The Hanging Tree, Drinking Fountains, Restrooms and the Poll Tax

Segregation was as entrenched in Ft. Worth as anywhere else in the South, but by the early 1960s it was in the process of dying a natural death. At least as far as overt practices were concerned. But it wasn’t always that way.

This was way before my time, but a little research on the internet will quickly reveal that the Klan was extremely active in the early 1920s, going so far as to have control (thru legal elections) of the Ft. Worth city government as well as several other major cities in Texas. I’ve also heard that the Klan had a hanging tree that was located on North Main near the Ellis Pecan Building.

When I came back here in 1961, there were still three extremely visible signs of segregation. Granted, there were many more, but these were so obvious that you had to be deaf, dumb and blind to miss them. Inside Monnig’s Department Store, on the block bounded by Fourth, Fifth, Houston and Throckmorton, on the south side of the elevators, was a pair of black enamel drinking fountains. If you wondered why two fountains, all you had to do was look above them. The signs identified one for ‘White’ and the other for ‘Colored’. By that time, no one paid any attention, but it was stark evidence of the segregated past. Not too much later, the signs were removed, but the fountains remained until the store was demolished.

Following the same pattern were the restrooms in the basement of Leonard’s Department Store. Located just past the sporting goods area (where a whetstone was available for everyone to sharpen their pocket knives) were two men’s restrooms. As with the water fountains at Monnig’s, one was for ‘Whites’ and the other for ‘Colored’. Eventually, I believe either one restroom was eliminated or the two were combined.

What’s interesting is that no one seemed to make any kind of fuss over either the fountains or restrooms. They just kind of faded into the background over a period of time.

The third thing took a legislative change and that was the Poll Tax. It still existed as late as 1964 because the Presidential Election in November 1964 was the first one I was elgible to vote in. To do so, I had to pay a 50 cent Poll Tax. For those who don’t know, the Poll Tax was basically created to prevent poor people (primarily blacks and hispanics) from voting. Considering that the original price was $1.75 per person per year, it did it’s job admirably. Of course, it had become a shadow of it’s former self by 1964 when the price had dropped to 50 cents. It was finally abolished in Federal Elections by the passage of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964 and two years later ruled unconstitutional in state and local elections by the Supreme Court.

Ft. Worth has a lot to be proud of...but also a lot that it’d probably just as soon forget. But the danger with forgetting is that a very famous phrase will jump up and bite you in the hinder part. That phrase? “He who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it.” Incidentally, the correct phrase is “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” And the author is George Santayana.

Have we learned from our past? Sometime I wonder.