The Petrified Forest
Both trees and the past surround life in deep East Texas, where lumber is king and the Civil War was yesterday.
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The elder McClure’s CAP program administers outreach programs and two hot-lunch programs for the elderly in San Augustine (one for blacks in the old American Legion building; another for an integrated group in the city’s Cedar Crest Public Housing Development). Yes, the county is poor, McClure agrees, so poor that they were able to get a reduction in nonfederal sharing funds. Normally the money breakdown is 70 per cent federal funds, 30 per cent other. Because of poverty conditions in San Augustine and Sabine Counties, their requirement was cut back to only 18 per cent.
“We have token leadership, which is at least a step forward,” said McClure. “Eddie Wilson, who runs the Exxon station, is on the school board, but he’s a handpicked candidate of Dr. Bennett. Lon L. Garner is on the city council. He doesn’t cross lawyer Smith Ramsey, the real power in the town. Percy Garner’s son, Sam Garner, ran for the school board and for a state Legislature seat against Buddy Temple and lost both races.
“It’s not just the racism and distrust of the blacks here in San Augustine, you see, but their lack of education,” McClure continued. “When I was principal at Lincoln I had the opportunity to hire a black as my secretary, or a white. I tried every black person I could find, but none could type a letter without errors. I hired a white girl because she could do the job.”
There is no leadership. There is poor education. There are no political movements like the populism of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, when the needs of poor people for jobs, land, decent wages, and good schools transcended race. Mr. McClure feels the situation in San Augustine County is getting worse, although he isn’t sure why. As an educator, he blames and at the same time places great home in the schools. After seeing the schools, talking to teachers, learning of the politics and financial woes of the San Augustine school system, I can understand his concern.
San Augustine’s elementary, intermediate, and high schools finally were desegregated in August 1970, after the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against ten East Texas school districts (including San Augustine) , claiming that the school boards operated dual school systems in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. J. L. Smith, school board president and member of the powerful Ramsey, Ramsey & Smith law firm, said they had “fought the good fight,” that the time had come for San Augustine to “face facts,” that the dual system was a relic of the past. The change was implemented swiftly and peacefully. In one way, the losers were the blacks who moved from their relatively new Lincoln School, built in 1958, to the 51-year-old San Augustine High School. Less than three years ago, the school had such a porous roof that students were assigned buckets during a rain to catch the steady dripping around their desks. Uncovered light-bulbs hung form the ceiling; sewage backed up into the drinking system; only this year is a general-science lab being constructed. There was no air conditioning in any of the schools. Finally, a portion of the roof collapsed, luckily injuring no one.
After a visit to the town’s schools in October 1973, Texas Education Agency officials threatened to withdraw accreditation of the school district. They cited deficiencies such as inadequate lighting, science laboratories without equipment, large holes in walls, non-vented heaters, loose-hanging tiles, rotting doors, and no organized instruction of art, music, and physical education at the elementary school. Students using the auditorium for classrooms wrote on large squares of plywood supported on the chairs in front of them. The high school was singled out as being dangerous, inadequate, and run-down.
The school board responded to the state’s report by presenting the voters with a $2.6 million bond issue ($2 million for a new high school and $600,000 for immediate renovations) , which passed overwhelmingly in April 1974. To pay off the district’s increased bonded indebtedness and to raise additional tax revenue, the board sought a reappraisal of property, but they rejected suggestions that they hire local appraisers such as Earl Woods, an associate of the Ramsey law firm, or Jake Whitton, whose family had sizable holdings in the county. Instead, they hired Southwestern Appraisal Company of Austin to revalue, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the 290 square miles of school district property, 180,000 acres at the time valued at $10.7 million.
Certainly, land evaluation was overdue. The valuable timberland and pastureland in the district was listed on the tax rolls for ridiculously low amounts. It is not hard to understand why. The tax rolls show that three major timber companies—Kirby Lumber Company, Temple-Eastex, and International Paper Company—own 27.5 per cent of the land in the school district. Last year they paid only 13.5 per cent of the school district property taxes. If you add the acreage of six of the largest landowners—Ben Ramsey, former lieutenant governor and railroad commissioner and a member of the Ramsey, Ramsey & Smith law firm; his brother, Smith Ramsey; Ed Clark, native son, former ambassador to Australia, Austin financier, friend of presidents, and statewide finance chairman for Senator John Tower; school board president Dr. N. T. Bennett; U.S. District Judge Joe Fisher, native son; school board member and finance company president Porter Halbert—to the timber company holdings you find the combined total represent 32 per cent of the land. Together, they paid only 15.5 per cent of the taxes. The other 4000 property owners in the district, who own 68 per cent of the land, paid almost 85 per cent of the taxes. Timberland in the school district is valued at $40 an acre; pastureland, $36, which any landowner or timberman in East Texas will confirm is barely one-twentieth the real property value of the land. On the almost 21,000 acres it owns in the district, Temple-Eastex paid just $14,643 in school taxes, or 70 cents an acre.
At first glance, this phenomenon has all the earmarks of an age-old story; a poor, unorganized region, dependent on a few major industries and dominated by a wealthy local elite, ends up sacrificing its children for economic gain. Since about 40 per cent of the students in the San Augustine school system come from families earning less than $3500 a year, it seems likely that the end result of offering them such inadequate education would be the predictable one: the rich get rich, and the poor … Certainly the new property valuations that came out of Southwest Appraisal’s study were aimed at reversing this trend. When the new property tax bills went out in September 1947, the total tax rolls shot from $10.7 million to more than $64 million, the largest increase coming from pasture- and timberland. With resources like those, the school district should have been able to afford at least a mediocre program.
But such changes are seldom so simple, and even fair valuation may seem like highway robbery to people accustomed to paying practically nothing. The ensuing battle over the valuation of property in San Augustine County gave the school board, most of whom no longer serve, a good lesson in how power works in San Augustine County. It also produced the opening salvos in a battle between rural and urban school districts that could challenge the whole basis of funding public education in Texas.
Naturally, the Ramsey, Ramsey & Smith law firm was behind it all. On behalf of a group of large property owners (few of whom had children in school), the firm filed a suit challenging the new valuations, claiming they assessed real property excessively high while excluding all other classes of property. Even as the firm was winning their case in U.S. District Court, a “fair taxes” slate defeated the school board candidates who favored the new, higher valuations. The new school board purged the superintendent and other officials who had backed the effort to get more money for the schools and proceeded to draw up the 1976-77 school budget based on old property values of $36 an acre for pasture and $40 an acre for timber.
Meanwhile, the state of Texas got back into the act. Since the amount of state aid a school district receives is based on a complicated formula that uses the value of the district’s property, the controversy over what San Augustine’s property was really worth was crucial. The Texas Education Agency, in its “Official Compilation of School District Market Value Data,” claimed last year that the district had property worth $79 million. This year the TEA reported the property value at $106 million, which could be taxed to raise money for the schools. So, while the school board was confidentially expecting a $700,000 chunk of state money to help run its schools, the state officials refused to disburse funds.
Smith Ramsey then pulled another rabbit out of his hat in the form of a new suit claiming the whole “Official Compilation” was unfair because it ignored as much has $75 billion in personal property—cash in bank accounts, corporate stocks and bonds, life insurance, art collections, jewelry, etc.—which the Texas Constitution requires to be taxed along with land and other real property. The result, the suit argues, is that state aid is distributed on a system that makes land-rich rural districts seem more wealthy than the urban districts where most of the personal property is concentrated. Rural districts therefore get less than their fair share of state aid.
Last July, continuing to operate in their own world like the Wizard of Oz, the school district ran completely out of money. They borrowed $55,800 from the First National Bank to meet July’s payroll. In August, one week into the new school year, they again could not pay the bills, and the state refused their request for an emergency appropriation for teachers’ salaries. A last-minute loan on August 31 from the tow’s other bank, Commercial State, saved the day. Later last fall, First National, Ed Clark’s bank, refused to lend the board $80,000 for a new vocational-agriculture building.
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