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Listening is Hard Work
Adept Word Management, Inc.
Mon, Feb 28, 12:04 PM (6 days ago)
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A client of ours, Dr. Thomas Cole, wrote this essay in honor of Black History Month in 2022. It was published in the Houston Chronicle on February 28, 2022.
Essay: Why Houston forgot Eldrewey Stearns. And why we should remember.
Tom Cole Feb. 27, 2022Updated: Feb. 27, 2022 6:57 a.m.08/26/1959 - TSU law student Eldrewey Stearns speaks at Houston City Council Wednesday. He claims two HPD officers beat him after his arrest on traffic charges early Sunday. Houston Chronicle
One morning in 1984, while I was sitting with 30 UTMB medical students in a conference reviewing psychiatric cases, a man was brought down from his room on the locked hospital ward.
He was Black, about 50, wearing painter’s pants, and sporting salt and pepper hair. His name was Eldrewey Stearns. At first glance, Stearns seemed to be a disheveled, vulnerable and angry man whose life had unraveled under the stresses of poverty, racism, alcoholism and mental illness. Yet he sometimes spoke in learned, even eloquent phrases.
A member of the psychiatry faculty interviewed Stearns. For teaching purposes, he checked off the criteria for his diagnoses of bipolar disorder (manic depression) and alcoholism. During the interview, Stearns declared that he was the “original Texas integration leader,” and announced that he was writing his life story. Students rolled their eyes and Stearns was taken back to his room.
“What should we make of the patient’s story, his desire to write an autobiography?” I asked, indignant at the omission of the patient’s point of view. The room was silent, as if I hadn’t asked the question. There was many a day, even years later, when I struggled with that same question to the point of despair. How do we listen and learn from our elders when it’s not easy, when mental illness and painful histories of racism pile on to difficulties we may have communicating? Finding the answer seems so urgent now as the racial reckoning set in motion in 2020, after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and many others, has turned into an entrenched conflict over “critical race theory” and how history is taught. I can tell you the answer isn’t easy.
The day after that conference 25 years ago, I took the elevator up to the locked ward and asked to speak to Stearns. An aide brought him out to the common room, where Stearns looked at me with a fierce gleam in his eye. I introduced myself and said that I appreciated the chance to learn about him in the medical-student case conference. He told me that he had been invited there to lecture.
“It sounds like you have an important story to tell,” I said. “I’d like to help you get it down on paper.”
“I doubt you’re up to it,” he said.
Yet Stearns began coming to my office every week to work together on his autobiography. It soon became apparent that he could not write due to severe tremors, and that he could not formulate an outline or focus of his own. I did some background research and found that from 1960-63, he indeed was the militant student leader of the sit-in movement and a major player in the dismantling of Jim Crow in Houston.
Stearns, an Army veteran, was then a law student at Texas Southern University — brilliant, charismatic, erratic, filled with boundless energy and ambition. On March 4, 1960, he gathered about 15 neatly dressed students around the university’s flagpole. They sang the Star-Spangled Banner, marched to nearby Weingarten’s supermarket, sat down at the lunch counter and demanded to be served. So began the first sit-in protest west of the Mississippi.
Although students were trained in nonviolence, they were haunted by fear of white violence. Three days after the first sit-in, a 27-year-old Black man named Felton Turner, was captured near the site of the sit-in by masked whites, beaten and taken to a remote wooded area. They took him to a tree, hung him upside down, and carved two rows of KKK in his abdomen. Police never found his tormentors.
Over the next few months, Stearns and fellow students felt isolated and uncertain. One night Stearns and Curtis Graves called Martin Luther King, Jr. and asked him to come to Houston. King hesitated for a moment. “I’ll tell God about it,” was all he said before he hung up the phone, according to Stearns.
Behind the scenes, however, white and Black businessmen, and some political leaders, were quietly laying the groundwork for maintaining the peace and managing the process of desegregation. After the Felton Turner incident, for example, Chief of Police Carl Shuptrine assured TSU President Sam Nabrit that student protesters would be protected against violence.
The Weingarten’s sit-in marked the beginning of three years of unrelenting student protests against segregation in lunch counters, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, sports venues, public transportation. White students joined the protests as well. By 1963, after three years of extensive strategizing, planning and protesting, these venues were mostly integrated. And Stearns — already seriously troubled and suffering from bipolar disease and alcoholism — began to unravel. He spent the next 20 years wandering around the country, in and out of jails and psychiatric hospitals, trying to resurrect his political career. But history had moved on.
Eldrewey Stearns was virtually unknown then, and the story of Houston’s desegregation had not been told. For over a year, we tried to piece together an autobiographical narrative of his life. I submitted a draft to the University of Texas Press, which rejected the autobiographical project but said they would publish it if I wrote it as a biography. This put Stearns in a difficult position, because it meant he would have to give me control over writing his life story. Stearns decided that he would have to trust me and gave me permission to write the book — on the conditions that he receive three-fourths of the advance and that I integrate his voice into the text. I agreed but told him that as a historian, I would have to do my own independent research and write about Houston’s desegregation and his role in it — and that I would have to write about his mental illness. He agreed, and so began a difficult journey that culminated in “No Color Is My Kind: Eldrewey Stearns and the Desegregation of Houston,” originally published in 1997 and recently released in a new edition in 2021.
For over a decade, I worked with Stearns, interviewing and trying to understand him, grasp his point of view, and piece the story of his life together. Ours was a confusing, tumultuous and emotionally difficult relationship, vastly complicated by issues of mental illness and race. At the outset, he refused to take his medication or return to see a psychiatrist. Yet he came to my office without fail every week. “I look forward to seeing you every Monday almost as the flowers want for rain,” he said in a hopeful moment. Yet after long experience working with him at moments of manic swings and psychotic breaks, I realized that I had to tell the story as I saw it, integrating his voice into the narrative, while using my own judgment and integrity as a historian, medical humanist, and writer.
My research into the civil rights movement in Houston was initially difficult as well. When I sought to interview former protesters and some members of the NAACP, I was told that this was not my story to tell, being white and from the Northeast. White businessmen, politicians and journalists were skeptical as well. But I gradually earned the trust of both Blacks and whites, who spoke freely with me.
But racial identity is complicated. Stearns and I were not simply “Black” and “white.” The title “No Color Is My Kind” is Stearns’ phrase and reflects the knowledge that he is descended from a multiracial ancestry — African slaves, Indigenous Americans, an Irish plantation owner and a German Jew. Nor did he see me as simply “white.” One afternoon, while driving to lunch with Greg Curtis, editor of Texas Monthly, I asked Stearns what he thought of a white man writing a book about a Black man. “You’re not white,” he answered. “You’re a Jew.”
What can my experience telling Stearns’s story teach us about the seemingly intractable problems we face today, not just in addressing injustices, but in our ability to even talk about them? Listening is hard work. It may take years. You may feel more wounded than healed. You may come away wiser, but the transcendent moment may elude you. Above all, you must listen with an open heart and be willing to push back against stereotypes of your racial identity as well as the identities of others.
Adept doesn't have a YouTube page in the usual sense of the word. But we do host a video about Mr. Stearns. We welcome your comments and reactions.
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Preview YouTube video Eldrewey Stearns - Fox New Interview 2012
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