Summary
The Houston university whose campus and dormitories were invaded by Houston police on the night of May 16-17, 1967, in the June-July 1967 SNCC Newsletter’s reporting, after which five of its students, the TSU Five, were charged with a patrolman’s murder (Third World Round Up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge — SNCC Newsletter Vol. I, No. 4 (June-July 1967), PDF p.2, p.7-8).
Details
- The newsletter’s facts box gives the sequence on its campus: Douglas Wayne Waller’s arrest on the grounds, 500 cops surrounding two dormitories, some 5,000 rounds emptied into the buildings, dormitories charged, wrecked, and their residents trampled, beaten and arrested (PDF p.2). The police strength is given differently within the issue: 500 in the facts box and in Carolyn Baker’s editorial (PDF p.2), against over six hundred policemen in Lawson’s account of the charge (PDF p.7); both figures are held as printed.
- Rev. William Lawson’s eyewitness account says one dormitory was so plundered as to render it unfit for residence, that the university is the most obvious scapegoat for Patrolman Louis Kuba’s death, and that its administration may be degraded and its defenseless, half-naked students portrayed as villanous [as printed] and criminal (PDF p.2).
- Lawson’s continuation describes Wheeler Street bisecting the university, the police blocking it with squad cars, the charge into Lanier Hall for Men shortly after 2:00 A.M., and the destruction of students’ clothing, books, radios, lamps and television sets there (PDF p.7).
- Lawson’s conclusion holds that the massive attack on the university’s dormitories was a panic action forced by clumsy leadership, that the Mayor recognized the political consequences of the attack against an entire university, that Chief Herman Short had to confess there never were the hordes of snipers they had pretended filled the dormitories, and that the build-up of force was originally designed to teach a lesson to Negroes in Houston (PDF p.8).
Related pages
Third World Round Up: The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge — SNCC Newsletter Vol. I, No. 4 (June-July 1967), TSU Five, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, William Lawson, Herman Short