Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 57
On my second trip to the United States at age 18, I landed at Miami International Airport
in August 1957 and proceeded to take a bus to College Station, Texas. I was shocked
to discover at the bus stations that colored people weren’t allowed to drink out of the
same water fountains the rest of us could, eat at the same counters or ride the bus in
the front seats. My previous contact with America had been in New York and
Philadelphia where I don’t remember being confronted with discrimination on the basis
of color, race or national origin.
College is the period of time when most people begin to pay attention to the surrounding
world. My awareness exploded with the message of the soon-to-be President Kennedy.
In the 1961-62 school year, as in many years before and decades afterward, Texas
A&M sponsored a student club involved in facilitating the understanding of national
affairs (SCONA). Faculty and students injected with this curiosity congregated around
this program. I did too. There I met a group willing to confront the college’s
establishment to force the gates of the basketball arena open to Black spectators. I was
irate that Blacks were good enough to entertain the crowd by playing on the court but
were not good enough to sit on the bleachers as spectators. Texas A&M had no Black
players at the time, though several visiting teams had stars who were of African
descent. I had attended school at Texas A&M for four years and had not realized that
Black people were being treated this way. This was indeed a great lagoon on my
awareness. In retrospect I can now point to the fact that there were few Black students,
if any, in the campus and that I had not met any yet.
As I describe in several parts of this book, my social environment growing up as a child
had been isolated and I had not had a chance to develop any likes or dislikes toward
Black people. I had never even seen a Black person until my family took me on a trip to
Brazil when I was eleven years old. My relative isolation continued at Texas A&M. At
the time, the lack of a car confined a student to the campus. Without transportation, it
was difficult to go into town where I might have seen and met Black residents. And the
few Black students in campus were not easy to find among eight or nine thousand men.
When the reality of this inequity finally dawned upon me, it went against my instincts. I
could not be aware of such a deplorable practice at my own alma mater and not rebel
against it. In ancient Rome, even Christians were allowed to watch other Christians be
killed by lions. I felt strongly that Black persons, any person, should have the right to
buy any ticket they could afford to watch a game.
The faculty leaders of our little rebel group selected the game against the University of
Texas at Austin for the test case. This team was A&M’s greatest rival. The popularity of
the game was sure to provide some media exposure. We reasoned that if we wound up
being charged, this publicity might provide some public sympathy to our cause. On
game night about ten or fifteen of us were ready to force the gatekeepers to let the
Black spectators in. We knew the police might take us and/or that we may have to fight
with other racist students who felt this was a second round of the civil war. Fortunately,
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