Historic Walker County

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Wendell Baker with his wife, Augusta.
COURTESY OF WENDELL BAKER.
their future prosperity and growth by accepting
the highway proposal.” Indeed they did. The
highway improvements brought an influx of
temporary jobs as Walker County Judge Amos
Gates encouraged contractors to hire young men
from the area. High school and college students
earned pocket money through this project. One
such student, Joe Kirkland, cleared debris and set
forms for concrete culverts along the roadway.
Also during this period, massive improvements to
farms and agriculture occurred. The prison
system, timber industry, and Sam Houston
State Teachers College employed many area
citizens, and improvements to the education
system began. 93
T H E C I V I L R I G H T S
M O V E M E N T
In the midst of Walker County’s booming
development, however, there lingered a deepseated
and difficult problem to solve. Many white
residents in the area had long discriminated
against African Americans, and years of
segregation had created a world in which whites
and blacks lived in two separate spheres. Blacks
were forbidden to eat at most local restaurants;
they were forced to sit in the balcony in local
theaters; and black parents faced the challenge of
explaining to their children why they could not
use the local swimming pool or state park.
Despite these difficult circumstances, the most
obvious form of racial discrimination occurred in
the public school system, which required black
children, teachers, and administrators to work in
separate, inferior schools to those provided for
white children in the area. Sarah Bartee, a longtime
white resident of New Waverly, remembered
that she attended school in a “beautiful old brick
building with hardwood floors” during the 1940s,
while “black children went to school…[in] a
frame building,” which was “not a good quality.”
“I feel bad,” Bartee said, “when I look back and see
how much better we had it than they did.” 94
In 1954, after years of legal campaigning by the
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated
schools were unequal and thus unconstitutional.
Encouraged by this decision, several local African
Americans decided to push for integrated schools.
Wendell Baker, a Walker County native, World
War II veteran, and chemistry teacher at the allblack
Samuel W. Houston High School led the
charge. The battle proved very difficult, however.
In 1961, Mance Park, the Superintendent of
Schools in Huntsville, fired Baker from his
teaching position, making it incredibly difficult for
the black activist to continue his civil rights efforts.
Undaunted, however, Baker formed the Walker
County Voter’s League in December 1962 and
registered voters throughout the city. Then, with
Ernest McGowen, Walker County’s first black
deputy, Baker met with Superintendent Park in
June 1963 and pushed the local school district to
integrate its facilities. Baker’s effort received
additional support the following year when legal
action forced Sam Houston State Teachers College
to admit James Patrick as the school’s first African
American student.
At roughly the same time, Congress passed and
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. Taken together, these changes set the
stage for one brave young African American
student—Janet Smither—to desegregate Huntsville
Independent School District in the fall of 1964.
Young Smither went alone that first year, however,
and it took four additional years of pressure by the
black community to convince the school district to
begin full scale desegregation in 1968. 95
In November 1963, as local activists fought to
integrate the schools, Jerry Jones, the president
4 4 ✦ H I S T O R I C W A L K E R C O U N T Y