Being a young, talented, black student at TCU in the mid-1960s meant opportunity and great responsibility, or at least that’s how it felt for the late Mildred Ann Martin Sims, who died in 2012, in a memoir by her daughter, Leanne Sims Parsons.
“There was a lot of pressure on us because if we didn’t do well, we were ruining it for future generations,” Leanne said, recounting her mother’s thoughts when she was among the first group of black freshmen to desegregate the private university’s main campus. “She hoped that we could pave the way for other kids of color.”
The path she blazed. As a lifelong educator, spending 40 years with the Fort Worth Independent School District, Mildred blazed a personal and political path. Three generations of her family have graduated from Texas Christian University: Mildred in the late 1960s, her daughter Leanne in the mid-1990s, and her grandson Austin Parson in 2024.
She was a trailblazer at a university that has struggled with negative publicity around racism and diversity, and reflecting on her family’s decades-long relationship with TCU is also a lesson in how far the university has come and how far it still needs to go.
Lianne said they’ve had to contend with both overt and subtle racism, and she feels TCU has changed from a university that wasn’t necessarily welcoming to black students in the 1960s to one that gave Lianne and Austin a sense of belonging and possibility.
While Mildred and Leanne did not have any black faculty, Austin’s classes had several. The campus now has a chief inclusion officer and an office of diversity and inclusion. In response to racial justice protests across the country in 2020, including in Fort Worth, TCU launched the Race and Reconciliation Initiative to explore the university’s history with slavery, segregation and the Confederacy.
Many of these measures are the result of student intervention, said Frederick Gooding Jr., founding chair of TCU’s Race and Reconciliation Initiative and co-author of “Unforgettable History: Purple, White and Black at TCU.”
“Students were on the ground saying, ‘We are paying clients, customers. This is what we need. This is what we see,'” said Gooding, an associate professor of African American studies in TCU’s John V. Roach Honors College. “They were able to leverage their collective power to force the administration to see things differently.”
The university’s enrollment rate for black students remains low and has declined over the past decade. As of fall 2023, the enrollment rate for black and African-American undergraduates was 4%, according to TCU’s institutional research data. In fall 2011, the oldest data available on the university’s website, the rate was about 5.2%.
For many Black students, being part of the university means many different things.
“I’m here, but do I belong here? I may be included, but am I fully incorporated?,” Gooding said. “I think those are some of the questions we’re still wrestling with today.”
These were ontological questions Mildred and her family asked themselves. Mildred graduated from TCU in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a teaching certificate. Leanne graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s in business administration. Austin earned a degree in child development 30 years later. Her granddaughter, Lauren Parson, will be entering as a freshman in education this fall.
“It was a big deal,” Lianne said of her mother’s education at TCU. “People in the community bought her so much stuff so she could go to college. They bought her all nice things because they didn’t want her to go to college and feel inferior.”
Desegregation at TCU
In the years before Mildred enrolled at TCU, integration of black students at other Southern universities had been met with violence: riots broke out at the University of Georgia and the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s, and President John F. Kennedy sent troops to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1963 to help the school admit its first black students.
Prior to 1964, black students had taken classes in the schools of Theology, Education, and Nursing, but the university had never seen a black student graduate from the main campus.
According to “Unforgettable History: Purple, White and Black TCU,” in December 1963, TCU’s Student Government passed a resolution condemning the continuation of discriminatory practices. By late January 1964, the TCU Board of Trustees declared that “students may be admitted to TCU without regard to race, creed or national origin.”
But the minutes of that board meeting clearly state that “the enrollment of Negro students has never been greater. This is due to two or three fundamental factors.” What were those factors? The board planned to increase admissions requirements, course requirements, and tuition fees.
In August 1964, five black students enrolled at TCU but dropped out before the end of their first year. The following year, Mildred graduated at the top of her class from Kirkpatrick High School, named for her uncle, Milton Kirkpatrick, and was part of a group of 14 black students who enrolled full-time at TCU’s main campus. They went on to become the first group of black graduates.
“She had a peer group that was there for each other and supported each other and looked out for each other,” Leanne said, including James Cash, the first Black athlete at TCU and the first Black basketball player in the Southwest Conference. “The athletes were the best, and they still are, so being so close with her (Cash) made her feel comfortable.”
Mildred Sims (back row, fifth from left), who attended TCU for graduate school, stands with fellow members of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, which was founded at the university in 1972. (Photo by Leanne Sims-Parson)
Mildred lived on campus, worked in the summer and bought herself a nice outfit to wear to school, one for each day of the week. Some of the white students noticed; her “Monday outfit” and “Tuesday outfit” became a running joke. She had a white roommate and some white friends. However, some of her classmates told her she was not welcome at the university, that she was one of the “poor people” there. Mildred wanted to be an engineer, but as a black woman, she was not accepted into the program and instead became a math teacher.
Paving the way
After graduation, Mildred taught mathematics in schools in the Fort Worth Independent School District and became a principal. She then served as the district-level K-12 Mathematics Education Director. She earned her Master’s in Mathematics from TCU. She took her children to TCU games. She always demanded academic excellence from her children.
Lianne says that decades later, even after her mother had established herself as an educational leader, Mildred still feared that small mistakes would cost her her status — and her opportunities.
In 1990, Leanne graduated from Dunbar College of Science and Technology and enrolled at TCU.
“When I got there, there were quite a few kids of color,” Leanne said. “Not many, but there were enough of them that we felt like, ‘We belong here,’ and that we deserve to be there just like everyone else.”
Leanne Sims-Parson, front row, far right, was on the TCU cheerleading team. She was one of the few black cheerleaders on the team during her time at TCU. (Photo courtesy | Leanne Sims-Parson)
Lianne said she shared positive experiences with most students, but others told her they thought she was enrolled on “fake” grounds or that they had used the N-word in front of her “as a joke.”
Despite her activities on campus, including serving on homecoming court, as a cheerleader, campus tour guide and as a member of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, Lianne remembers feeling pressured to try harder than her peers. Some of the cheerleaders would ask her why she always rushed to leave after practice.
“And I said, ‘Because I don’t have the ability to fail.’ I mean, physically, I did,” Lianne says, “but I knew if I failed there was no other way. I mean, this was the only way.”
Lianne didn’t fail: She graduated from Neely School of Business, worked for Texas Commerce Bank (now JPMorgan Chase) and rose to the position of assistant vice president, then switched careers and now works as a math specialist for the Everman Independent School District.
Her time at TCU has taught her life skills.
“In the real world, you’re going to meet people who aren’t necessarily like you, and you’re going to meet people who are on your side, and you’re going to meet people who are completely against you,” Lianne said. “TCU really helped me know how to navigate that process.”
“A time of intensified racial discrimination”
When it came time for LeAnn’s oldest son, Austin, to go to college, the choice wasn’t obvious to him. As a teenager, he wanted to carve his own path. He didn’t want the generational pressure of carrying on a family tradition. Ultimately, his own path led him to TCU.
As a senior at the Fort Worth Independent School District’s Young Men’s Leadership Academy, Austin applied for college academic scholarships through TCU’s Community Scholars Program and was accepted to TCU on a full scholarship. At that point, the decision was clear.
During his scholarship interview, Austin was asked, “Why TCU?” and his answer was simple.
“I’m a third-generation TCU student, and my dad always tells me I’m great because I have greatness in me,” Austin recalled. “I’m going to bring greatness to the TCU name,” he told the students.
Austin Parson is the third generation of his family to attend TCU and will attend the university’s graduation ceremony in May 2024. (Photo by Mark Parson)
For Austin, who majored in child development, attending TCU was a time of “coming of age.” There was the COVID-19 pandemic and the start of online classes; the murder of George Floyd, which sparked a summer of protests calling for racial justice across the country; the November 2020 presidential election; and the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
In the midst of this historic moment, Black athletes, with the approval of the administration, led an effort to paint the message “End Racism” outside TCU’s basketball arena.
“It was a time of heightened racism,” Austin said, recalling how racism was a topic of discussion in class and how students believed it was a thing of the past. “Some of them thought it was a 1990s thing, like Rodney King, or a 1960s thing, like Dr. King or Malcolm X.”
Like his mother and grandmother, Austin had to contend with the impression among students that he got into college not on his own merit but through affirmative action (what some students called “handouts” or “DEI thinking”). But Austin wasn’t trying to prove he deserved the school; he knew he’d earned it.
At the same time, Austin was happy to be part of the TCU community. He went to games. He was proud to be a part of the Horned Frogs, especially when the football team reached a national championship game in the 2022-2023 school year. At the time, going to TCU “had a nice ring to it, and it had a vibe about it,” Austin said.
Now, he feels that TCU’s senior administration is committed to promoting diversity, not as a PR stunt, but as an effort to make the campus more representative. His sister, Lauren, will be attending TCU this fall. Lauren is a graduate of Martin High School in the Arlington Independent School District and was attracted to the small class sizes, individual attention and campus atmosphere. For her senior year, Lauren’s first choices were TCU and Huston-Tillotson University, a historically black college in Austin.
“There were a lot of positive signs at TCU,” Lauren says, “and what I liked was how much they put into their students. They’re constantly renovating. They’re always building new buildings for new programs and new dorms.”
While the college choice is up to Lauren and Austin, destiny means a member of the next generation will find their way to TCU — at least, that’s what Austin thinks.
“There’s a fourth generation coming up, and then a fifth generation,” Austin said. “We need to keep the momentum going.”
Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, affiliated with Open Campus. She can be reached at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.
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