The Students’ Motivation
After years of mistreatment and injustice, the students finally had enough. With little more than ambition and a burning desire for immediate social change, the band of social combatants set out to make a difference. Recognizing the mistakes of those civil warriors who had made failed attempts to accomplish the same before them, they decided that the best route to achieve some semblance of success was through military styled planning.
The “war room” is where they mapped out their plan of attack against Houston’s Jim Crow. “The war room was usually someone’s apartment, like Eldrewey Stearns’. This is where we planned out activities,” said Otis King, the city of Houston’s first African-American attorney and TSU law professor. “It was an opportunity to do something specific and concrete about the kinds of injustices we had witnessed in silence. We felt at last, we had an opportunity to do something about the issues that had been troubling us for so long.”
Many attribute the initial success of the movement to Stearns, who was a TSU law student. A savvy orator in his own right, Stearns became deeply passionate about desegregating Houston after he was stopped by a Houston Police Department officer in August of 1959, placed in jailed and severely beaten.
“Eldrewey Stearns had a brilliant mind,” said John Bland, one of Houston’s first African-American transit drivers. “He put all of this (sit-in strategies) together.” (Click this link to hear audio from Stearns' sister, Shirley.)
However, unlike many of his fellow freedom fighters who went on to become successful professionals, Stearns became lost in “the cause”, and succumbed to a mental illness.
But still, “the cause” was noble, and those disciplined, determined students would not let it fail…even after enduring devastating casualties in this urban war of sorts.
“When you sense something is wrong and you feel comfortable about doing something about it, you do it. And we did something about a system that was unfair and unjust,” said Hollie Hogrobrooks, a journalist and journalism professor at TSU.
Their Strategies Worked
The students had become so determined to tear down the walls of segregation in Houston that they formally mobilized. Founded on March 2, 1960, this mobilization initiative was called Progressive Youth Association (PYA). Quentin Mease, a businessman man and director of the South Central YMCA located on Wheeler Avenue in 3rd Ward, allowed the young fighters for justice to run their operation at the YMCA. It was a brilliantly formulated operation, and the impact of their planning sessions was profound. From their “war room” dialogues and covert planning sessions at the Y, nine PYA objectives emerged:
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Total integration of all facets of American live.
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Civil and political education.
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Inter-racial communication.
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Education for individual competence.
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Improvement for economic status.
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Attainment of recreational facilities.
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Promotion of goodwill through public relations.
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Propagation of spiritual and democratic ideals.
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To obtain better job opportunities.
