As the first Black woman elected to the Houston Independent School District Board of Education in 1958, Hattie Mae White held a leadership position on the Board while schools remained segregated. Her election made Texas history, marking the first time since Reconstruction that a Black Texan held public office. Mrs. White crossed paths with the Hogg Foundation while Hogg researchers Bernice Milburn Moore and Wayne H. Holtzman conducted the Texas Cooperative Youth Study. This large-scale survey of nearly 13,000 high schoolers aimed to gauge [1] their futures, family dynamics, and American society at large.
The study began in 1954, the same year the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case mandated the desegregation of public schools. Throughout the Jim Crow South, tensions were already high in the school sphere. When sociologists from the Hogg Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin began surveying teenagers about their opinions on segregation and other social issues, many white parents became alarmed.
Aiming for a representative sample, the study surveyed a group that included white, Black, and Latino students of varying class, geographic, and religious backgrounds. It signaled one of only a few opportunities at that time for minors to anonymously identify problems they perceived in their school, family, and social structures. [2] Thus, the Texas Cooperative Youth Study’s research methods stood out for recognizing teenagers’ agency. By embracing the popular social theories of its day, however, the study upheld the conventional understanding that many students from wealthier backgrounds were “well-adjusted” while assuming a path to “delinquency” for students of marginalized backgrounds or non-traditional family structures. [3]
The Texas Cooperative Youth Study was led by the University of Texas at Austin (UT)—an institution that had itself only recently integrated. The first year of the study also coincided with the first graduating class of Black undergraduates at UT. In 1956, researchers from Prairie View A&M, Texas Southern University, and Texas College, three historically Black institutions, approached the Hogg Foundation to fund an extension of the Texas Cooperative Youth Study. This time, Black researchers would interpret the results from Black respondents and expand on the survey’s findings. The Hogg grant also covered a conference to discuss the findings and their implications for Black Texan youth.
In Houston, the study was poorly received. Not surprisingly, its detractors and proponents reflected political divisions on the Houston School Board at the time: while Mrs. White supported the study, every other Board Member voted in opposition. [4] Against a climate of censorship caused by Red Scare-era fearmongering about Communist influence and heightened tensions of desegregation, the outcry culminated in the burning of surveys at a televised Houston School Board meeting in June of 1959. [5]
Because of its limitations, the Texas Youth Cooperative Study offers a way to assess both the strides we have made as a society and the areas of needed improvement. Critical examination provides meaningful insights for researchers, foundations and charitable organizations, and school officials alike. It also tells a story about the long struggle for integration in Texas and identifies Hattie Mae White as a dedicated figure in that fight. Finally, it’s a sobering lesson on what happens when intellectual curiosity about race confronts a larger climate of censorship and fear.
- For more on the Texas Cooperative Youth Study, the Hogg Foundation archive contains plenty of primary and secondary sources including newspaper clippings, staff files, grant project information sheets, and the published study results in Tomorrow’s Parents. Research questions and appointments can be made by contacting our archivist at hogg-archives@austin.utexas.edu.
- Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth Century Texas, by Dr. William Bush, was a source for some of the information in this blog post. Information concerning the Texas Cooperative Study can be found in Chapter 4, Branching Out: The Professionalization of Mental Health Research and Philanthropy.
[1] Bush, W. S. (2016). Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 104.
[2] Bush, W. S. (2016). Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 104.
[3] Bush, W. S. (2016). Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 181.
[4] Bush, W. S. (2016). Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 107.
[5] Bush, W. S. (2016). Circuit Riders for Mental Health: The Hogg Foundation in Twentieth-Century Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 107.