Dallas had the largest segregated school system in the South until 1961. That was supposed to change with the introduction of the Stairstep Plan that year, and Dallas ISD announced in 1967 that it was fully desegregated. The declaration proved to be premature. Fighting segregation in Dallas ISD’s schools was more complicated than it was in other cities, if only because those who opposed segregation didn’t have a definable opponent. There wasn’t one person loudly making the case for the status quo. There were only whispers. The whispers turned into threatening phone calls when Sam Tasby filed his landmark lawsuit on October 6, 1970. But Tasby, a World War II veteran, pressed on, even after it cost him his job.
Things have changed so much. Not always for the better, but you take the good with the bad. We still have problems. We always will, I suppose. I was in the Army, as a quartermaster back in 1943, and they sent me to France. We were good enough for Uncle Sam, but not good enough to work and fight alongside the white soldiers.
Even after they integrated the Army, we still had to ride in the back of the bus. All that changed. My whole lawsuit started after we could ride anywhere on the buses that we pleased but we didn’t have a school in the community where my kids could go. People just didn’t want the black kids in school with their kids. They were subtle about it, but it was clear.
That’s one of the things that made it harder to fight. There wasn’t any one man you could point to, like that governor standing in the schoolhouse door in Alabama. This was almost everyone, and no one said it out loud, but they just talked around it. That’s why I knew I had to take it to the courts. We had some good lawyers.
Was I worried? Well, if people can go and kill the president here, they could take a shot at me. They’d call on the phone and threaten, but I never talked to them because I was at work—at least until I lost my job at the plumbing company in Garland when they found out what I was doing. My wife and kids caught most of the nasty calls. But we never had a thought of backing down. Not me and not my family. I had a lawyer ready to stand with me, and I knew we were doing what was right.
For a long time, it felt like we’d never see the end, and it wears you down some. When we finally got a judge (the late Judge Barefoot Sanders) who heard what we were saying, understood what we were trying to do, and was in our corner, we knew it was all worth it.
A lot of white people started running off rather than sending their kids to the black schools. That hurt the Dallas schools, and they were the ones who would have gotten the most out of spending some time with other people. I think those who stayed understood. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what was right. For all that and all the trouble, I’d do it all again if I had to.
There’s been quite a bit of change. There’s more coming. I’m 87 years old, so I’ve seen a long piece of it. People are different now than back when I had my lawsuit. Different from the back-of-the-bus days and even when I was serving in the Army in the war. They’ll keep on being different. The kids of these kids won’t even know what busing was, or white flight, just like they couldn’t understand the Army being segregated, except in history books.
Sam Tasby’s lawsuit initiated in 1970 led to more than 30 years of judicial oversight of Dallas ISD, as it strived to comply with federal desegregation requirements. Tasby is retired and living in Dallas.