African-American college students protest segregation at the University of Texas, Austin, April 27, 1949. UT Texas Student Publications, Inc., Photographs, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 02653.

African Americans in the "Colored Waiting Room" at a bus station. Photograph by R. C. Hickman. Dallas, ca. 1950s. R. C. Hickman Photograph Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 08024. Integration of blacks became an important political topic after Heman Sweatt was admitted to the law school at the University of Texas in 1950. The last bills supporting segregation passed the Texas legislature in 1957.

Class in physics at the Mary Allen Seminary, Crockett, Texas, ca. 1927. Courtesy The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 06166. Educational opportunities for black women developed toward the end of the nineteenth century. Mary Allen Seminary opened in 1886.

State and national leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (top row, left to right: John J. Jones, M. T. Blanton, Thurgood Marshall, ; bottom row, left to right: unidentified, Juanita Craft, Walter White, Peyton Medlock), Dallas, 1948. Juanita Jewel Shanks Craft Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 00674. Juanita Craft, a field worker with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, helped organize 182 branches in Texas.

Hal and Jane Mason. Photograph by Samuel B. Hill. Austin, ca. 1895-1900. Andrew W. George Papers, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 02926. Hal and Jane Mason began their lives as slaves. By the mid-1880s Hal Mason was assistant jailer at the Travis County Jail.

Thomas Delashwah (right), proprietor of Delashwah's Drug Store, Austin, ca. 1920s. Delashwah's Drug Store Photographs and Receipts Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; CN 02962. Although blacks enjoyed fewer economic opportunities than whites, some, like Delashwah, prospered as the state's economy expanded in the 1920s.