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and constraining standards of propriety,” and depicted “bluesmen as the embodiments of an anti-modern ethos.”40 Even Charters, in his book The Country Blues published in November 1959, had a highly romanticized view of African American blues singers and described Hopkins as “one of the last of his kind, a lonely, bitter man who brings to the blues the intensity and pain of hours in the hot sun, scraping at the earth, singing to make the hours pass. The blues will go on, but the country blues … will pass with men like this thin, intense singer from Centerville, Texas.”41 McCormick, writing in Jazz Journal, reiterated this perspective, but even went further in his portrayal of Hopkins as a counterpoint to what Filene has called “the emptiness of contemporary society.” Hopkins, McCormick wrote, “is a fascinatingly complete man: even the least of his routine actions seem in tune with the earthy cynicism that characterizes his songs. A man with a tribal sense of belonging to his culture, he is outside the modern dilemma.”42

Certainly McCormick was aware that racism and discrimination in Houston were rampant. While the white liberal-minded audience at the Alley Theatre appreciated Lightnin’, the reality of life in Houston during the 1950s imposed definite limitations. Isabelle Ganz, a classically trained mezzo-soprano, composer, conductor, and teacher who moved to Houston after living in New York City and was active in the Houston Folk Group, says that the hootenannies in Houston emulated those in New York City, and tried to be as inclusive as possible. “I got interested in folk music singing union songs in high school,” she recalls, and as she got older she started listening to Pete Seeger and going to folk shows in New York. But in Houston, she says, “it was different because it was strictly segregated. Blacks and whites did not mix. I was shocked by the colored-only water fountains in Foley’s department store, and in other places around town. I’d never seen anything like it.”43 Kyla Bynum concurs: “Houston was pure McCarthyism. Absolute bigotry. Houston was a god-awful place.”44

The NAACP had been fighting for decades in Houston against racism and discrimination against African Americans. By 1945 it was looking for a plaintiff to challenge Texas’s segregated university system and targeted the policy that excluded blacks from the University of Texas law school. The resulting case of Sweatt v. Painter was finally resolved in 1950 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, Heman Sweatt.45 While this was a landmark decision, the dismantling of the Jim Crow system in Houston proceeded slowly. In the 1950s and 1960s African Americans there fought hard in the courts to gain the right to sit on juries, to eliminate segregation in housing and education, and to obtain equal pay for equal work and equal access to social services and public transportation. In 1958, Hattie Mae White won a seat on the Houston School Board and became the first African American elected to public office in Texas since Reconstruction. White, in a coordinated effort with the NAACP and African American community leaders, mounted a sustained effort to force members of the school board to implement court-ordered desegregation.

Opposition persisted, however, and racial tensions intensified. In March 1960, four masked white youths followed Felton Turner, an unemployed awning installer who had participated in a sit-in with Texas Southern University students, and abducted him at gunpoint as he walked through the Heights section of the city. They took him to a deserted wooded area not far from downtown Houston and strung him up in a tree, beat him with chains, and carved two sets of KKK initials on his abdomen with a pocket knife.46

In an article in the Houston Post on April 24, 1960, columnist Jim Mousner noted that “the city’s Negro population is increasing at the rate of 3 percent a year from immigration—mostly from East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas…. More than half of Houston’s Negro population lives in three sections of the city, the Fourth