Old friends share memories of 1960s Houston
Storytelling is key to preserving history of civil rights
The Rev. William Lawson held my father’s hand as they prayed and talked about marching together with Martin Luther King Jr.
I’ve heard my father tell many stories of his youth, but somehow I missed that one.
King visited Houston several times during the 1960s and, on his last visit in October 1967, he drew nearly 5,000 people to the Sam Houston Coliseum. Six months later, King was assassinated.
My father isn’t really the protesting type. Richard Sewing is an architectural engineer and businessman who focused on working hard. His form of social justice meant getting his education, making money on his own terms and taking care of his family.
My father and Lawson, a civil rights leader, revered peacemaker and founder of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, are old friends. So to listen to the two men — ages 87 and 92, respectively — reminisce about their younger years was a treat.
They both grew up in Kansas City, Kan., and attended the same high school. My dad was the first Black student to graduate in architectural engineering from Kansas State University. When my parents moved to Houston in the 1960s, they were one of a handful of Black families in Riverside Terrace. Lawson and his late wife, Audrey, were the first to welcome them. She was the first person outside my family to hold me as a baby, I’ve been told.
Judging by the Kansas neighborhood that raised them and the time in which they came of age, Lawson and my father weren’t expected to go far.
Greatness tends to come from adversity. Too often we miss those incredible stories of the past in our rush to deal with life right now. But this pandemic, in effect, has forced many of us to be still and listen.
In the Black community, the oral tradition of storytelling is how we learned about the atrocities of slavery, which are often left out of history books, and the triumphs of the human spirit in the Black community.
“We have to tell the story,” civil rights icon John Lewis once said. “We have to make it plain so people can feel it. So people can be inspired … Without storytelling, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.” Lewis, who spent more than 30 years in Congress, died July 17 at age 80.
In Houston, the civil rights movement was led by Texas Southern University students who challenged segregated lunch counters at what was then Weingarten’s supermarket in Third Ward. The property, now a post office, has a Texas Historical Commission marker commemorating the event.
Compared to the rest of South, intergration in Houston came quietly. White business owners and leaders in the Black community were committed to keeping it that way. Even local media owners agreed to a news blackout so that lunch counters, buses and other businesses once closed to Black people would be integrated without making headlines.
Marlon Hall, a Houston anthropologist, believes telling stories of Black history is imperative for the future of humanity.
“There’s something powerful that comes out of telling your story; lives are transformed,” he said. “Every culture’s future is directly related to how they receive the past.”
Hall is set to move to Tulsa, Okla., in January to work with Houston artist Rick Lowe as the visual anthropologist and socialmedia archivist for the Greenwood Art Project, an effort to bring awareness of Tulsa’s Greenwood community, the site of the 1921 race massacre of “Black Wall Street.” The thriving community was burned to the ground, and 300 Black people were killed.
In 2019, Hall curated a series of dinners to bring Black men together to share their stories in six cities. He plans to host a similar dinner for the descendants of the Black Wall Street massacre “to create a space where they can share stories of their ancestors and empower a better future for Black Wall Street.”
My father and Lawson talked for nearly two hours that afternoon in Third Ward.
They laughed and marveled at how many random details my dad recalled — he remembered that the Lawson family once owned a T-shirt shop that made shirts for Yates Senior High School, Texas Southern University and other Black organizations and that Lawson had an old car that he would let anyone in the community drive for free.
Lawson shared that he had wanted to become a cartoonist.
“Most people who are called to preach, who are really called, don’t want to go,” he said. “They have to resist God and sometimes fight God. But sooner or later God is going to make them go. I had wanted to be a cartoonist. God said, ‘No, you’re not going to be a cartoonist. You are going to be a preacher.’ Very few people volunteer for ministry. Most of us fight it.”
At the heart of their conversation was a mutual respect for each other and a deep love of family.
“Being a friend of the Lawson family is an honor,” my father told Lawson. “It’s the truth. I’ve been around you ever since I’ve been in town. I’ve been here over 50 years. I marched with you. I was part of your house.”
“You still are,” said Lawson’s daughter Melanie, who calls my dad “Flip” because of his resemblance to the late comedian Flip Wilson. The KTRK (Channel 13) anchor attended this family visit with her sister, Cheryl Lawson, the head of the Lawson Academy school in Third Ward.
My dad grew contemplative for a moment. “A man who stays with his family and tries to contribute as much as he can to their development, boy, he’s made a hell of an investment,” he said.
“Yes, that he can be proud of,” Lawson said.
The Rev. William Lawson held my father’s hand as they prayed and talked about marching together with Martin Luther King Jr.
I’ve heard my father tell many stories of his youth, but somehow I missed that one.
— Joy Sewing