Only the Strong Survive
(Page 3 of 8)
Sticking to Business
Clifford Smith felt very good by lunchtime. Most of his C.F. Smith Electric Company trucks and electricians were out on jobs. A government fact-finding group had approached him concerning an interview about minority business opportunities in Texas. And someone from the mayor’s office had just called to ask if he would serve as one of the seven members—the first black—on the board that oversees the issuance of the city’s master electrician licenses. Yes, he would. As it often does, life had come full circle: Smith had been the first black in Houston to receive his license, back in 1945, the year he founded his company.
“I remember sending my dad downtown to get the papers because he was light-skinned enough to pass for white,” Smith said, sitting in his office with fresh coffee. “When I walked in the inspection office, the first thing the lady said to me was, ‘What you want boy?’ I thought, ‘Oh, God, here it goes.’ But I got to the board for my papers, and they were very nice, and when the lady saw my experience she changed her tune. Just like that. I made one of the highest grades on the exam, and until she died she was my best friend in city hall.”
Successfully passing the city’s master electrician licensing exam was far removed from Smith’s first job, the best-paying newspaper route in Fifth Ward. Smiling, Smith said, “I threw to all the houses of prostitution and speakeasies west of Lyons and Jensen. Most money and best credit in the ghetto. I remember the revenue officers busting up whiskey outside the Italian grocery at Gregg and Green. Say, do you know Cootie Hill? That’s his corner. Then came Carry Nation. There was a saloon that used her name on the corner of Wood and Willow. She came one day and said, ‘I told you to take my name off that sign two years ago, and now I’m here to do it for you.’ She did, too, with her hatchet and a load of rocks.”
Smith believed a business that whites would respect and patronize could survive and prosper in Fifth Ward. He knew you couldn’t be just competent and professional. You had to make no mistakes and “keep up with the times,” his favorite axiom. Businessmen, like some he knew, couldn’t keep their accounts in a ten-cent notebook. You couldn’t close up because of hangovers or fishing days or ball games. Also, you had to get involved in the white man’s world. Smith’s service on the Harris County Grand Jury and his work with the Boy Scouts and as chairman of the Service Committee for Cancer Patients’ Aid at M.D. Anderson Hospital have helped his business almost as much as his competence as an electrician.
He has trouble understanding the vandalism, the trash, and the lack of self-respect he has seen and lived with in Fifth Ward. But he isn’t moving. Smith still uses his old Quonset huts and office next to his home on Buck Street. He and his wife, Hortense, complain about the trash and the streets not being paved and guttered, but they raised their two daughters, both now married, amid the overflowing ditches and potholed streets. Back in Wheatley High, playing trombone in the orchestra with his friends Arnett Cobb and the Jacquet brothers, Illinois and Russell, Smith thought only of getting out. Not now. Fifth Ward has been good to him and it is home.
Political Football
Texas tried harder than any other state to keep blacks from voting in Democratic party primary elections, beginning in 1924 with a statute that declared blacks ineligible to vote in the party’s primary. This law provoked a series of lawsuits that ultimately brought about the collapse of the “white primary,” the South’s favorite disfranchisement weapon. The final chapter was decided in 1944 by the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous Smith v. Allwright case. The man who filed the suit that opened politics to blacks in Texas was Lonnie Smith, a dentist from the Fifth Ward. Smith was a hero to a young girl growing up in Fifth Ward who would use his legal victory to win her own political battles. Her name was Barbara Jordan.
Government agencies and politicians make admirable efforts to change the destiny of Fifth Ward. The year-old $1 million Fifth Ward Multi-Service Center, a handsome building near IH 10, harbors nine agencies—housing counseling, health clinic, day care, juvenile probation, employment, etc—and provides a mixture of advice and service (library books, meals for senior citizens) to area residents. For many in Fifth Ward, the 36-year old Julia C. Hester House is as much an institution as Wheatley High. A United Fund agency that offers community services and youth activities, Hester House attracts young and old, and all age groups feel comfortable in its well-worn, familiar atmosphere, like the rumpus room in a close friend’s home.
The parents of former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and the grandmother of Mickey Leland, Jordan’s successor in Washington, still live in Fifth Ward. Both Leland and Jordan grew up in the ghetto and have worked hard to aid their constituents, who are weak and friendless in the halls of power, and to alert the great and powerful to the special tyrannies that rule their home. “White politicians don’t believe poverty like this exists. I have to bring them down here and onto the streets before they understand,” says Leland.
The government agency with the widest experience in Fifth Ward is the Texas Department of Human Resources, formerly the Texas Department of Welfare. The TDHR regulates the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, food stamps, Medicaid, and the social services such as day care and the Work Incentive Program. The day each month the welfare checks arrive in Fifth Ward is known as “Mother’s Day.”
Pearl Harbor
I turned west on Lyons Avenue from Gregg Street, after saying good morning to the legless man who sold pencils and newspapers in the shade of Ralston’s drugstore. Across the street was Orlando’s Grocery, run by one of the few remaining Italian families in Fifth Ward and located in the building where ex-mayor “Honest John” Browne once lived. Not far ahead was the Sweeper, wearing, despite the hot day, his usual three shirts, multiple pairs of socks, toboggan cap, and long overcoat, and frenziedly sweeping the one section of sidewalk he deemed needed cleaning. The only whites I saw all day, aside from the police, were on the construction crew building an addition to the fifty-year-old E.O. Smith Junior High.
Like Seventh and T in Washington, D.C., 125th Street in Harlem, Springfield Avenue in Newark, South Street in Philadelphia, Tremont in Boston, or 47th Street in Chicago, Lyons Avenue is “Soul Street” in Houston, the main road of this urban plantation. Originally it was named Odin Avenue for John Mary Odin, the first Catholic bishop of the diocese. The Lyons family owned saloons and grocery stores along Odin Avenue during the twenties, and in 1927 Odin was changed to Lyons in honor of saloon magnate John Lyons. It was a portent of things to come.
Complaints about living conditions along Lyons Avenue and in Fifth Ward—insufficient police and fire protection, poor drainage, inadequate lighting, no sanitation services—extend back over a hundred years. In 1875, Fifth Ward residents threatened to secede from Houston if utilities were not upgraded and streets paved. Another secession threat in 1883 brought the construction of an iron drawbridge over Buffalo Bayou at the foot of San Jacinto Street to improve transportation. In the 1890s Lyons was paved in brick two blocks past Mayor Browne’s house. Electric streetcars ran there until 1952, and for a while, in the late fifties, buses with steel wheels followed the tracks.
Why has Lyons deteriorated to its current war zone appearance? Some people blame the vivisection of the Fifth Ward by freeways, and the elimination of the Lyons Avenue exit on the Eastex Freeway, which cut off some business customers. Others, like Clifford Smith, say merchants haven’t tried to keep up appearances and haven’t done as much as they should to attract white investment. Certainly, the black flight during the past ten to fifteen years away from this poorest urban neighborhood, north to Kashmere and Trinity Gardens and south to South Park and Sunnyside, has hurt.
“What happened,” said Constance Houston Thompson, a retired schoolteacher and a Fifth Ward resident since the twenties, “was that in the early sixties at the beginning of the civil rights struggle, the whites got scared and took their money and credit with them. The city neglects the area terribly and no new businesses move in. I’m afraid to walk down Lyons near Jensen myself.”
Ghetto businesses have always been geared toward personal services: barbershops, cleaners, liquor stores, garages, cafes, bars, pawnshops, and, of course, funeral parlors—Fifth Ward has thirteen. Few businesses produce either high payrolls or hoods for the city. Only one financial institution, the Standard Savings Association, owned by one of Texas’ richest blacks, Mack Hanna of Houston, is located in Fifth Ward. Nine years ago the Moncrief-Lenoir Manufacturing Company, makers of metal products, spent $10 million buying up twenty acres at the west end of Lyons Avenue, planning one of the largest urban renewal projects in the country at that time. Today, the land parcels are still vacant.
Grinding poverty is written large across the buildings at Lyons and Jensen. HOPE Development’s improbably buoyant social-service activities are housed on one corner in a drab, anonymous building; heavily barred Standard Shoes, a veteran resident, sits across the street; Arthur Dunbar’s pawnshop stands catercorner from HOPE, and, on the northwest corner, a boarded-up lounge features on its Jensen side a sassy mural of a black girl with legs spread, reclining amid palm trees.
My Library
