filled with white residents. Along the way, she moved through just one black neighborhood centered on Swisher Street. It was one of the few remaining clusters of African Americans outside East Austin that had once been dominant areas of black life.21 Carpenter also surveyed a handful of isolated Hispanic households in the course of her work. Most rented modest apartments, while a handful of the black Austinites on Swisher and Cole Streets owned their homes. Though her house was in the top third in Austin, it was more expensive than all but two Mexican American–owned homes in the city, and fewer than thirty African American families owned houses more valuable than her comfortable but by no means ostentatious house.22 The fruits of a growing economy were out of the reach for almost all of the city’s black and Hispanic population.
Flossie Pluenneke, who surveyed East Austin, rented her home in Hyde Park, an exclusive development far north of the UT campus.23 She and her husband, a physician, had a fourteen-year-old daughter. Platted in the 1890s, Hyde Park had been a suburban neighborhood with Victorian and Craftsman homes at the very outskirts of Austin, but by 1930, it was well within the city limits. Most residents were white-collar professionals—the two neighbors across the street were a lawyer and a pharmacist—and of its 1,500 residents, the only one who was not white was a live-in domestic worker, Rose Gooden, a black cook who worked for a prosperous lawyer.
Pluenneke’s daily path illustrated the city’s racial stratification. She began her two-week walk on the 1800 block of East Avenue, the large north–south street that was one of the city’s transportation arteries and the boundary between East Austin and downtown. The first block of East Avenue was all white—clerks and grocers and office printers—except for one black family. A block south, every house on both sides of East Avenue was occupied by African Americans who worked in the service class. As she moved farther into East Austin, the most heavily segregated of the city’s African American neighborhoods, her path snaked around the city’s black schools and churches and a handful of Hispanic neighborhoods in East Austin, a neighborhood of cottages and small bungalows. Pluenneke tallied black income and jobs in Austin’s Jim Crow society that were lower than whites’ and reflected constrained job opportunities. Indeed, more than 85 percent of working black women held jobs as maids, cooks, servants, or laundresses for white families or white institutions.24 Black men hardly fared better: two thirds of the black workforce in Austin were either laborers, porters, servants, cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, or launderers.25 In a city with two African American colleges in East Austin, even those with higher education had low-prestige jobs. Black home values were also lower than those of white-owned homes, thwarting a key means of accumulating wealth and concentrating that disadvantage in black neighborhoods. The census revealed the spatial aspects of racial segregation as well as its social and economic implications.
Residential racial segregation was part and parcel of the project of urban development in Austin. In the 1920s, it was a city in transition. Civic leaders pursued a Progressive-type agenda of good government and urban order, including adoption of a council-manager form of government in 1924, establishment of the Austin City Plan Commission in 1926, and a civic improvements campaign called “Onward Austin” that drew on emerging ideas about economic development and urban planning practice. The civic agenda included the preservation of segregation but advanced in fits and starts. The Austin Chamber of Commerce helped promote passage of the Love Bill, which enabled Texas cities to pass racial segregation ordinances.26 Throughout the 1920s, Southern cities including Dallas and New Orleans established such measures. When they failed legal challenges, Southern city leaders needed to find new methods of segregating.27
Austin turned to city planning to institutionalize separation of the races. In 1927, the city plan commission invited Will Hogg, chairman of Houston’s plan commission, to discuss a plan for Austin. Hogg had gone on record with the Houston commission: “Negroes are a necessary and useful element of the population and suitable areas with proper living and recreation facilities should be set aside for them. Because of long established racial prejudices, it is best for both races that living areas be segregated.”28 Yet explicit racial zoning had been deemed unconstitutional, and so it would not be among Austin’s instruments of urban development.
That same year, the plan commission hired Koch and Fowler, a Dallas engineering firm, to create Austin’s first master plan.29 Traffic and transportation, public services, land use—for the first time, all of these would be considered in concert, and the planners would present a unified vision for the city’s future. The university contributed its expertise to the endeavor through an alumnus, Hugo Kuehne, who served as a local representative for the plan and later helped create the UT architecture program.30
Koch and Fowler’s 1928 plan proposed a service district in East Austin where the city would locate public facilities for African American residents. The report recommended that “the nearest approach to the solution of the race segregation problem will be the recommendation of this district as a negro district; and that all the facilities and conveniences be provided the negroes in this district, as an incentive to draw the negro population to this area.”31 In the 1910s, white residents of West Austin had fought a bitter battle against an African American school there, arguing that black residents would follow black schools.32 Koch and Fowler turned that logic around in their 1928 plan, which went public as a special insert in the city’s leading newspapers in February.33 The press discussed Austin’s “racial segregation problem”—not the inherent unfairness of it or its cost to society, but the barriers to effective segregation. Even though the city’s Hispanic population, at greater than five thousand, was more than half the size of black Austin, far less anxiety attended segregation of the city’s Hispanic population. Largely Mexican American, they lived in two neighborhoods, one at the foot of Congress Avenue near the Colorado River, and one in the southern part of East Austin. There was no planning effort to concentrate the city’s Hispanics in either of the two districts. The color line was drawn more boldly between black and white than it was between brown and white.34
Koch and Fowler’s report planned a segregated city that would at least double its size, reaching three to five miles outside of the boundaries in 1928. Civic leaders accepted the plan and set an election for city bond issues worth $425 million in the spring of 1928 to fund the infrastructure improvements it called for, including road paving, more and better school buildings, and parks and leisure spaces. The business community was squarely behind the “Onward Austin” campaign that would guide development for several decades.
Everett Givens saw the bond election as an opportunity. Givens was a dentist and business leader, one of only seven black medical professionals in the city.35 He was a native Austinite but had gone to Howard University for his dental training, returning to Austin to practice.36 “Insofar as you could say that [black] Austin had a political boss when I came here … it was Dr. Everett Givens,” a political rival later remembered.37 A longtime Austinite called Givens “a bronze mayor.”38 Givens was part of a generation of black leaders who sought equalization long before integration rose to the fore of the civil rights movement.39 He had inherited the mantle of black leadership from an earlier generation; the philosophy of Booker T. Washington had guided those predecessors, who advocated self-improvement rather than radical social change.40 While Givens made greater demands on Austin’s leaders, he did not question the fundamental logic of segregation.
Bond elections empowered black voters, and this was a rare moment to exercise their political clout. Whites largely excluded African Americans from Democratic primaries, which were the de facto general elections in the one-party South.41 They could intimidate voters or exclude black citizens from being members of a private political organization. Bond issues, however, were general-election votes ostensibly guaranteed to majority-aged citizens. Poll taxes, however, constrained the franchise to more affluent and business-friendly parts of the black electorate. Passage of a bond required a supermajority, a two-thirds “yes” vote. These elections were often closely divided, making African Americans—nearly 20 percent of the city’s population—a
