Thurmond as native sons. William Stewart Simkins attended the Citadel in Charleston, and he helped start the Civil War by relaying the order to fire on the “Star of the West,” a vessel carrying provisions to Ft. Sumter. He entered the Confederate army as a lieutenant and by war's end held the rank of colonel. Until the end of his life, he was known as Colonel Simkins.