AUSTIN, Texas — In 1960, Austin was essentially two cities: one in which white residents enjoyed unfettered freedom, and one where Black residents were not allowed into many local, white-owned businesses, including stores, restaurants and theaters.
That same year, a small group of University of Texas students, most of whom were white, began protests at two movie theaters on the Drag in an attempt to force them to admit Black moviegoers.
The Varsity Theater and the Texas Theater were targets for the protests, known as “stand-ins.”
“We would walk in line, and we had to have at least one Black student come out with us because we were mostly white, and we would get in line at the ticket window and ask if we could buy two tickets or a ticket for myself and for my friend here, the Black kid who would be next to us," former UT student Jim McCulloch said in a 2015 interview for a documentary about the local civil rights struggle called "Stand-Ins." “And then they would, of course, deny the ticket. So we'd go back around to the back of it and stand in line again.”
With the protestors getting back in the ticket line over and over, others waiting to buy tickets would get frustrated and leave. The theaters began to lose money.
Though they were non-violent, the students who were occasionally joined by some local high school students were threatened, spat at and occasionally roughed-up.
A student planning meeting at the university's YMCA/YWCA chapter in 1960 nearly cost lives when two students who opposed desegregation built and used a pipe bomb.
“When two young men tried to throw a pipe bomb through the window, they were having some sort of brotherhood conference there was integrated,” Leon McNealy said. “And that would have been probably one of the biggest civil rights killings in the country. But the throw was a tough one and it hit one of the supporters and went down this deep stairwell which contained the explosion."
McCulloch and McNealy were among several former students who participated in the 1960-1961 protests who were interviewed for a 2015 civil rights documentary produced by People’s History in Texas.
The video tells the story of how the protests eventually led to change. By the next year, the “stand-ins" had forced the Texan and the Varsity Theater to open their doors to Black moviegoers, though other movie houses in town remained whites-only for a few more years until 1964, when civil rights for all became the law of the land.