Houston, Texas (KTRK) – A group of students who attended Texas Southern University did the unimaginable, walking and sitting at an all-white, segregated grocery lunch desk. Now, 62 years later, the two of them sat down with ABC13’s Melanie Lawson to remember the move.
Loretta Williams and Dorothea Henry Miller have known each other for most of their lives, but formed a bond during the civil rights movement.
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Williams, a freshman at TSU at the time, and Henry Miller, then 22, walked a mile from campus with other protesters to a Weingartners supermarket in Almeda in Houston. They came in and sat down and asked to be served.
“Usually, we’d be told to leave. We wouldn’t be served. We didn’t belong there. You know, they wouldn’t serve us. And we had to just ignore them when they asked us,” said Henry Miller.
They said law student Eldroe Stearns told them to dress and ignore threats and insults. Stearns is credited with planning the protests.
“You know, they said let’s go back to Africa,” Williams said. “Some people might say things like that.”
They were young, but they saw that the world was changing. Black students in North Carolina were already ahead and holding their first few “whites-only counter” sit-ins, and the TSU students wanted to do the same.
And it didn’t stop there. Students wandered around town, including stopping at City Hall, taking turns and sitting quietly at the lunch counters. Carrying engraved banners calling for an end to apartheid.
Henry Miller and Williams decided to select another place to demonstrate: the lunch table at the Union Pacific train station. Soon after sitting down, both of them were arrested.
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“I wasn’t afraid,” Henry Miller explained. “I was worried about our safety, but I wasn’t afraid because every time we demonstrated, there were journalists and some safety, you know, cameras are recording everything.”
After the arrests, several black churches and businesses rescued the students and helped them find legal aid.
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Despite the struggle for equality, their parents did not feel the same.
“You were so proud, my parents,” Williams said.
“My mother wasn’t. She didn’t want me to participate because she was afraid for our safety. She watched what was happening in other parts of the country, you know, with pig dogs and hosepipes and police brutality and everything, and my mother did not want this to happen to me, Henry Miller said.
Although this violence was not seen in Houston, they were well aware of the danger they faced, but this did not stop the movement.
“I think we’ve done our part in Houston, and across the United States, other young people have done the same. So I think all of us, you’ve been very instrumental in making the changes. And I think if we don’t, the changes,” said Henry Miller.
Most businesses in Houston were desegregated by the end of 1960. This was partly because black leaders met with white businessmen in secret, but that would not have happened without student-led protests.
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