The 1998 documentary, “The Strange Demise of Jim Crow,” was nominated for a National Humanities Medal for its look at how desegregation in Houston in the Sixties was relatively quiet compared to other large Southern cities. On Friday, Oct. 29, the film will be screened at the Carver Museum and Cultural Center for a Texas Black History Series program, “50 Years after Integration.”

The Carver Museum is located at 1165 Angelina St., off Rosewood Ave.

The event, from 6 to 9 p.m., is free and open to the public, and made possible in part with a $1,500 grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Texas Black History Preservation Project, a nonprofit, is presenting the screening and will occasionally offer similar programs throughout the year in an effort to keep alive discussions about Texas black history beyond Black History Month and Juneteenth.

The TBHPP is also documenting almost 500 years of African American presence in Texas, dating to 1528.

Thomas R. Cole, Ph.D., the film’s producer, will introduce the movie. Cole is the Beth and Toby Grossman Professor and director of the John P. McGovern, M.D. Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Cole also authored “No Color Is My Kind, The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston” (University of Texas Press, 1997). The book was also nominated for a Humanities Medal.

The film examines how fear of integration, the specter of violence and embarrassing national publicity, and potentially huge financial losses led to secret deals by leaders of the powerful white Downtown Business Alliance with black community leaders. The tactic neutralized arch-segregationists, but also compromised freedom of the press, though desegregation was achieved. However, Houston media outlets became complicit in the deals by agreeing to news blackouts of integration efforts at the risk of losing major advertising revenues. As a result, 70 lunch counter operators were convinced to integrate all at once with promises that the moves would be kept off the news.

Cole, a gerontologist, first encountered Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital in 1984. For the next 13 years, the men worked together reconstructing Stearns’ life and with it the untold saga of Houston's desegregation. Stearns, a Galveston native, had been a law student at Texas Southern University. There, as leader of the Progressive Youth Association in 1960, Strearns led demonstrations at public facilities in the city. Sadly, he would lapse into alcoholism and later was confined to a mental health facility at UT Galveston.

Immediately following the screening, Cole and several panelists from the Austin area will participate in a discussion and question and answer session about the movie and integration in Austin. The participants will include:

• Dr. Charles Akins – Educator, administrator, and former asst. superintendent with the Austin Independent School District (1983), and the first African American to achieve that rank with AISD.
• Ms. Bertha Means – Businesswoman, community leader and long time local and national activist for civil rights and education, and a key figure in he integration of public facilities and schools. That included the integration of athletics at the University of Texas where her son, James, was the Longhorns’ first black letterman (1964, track).
• Dr. Dwight Watson – Associate Professor of History (African American History and the Civil Rights Movement) at Texas State University-San Marcos. He is also the author of, “Black Bayou: African-American Life and Civil Rights in Houston.”

The state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Texas has provided more than 2,000 grants to nonprofit organizations throughout the state over the past three decades. Humanities Texas grants support a wide range of humanities programs, including lectures, oral history projects, museum exhibitions, teacher institutes, interactive projects and documentaries. The award to TBHPP reflects Humanities Texas’ continuing commitment to outstanding and diverse public programming.

For more information on the event, call 512-673-0565 or email Michael Hurd or Roxanne Evans.