Willie Durham House, an extraordinary person, devoted public servant, and gifted administrator, played a pivotal role in the establishment of two of Waco’s most essential institutions — free public schools and the Waco-McLennan County Library.

Born in 1856 in Austin County, Willie Durham was the only child of Dr. and Mrs. M.S. Durham. When the Durham family moved to Brenham, she attended schools there until her marriage at age 16 to J.A. House. The couple had one child, a daughter, Lolabel.

Whether J.A. died or deserted the family is unknown, but with a young, precocious daughter to support, Willie entered one of the few fields open to women in those days: teaching. Possessed with a great thirst for knowledge, House, in 1878, somehow cobbled together the resources to enroll in the University of Nashville’s Peabody Normal School which had been established to empower teachers.

Upon graduation, the Texas State Board of Education hired House to administer Summer Normal Services (meaning all education and administrative services that go on during the summer months) in Mineola, Victoria, Marshall, and Lampasas. She returned briefly to the classroom in Tyler, then the fledgling Waco public school district hired her in 1884 as the principal of the city’s third ward school. She was just 28 years old. Within a few years, House became vice president and secretary of the Texas State Teacher’s Association, founded in 1880 to further the cause of education in Texas.

From this point forward, House’s name appears hundreds of times in the Waco newspapers, including The Day, The News-Tribune and others — she’s everywhere, speaking, encouraging, raising money for schools, spearheading the campaign for women to vote and working with businessman Isaac A. Goldstein to bring a Carnegie Library to Waco.

When A.A. McGregor was elected superintendent by the School Committee of the Waco City Council, he vigorously crusaded for public schools — Black and white — continually going to the press and city council meetings to push for better salaries, facilities, and working conditions for teachers and administrators. The city council eventually fired McGregor in 1888. Her fellow teachers and administrators strongly supported House for the position. The Council, however, wanted another male superintendent.

On June 3, 1888, Waco newspaper The Day reports that the Council was reluctant to support House’s appointment because she was a woman. We don’t know what changed the Council’s mind, but on July 13, a follow-up article appears, heralding her election to the position and commending her on her qualifications for the role.

House immediately set to work in the Waco schools — improving record-keeping, tackling maintenance issues, expanding the curriculum, and encouraging and equipping students, staff, and faculty alike in a school district that was one of the largest in Texas. She was also the lowest paid superintendent of schools in Texas, making about $2,000 a year, while many other superintendents made closer to $2500.

It was too good to last. When the City Council deeded authority over public schools to the newly formed Waco School Commissioners in 1893, House was summarily replaced and demoted to campus principal. Leading the charge against House was Waco businessman Edward Rotan, who headed up an opposition “ticket.” House returned again to the classroom.

Within a year, the all-male school board declared that only men could be principals in Waco schools. The following year, it decreed that all female teachers must be single and that, should they marry, it would be a declaration of resignation from Waco schools.

In 1904, when the beautiful Carnegie Library opened on Twelfth Street and Austin Avenue, House accepted a position as Waco’s first full-time librarian.

Once again, House encountered opposition, this time from the Waco City Council. Despite the city’s pledges of support with the original grant application, the Council provided minimal support to the library, publicly dismissing it as a playground for children and a storehouse of cheap novels. Consequently, House was again forced to spend much of her time fundraising.

Eventually, she had had enough.

In 1907, House accepted a position with the filing and stenographic division of the Workman’s Compensation Commission in Brooklyn and rapidly rose through the ranks to the position of “chief” of the division. A Waco Times-Herald article from June 7, 1914, reported that her promotion was to “the most important position held by a woman in business circles of New York state.”

When House died in July 1926 at the age of 69, her obituary appeared in both The Brooklyn Eagle and New York Times, as well as different Waco newspapers. Her daughter Lolabel House Hall, Ph.D., an educator respected in both the Waco and New York school systems, brought her mother’s remains to Waco for burial in Oakwood Cemetery and read from a framed letter of tribute from the very commissioners that once fired her, calling her a “remarkable woman.”

When Lolabel herself died in May 1946 after a lifetime of advocating on behalf of education and women’s rights, The Waco Tribune-Herald cited both women in an accompanying editorial:

With her mother, the late Mrs. Willie Durham House, a strong personality well-remembered by old-timers, Mrs. House was one of the early workers for women’s suffrage. It is due to the activity of those two women and many other like them that women are able to vote in this country. We accept the fact of women’s votes without question now. It is hard to imagine the campaign that had to be waged by women like Dr. [Lolabel] Hall and Mrs. House to make that fact come to pass.

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A Chicano activist and founder of Tiempo newspaper, Ernesto Fraga worked tirelessly to advocate for the interests of Hispanic communities in Waco and Austin. Fraga’s family had a long history in Waco: his grandparents, like so many others, had moved there in 1910 fleeing the Mexican Revolution, joining a growing Hispanic community in Waco. Fraga made it his life’s mission to protect this community by fighting discrimination, advocating for their representation in politics and media, and celebrating their rich heritage. 

Born in 1950 in Chicago, Fraga spent the early years of his life moving all over the country because his stepfather was in the Army. He moved to Waco when he was twelve years old, where his extended family still lived, and grew up on Spring St just north of the Brazos. Many of his family members, along with others in the Waco Hispanic community, worked in the cotton fields. In school, Fraga encountered racism and sometimes got into fights; from a young age he refused to let racism go unchallenged. At age seventeen he left home due to familial strife and moved in with two roommates, one of whom was Manuel Sustaita, a Vietnam veteran and activist in Waco, and at this point his political involvement began. That same year, he helped create a junior chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Texas-born civil rights organization, bringing together around eighty high school and McLennan Community College students in Waco. Within a year, he moved up the ranks to be elected as a state director. He then helped to organize a chapter of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in Waco, a group originally founded in San Antonio based on more aggressive political demonstrations, including protests and school walkouts. MAYO in turn coordinated the Alliance of Mexican American Organizations in Waco, a coalition of churches, businesses, and clubs that advocated for equitable hiring practices. All of this took place before Fraga graduated from high school in 1968. 

In 1970 Fraga moved to Austin to work for the Office of Economic Opportunity, a War on Poverty initiative, and he quickly became involved in the Austin Chicano Movement. He helped found a chapter of the Brown Berets in Austin, a paramilitary organization that pushed for civil rights for Hispanic communities and a major player in the nation-wide Chicano Movement. The Brown Berets participated in strikes, protested police brutality, and advocated for housing, education, and immigration reforms. While in Austin, Fraga also worked with the Echo newspaper and some other barrio newspapers, introducing him to the ability of media to empower a community. He believed that the mainstream press both in Waco and Austin did not represent the issues and concerns of Hispanic residents, making barrio newspapers crucial tools for informing and organizing Hispanic communities. Fraga moved back to Waco in 1974 after being fired by the city of Austin for his involvement in protesting a city official. He organized another chapter of the Brown Berets in Waco but moved back to Austin in 1977 to continue his activism. 

Two of the most famous incidents the Brown Berets organized in East Austin took place at this time. The first was a confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan in 1977. The KKK claimed they were going to patrol the border in South Texas to intimidate illegal immigrants. After the Brown Berets announced their intent to confront the KKK at a press conference and organized caravans to travel to South Texas, a KKK leader called off the patrol to avoid the encounter. Fraga recalled this success with pride. The second was a protest in 1978 against the annual Aqua Fest, a boat racing contest that took place in a Hispanic neighborhood. The residents of this neighborhood had repeatedly petitioned to have the contest moved to another location, to no avail. The races caused noise, traffic, and significant pollution, as viewers left their trash in the neighborhood and parked on lawns, devaluing the properties in the area. The peaceful protest turned violent when police began to roughly handle and then beat protesters. Ernesto Fraga was one of the nineteen protesters arrested, although all of the charges against them were dropped when the court found that they had been within their rights to protest. Fraga’s activism in Austin was varied, but it forever shaped his political consciousness. 

Fraga’s most well-known work in Waco began with the founding of the Tiempo newspaper in 1982. He believed it was important to have a media outlet that represented Latino concerns. Tiempo was distributed free of charge; Fraga and his wife Linda made their living from ads placed in the newspaper. Tiempo covered all kinds of topics, both political and personal, and it was bilingual. Articles about immigration issues could be found next to announcements of community socials. Fraga continued his political activism, organizing marches and protests, especially against immigration-related policies which he and others felt were degrading to Latinos. The day after one such march in July 2018, Fraga suffered a heart attack which forced the closing of Tiempo. Another newspaper has not yet stepped into the same role, leaving a “void” in the Waco Hispanic community. He inspired not only Latinos, but other minority groups to organize and fight discrimination. Fraga never remained silent on an issue that impacted Latino communities, but raised awareness and advocated for change. 

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Manuel "Manny" Sustaita was a Vietnam veteran, civil activist, and the founder of Waco Citizens for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Though an insurance salesman by trade, he spent most of his life advocating for veterans and their families, Hispanic communities, and other underserved groups in Waco.

Sustaita was born in 1944 in Waco. As a boy he sold newspapers, shined shoes, and did other odd jobs to help support his family. In his free time, he played sports with the Waco Boy’s Club and especially enjoyed playing basketball. Though his parents did not speak English, they required their children to learn it, resulting in Sustaita and his siblings speaking what he called “neighborhood Spanish,” a mix of Spanish and English. Sustaita struggled with academics, and he dropped out of high school when he was fifteen.

Sustaita joined the National Guard at age sixteen, partially because of a desire to travel, and partially because of his love for movies like To Hell and Back and The D.I. Popular in the fifties and sixties, these movies depicted life in the military in a thrilling and heroic light, and Sustaita was moved by the example of the heroes in these films. For someone under the age of eighteen to join the military at that time, they had to have written parental consent. His father could not write, so Sustaita forged his signature. In 1963, Sustaita enlisted in the Marines. After training in San Diego, he went to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and then to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. After this first deployment, he served in Costa Rica and the Mediterranean before volunteering to join reconnaissance in Okinawa. With reconnaissance, he toured in the Philippines, Thailand, and finally went to Vietnam in 1965. Sustaita’s battalion operated out of an American air force base in Da Nang. Their primary objective was to scout for the division, and they chiefly had contact with Viet Cong guerilla units. Sustaita did one tour of duty in Vietnam before returning to the United States and serving at Camp Pendleton in California. He finally left the Marines in 1966.

When he returned to Waco, Sustaita became a life insurance salesman, drawing on his sales experience from his childhood jobs and love for interacting with people. After working for MetLife Insurance for a while, he started his own insurance company, called Multi Services Associates. He married Patricia Rivera Sustaita, and they had two daughters before getting divorced in 1981.

Sustaita made a name for himself in Waco as a civil activist. He was a founding member of the Cen-Tex Mexican American Chamber of Commerce, and he later served as its president. He served on the board of the Waco Boys’ Club and was involved with the Red Cross, but perhaps his most memorable contribution to the Waco community was his work on the Waco Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Sustaita was deeply moved the first time he visited the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Knowing that there were many people in Waco who had lost brothers and sons in Vietnam, as well as a significant number of other veterans, he resolved to build a memorial for the people of Waco. He, along with the Waco Citizens for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial, began the planning process in 1987, but due to a series of delays, the memorial was not dedicated until 2004.

After a lifetime spent serving his country and community, Manuel Sustaita died peacefully on May 20, 2020. He left behind a legacy of activism, having worked tirelessly to aid veterans, the Hispanic community, and all who needed help in the Waco area.

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Lewis “Les” Ritcherson, born in Hillsboro, Texas in 1926, was the first African American to coach at the University of Wisconsin and the second African American football coach in the Big Ten. Ritcherson began his football career at A.J. Moore High School in Waco. As a senior, he earned All-District Defensive End as Moore High took home the 1942 district title. The team’s talent caught the eye of HBCUs around Texas, and Wiley College in Marshall offered Ritcherson a football scholarship.

Ritcherson attended Wiley from 1943-1946, playing football and basketball all four years and running track for two years. Wiley had an exceptional football program and won the Southwest Athletic Conference three out of Ritcherson’s four years as a player. Wiley’s coaches, Fred and Harry Long, were renowned among Black football coaches. In 1945, the football team went 10-0 and won the Orange Blossom Classic, the national championship game for HBCU football teams, against Florida A&M. Ritcherson’s performance that season and particularly in that game led to renowned sportswriter Fay Young naming him an end on his Black All-American team, an honor that came with a five-dollar prize.

After a short stint as football and debate coach in Midland, Texas, A.J. Moore High School hired Ritcherson in 1950 as head football coach. Moore High under Ritcherson went on to be state champion in 1952 and 1965 and state co-champion in 1951 and 1960. Ritcherson, at the urging of assistant coaches and players, started his son, Lewis Ritcherson Jr., at quarterback his last three years at Moore High. Coaching at Moore High was not without its struggles. The Black teams in the area played midweek games because the white schools played on weekends. This meant that the team often had to travel as far as Dallas or even Corpus Christi on school nights, and often the team bus got in so late that players and coaches would spend the rest of the night in the school gym.

In 1966, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) sent assistant coach Deral Teteak to Texas to scout players. Teteak was impressed by Ritcherson’s coaching during his stop at Moore High, and soon after, Wisconsin Head Coach Milt Bruhn offered Ritcherson the position of receiver’s coach at the university. Although initially unsure about leaving Moore High, Ritcherson decided to take the job. He negotiated an unusual five-year contract with the university after hearing that administration might fire Bruhn the next year. Ritcherson was the first African American coach in any sport at the University of Wisconsin. At this time, Iowa’s Frank Gilliam was the only other Black football coach in the Big Ten.

As expected, the university replaced Bruhn after the 1966 season and hired John Coatta, a former Badger quarterback, to replace him. Coatta hired many of his former teammates as assistants. They greatly influenced his coaching decisions and upended the chain of command. These coaches were also extremely hard on their players, a tactic which Ritcherson felt to be unnecessary, especially when it was not improving the quality of the team.

In the sixties, considerable tension existed between Black and white students on campus, and this tension was prevalent between players and coaches on the football team. Many of the coaches treated the Black players poorly and would not pay attention to the players’ grievances. This led some of the Black players to boycott the team banquet. They also threatened to boycott a game against Minnesota, but Ritcherson felt that such an action could endanger their scholarships, and he talked them out of it. Despite the coldness of the coaching staff, the UW-Madison Athletic Board strove to help the Black players. The board even hired a psychiatrist to examine the players and coaches and suggest new ways to improve both their relationships and the team environment as a whole.

The prejudice of the other coaches affected Ritcherson as much as it affected the players. They often held meetings without him or ignored his opinion when making decisions. Ritcherson especially struggled with the lack of his peers on the staff. To remedy this, he organized the first meeting of Black coaches at predominantly white institutions at the 1970 American Football Coaches Association convention.

After he retired from coaching in 1970, Ritcherson took a job as an affirmative action officer first at UW-Extension, then back at UW-Madison. As an affirmative action officer, Ritcherson’s job was to encourage university departments to hire minorities. It was often difficult to convince departments to hire minorities because of what Ritcherson called the “old buddy system.” This meant that the departments only wanted to hire people they already knew. Despite this and other obstacles, Ritcherson made considerable progress in the university. One of his biggest successes was the program he set up with the nursing school to recruit from North Carolina A&T and Tuskegee Institute. Ritcherson was also instrumental in the creation of the Afro-American Studies Program and encouraged its administrators to hire a diverse staff.

Ritcherson retired from administration in 1990. He has since been inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Champions and the Waco Independent School District Athletics Hall of Fame. When he passed away in 2019, Lewis Ritcherson had created a lasting impact both on the university and on his players. While he as an individual might not have much national renown, it was his effort and the efforts of all the Black coaches, players, and administrators that were willing to suffer injustice to set a precedent that broke the color line in college sports.

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Seeking to provide refuge to children and families in need, the Evangelia Settlement Home opened in 1908. Established by religious reformers Ethel Dickson and Nell Symes, the home aimed to care for the least of these throughout Waco’s community for nearly a century.

Evangelia Settlement was part of a broader settlement house movement that began in Great Britain and moved to the United States. In the late nineteenth century, white, middle- and upper-class women, often motivated by their Christian faith, began to establish homes for those in low-income areas with few resources. Settlement houses popped up across the country. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established one of the most well-known settlement houses, Hull House, in Chicago, Illinois. As the movement spread across the country in the early twentieth century, an estimated eighteen settlements opened throughout Texas, including in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Waco.

Inspired by a traveling evangelist who spoke in Waco, Dickson and Symes opened a small nursery on Webster Street. Initially a modest room located on Thirteenth Street, Waco’s Evangelia Settlement began as a humble effort to care for children whose mothers worked as sewing machine operators at Slayden-Kirskey Woolen Mills. Seeking to expand Evangelia’s reach as a charitable, educational, and religious institution, the founders partnered with Protestant churches in the area to garner community support and to secure funding.

By 1910, with financial aid from local churches, volunteers for Evangelia Settlement began working from a rental house. The next year, additional donations from Waco citizens enabled the opening of Evangelia’s own home, complete with a playground and five full-time staff. The State of Texas issued a charter for Evangelia Settlement Home in June 1912. Though backed by the state government, Evangelia’s board members and volunteers continued to depend on community support.

Donations and funding from those across Waco provided necessary aid for the growing settlement house. An upper floor and additional rooms were added to Evangelia in the late 1910s, and the Karem Shrine constructed a building for boys and a space for kindergarten classes in 1927. The Waco Community Chest, organized in 1924, regularly allocated money to Evangelia, and other generous donors also helped improve the building. For instance, donations from the Cooper Foundation, United Way, and the Andrew J. Dossett family facilitated the construction of a cottage for infants. Later in 1953, Evangelia operated with financial support from the United Fund of Waco and continued to improve the building on site. With each expansion, Evangelia Settlement grew in capacity and provided additional children with housing, meals, and educational and religious instruction.

In partnership with the Salvation Army and the YMCA, Evangelia joined the “Yes-For-Youth” Building Fund Campaign in 1956. The fund enabled the construction of a new building, which opened in June 1958. From 510 South Twelfth Street, Evangelia volunteers and workers continued their efforts to serve children and families throughout the community. By the late 1950s, Evangelia was authorized to care for sixty-two children and offered twenty-four-hour day care. To subsidize costs, parents paid on an individual basis, and the price of care depended on each family’s financial situation. Some children stayed for free, while others paid around five dollars a week per child. For those who placed their children in twenty-four-hour care, Evangelia sought to provide parental education so that children could eventually return home. Still, depending on the family’s circumstances, others were placed in foster homes and at times, orphanages.

Hoping to accept the growing number of interested families, Evangelia continued to expand throughout the mid-twentieth century. Despite Evangelia’s broad efforts, though, the institution remained segregated from its founding until the mid-1960s and only offered resources to white parents and children. Other organizations, including the Joyce Stamps Nursery and the Latin American Neighborhood Center provided care for Black and Latino children in the area.

By the 1970s, Evangelia offered services to over one hundred children and continued to partner with community organizations to ensure children received necessary care. Evangelia held kindergarten classes for children not yet enrolled in school, and for those who attended Waco Public Schools, Evangelia provided after-school care to assist working parents. The settlement house worked with social workers, public school teachers, nurses, doctors, and psychologists. Providing resources to children and families in need remained central to Evangelia’s efforts.

Evangelia Settlement continued to operate in Waco until the state denied their licensure in 2007. After advocacy from Buck Cole, whose family found refuge at Evangelia Settlement in the mid-twentieth century, the Texas Historical Commission placed a marker at the site in 2022. While the settlement house no longer exists in its original form, the site now accommodates EOAC Head Start, an organization that provides educational opportunities and childcare to families across McLennan and Fall Counties. Other organizations in Waco also heed the message of communal care that Evangelia promoted. The Good Neighbor House, founded in 2016, draws on the settlement house movement as its volunteers and workers aim to provide resources and enrichment for Waco’s youth. Through these organizations, Evangelia Settlement’s effort to support under resourced children and families endures.

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St. James United Methodist Church, originally a Methodist Episcopal church, has existed almost as long as the city of Waco itself. Founded in 1874 by Anderson Brack, a formerly enslaved man, the congregation started with roughly fifty-three members. On the banks of the Brazos River, they worshipped, communed together, and worked to establish a permanent brick-and-mortar building that would serve as a central location for their Christian community. Along with the church, St. James also established a school that provided education to Black children in the Waco area. As they sought to secure a steady meeting place, though, they faced difficulty and discrimination.

Built in 1889, their original building at Second and Ross Streets was the first brick church for African Americans in Waco. St. James, established after Mt. Zion, was the second African American church in the city. After the city of Waco condemned their new building, they built a larger tabernacle in 1909 in the same location. They worshipped there until 1922. That year, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad Company purchased the property, citing eminent domain, and the St. James congregation built once more. This time, on Second and Clay Avenue.

Under the leadership of Pastor C. S. Williams, the congregation broke ground on the church in March 1924. Utilizing bricks from their previous tabernacles inside the new structure, St. James memorialized and honored the history of their church. Architect Carleton Adams, who garnered statewide and national attention for his home and building designs in San Antonio, developed plans for the Tudor Gothic-style structure. While members were eager to meet in the new location, the congregation experienced financial strain in the years to come after accumulating $85,000 in debt to construct the building, which took thirty-two years to repay.

At Second and Clay, St. James committed themselves to racial justice initiatives in the community as well as interracial partnerships. During the Great Depression, they offered a daily soup kitchen to Wacoans in need. They also held meetings for the “Waco Forward” movement of the 1920s that launched as a local effort to assist those struggling amid economic stagnation. Waco Forward hoped to improve Waco’s economy and usher in an era of progress and stability. St. James also hosted other interracial events, including concerts and women’s groups, as well as a “Race Relations Sunday” service in February 1945. There, they called for attendees to “build a nation and a world where there shall be no discrimination on the basis of color, creed, or national origin.”

After its formation in 1936, the McLennan County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) met multiple times at St. James. At an “NAACP Sunday” event in 1951, which occurred during the civil rights movement, the McLennan County chapter formed a plan that addressed local and national needs. They also hosted another notable meeting in 1955, where the organization expressed their support of the “Free by ‘63” campaign. This campaign effort raised funds for numerous legal cases taking place during the movement. Those a part of the NAACP and the church sought to address and end discrimination in Texas and across the country.

Important to Waco and St. James, multiple prominent members worked within and outside of the church. Robert L. Smith, one of the first Black Americans elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1894, attended St. James. Prior to his arrival in Waco, Smith established the Farmers’ Improvement Society, which aided farmers who had fallen into extensive debt. Inescapable debt particularly impacted previously enslaved people who turned to sharecropping and tenant farming after emancipation. As Smith worked for these communities in Waco, he also served as a steward and legal adviser for the church. J. J. Flewellen and Professor J. S. Henry, principals at Carver High and Kirk Elementary, also attended St. James. Both schools offered educational opportunities to Black students in Waco. Lonnie Morris Belle Hodges, the church’s historian, strove to bring attention to the history of St. James. As the only living descendent of St. James’s charter members with continuing membership, Hodges worked to attain recognition for the history of the congregation and building. In 1986, the building received a Recorded Texas Historical Marker due to her efforts.

The congregation continued to grow over the years, exceeding over six hundred members during their strongest periods. Yet, by 2015, St. James had dwindled once more to fewer than sixty congregants. Deciding to focus more on fellowship and community rather than upkeep of an aging structure, they placed the historic building on the market. The church received a City of Waco Historic Landmark in 2017 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 12, 2019. St. James remains the only religious structure on the National Register of Historic Places in Waco. The building, purchased by local Wacoans Amy and Lane Murphy, remains a prominent historical landmark for the city. As they transition the church into a restaurant and event space, they plan to preserve the history of the congregation and the building. Members of St. James now meet in another location in Waco, joining with Wesley United Methodist Church each Sunday. There, they continue to commune and worship together. Through the remaining congregation and renovation efforts at Second and Clay, the long history of St. James United Methodist Church persists in Waco.

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Tragedy marked the experiences of many during the Vietnam War. On the home front, Americans increasingly questioned the country’s role in the conflict and lamented the loss they watched unfold throughout the first widely televised war. Americans especially worried over the conditions of US prisoners of war (POWs) held captive in North Vietnam—POWs that had been kept in physically and psychologically harmful conditions for extended periods of time. The North Vietnamese captured and imprisoned these Americans, often pilots in the US Navy or Air Force, for nearly ten years. Prisons in Vietnam received nicknames such as “Alcatraz,” for their severe environments, and “Hanoi Hilton,” an ironic name given to a primary torture site. Some POWs never returned home from their internment and remain unaccounted for.

In the late 1960s, the US Department of State sought to improve the treatment of American POWs and stepped up efforts to bring them home. Local communities pursued ways to assist in these efforts. Texas businessman Ross Perot became especially interested in sending humanitarian supplies to POWs, and he believed that ordinary citizens could make more of a difference than the federal government. Citizens of Waco, along with other towns and cities across the country, heeded Perot’s call.

Beginning in 1970, under the auspices of the Prisoner of War project, thousands of citizens in Waco advocated for American POWs through a letter-writing initiative titled the “Write Hanoi Campaign.” After Perot visited and spoke at Baylor University on March 10, 1971, Wacoans further invested in the project. The city, inspired by Perot’s message, proclaimed the day as “H. Ross Perot Day in Waco” and embraced his invitation by forming a local delegation that would negotiate directly with officials from North Vietnam later that year. Twelve men and women formed an advocacy group on behalf of American POWs, and local attorney C. Cullen Smith served as chairman. By mid-March 1971, they had collected 40,825 letters and petition signatures that demanded humane treatment of POWs in Vietnam, and the delegation prepared to present them at the Paris Peace Talks in April.

Supported by the US State Department, the Waco delegation visited Paris for negotiations with officials in North Vietnam in April 1971. Avoiding approval or disapproval of the war, the effort remained focused on the POWs. Once in Paris, a portion of the group met with officials to persuade them to better the prison camp conditions and improve the treatment of American POWs. Though an immediate change did not occur, in 1973, Operation Homecoming resulted in the return of 591 American POWs held captive in North Vietnam. Upon their return, some shared reports of prison conditions, and Waco’s Mayor Karl May contended that the Waco delegation had “some reason to believe our efforts were not in vain, since prisoners who have returned tell of a change for the better after that time.”

When the group left Paris on April 16, 1971, they wanted to commemorate the inspiration for their efforts. The delegation, mournful of the imprisonment of American POWs and grateful for the freedoms they experienced in the US, discussed how to memorialize the moment. Inspired by the architecture of Paris, they decided to construct a fountain. They planned to inscribe the word “freedom” in seventy different languages at the base of the structure. As they began the process of raising money and planning for the duly named “Freedom Fountain,” they refused large donations and instead requested smaller donations from those across the community. This way, as in the Write Hanoi Campaign, all could contribute. Groups like the Waco Jaycees pledged to raise $10,000, and sixth graders from North Waco Elementary School donated $14 in coins.

More than 750 people attended the dedication of the fountain in May 1973. There, two freed POWs, Colonel George Hall, who had recently settled with his wife and family in her hometown of Waco, and Captain Ronald Bliss, who later attended Baylor Law School before moving to Houston, joined the ceremonies. Wacoans also buried a time capsule underneath the fountain, which contained names and addresses of those who donated their funds along with additional information about the fountain and its origins. At the time of the dedication, the community had raised over $50,000 in support. Still in its original location, the Freedom Fountain sits at the south end of the Waco Convention Center with the word “freedom” inscribed in fifty-four different languages. There, Waco residents can remember the community’s efforts to support American POWs during the Vietnam War and reflect on the meanings of national and global freedom.

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Born the daughter of educators in segregated Mexia, Texas, in 1941, Mae Allison Johnson developed an early understanding of the significance of education and equality. Her parents, Allison Johnson and Eula King, met while working at a small country school called Salem in Teague, Texas. Together, they instilled the value of learning. At sixteen, Mae Johnson graduated Booker T. Washington High School as valedictorian of her class and attended college at Texas Southern University in Houston. There, fascinated by people and interested in working with others, she first thought she wanted to study sociology, but her desire to work closely with people drove her into the field of social work.

During her collegiate years at Texas Southern, she participated in debate and public speaking, traveling across Texas and around the country for competitions. These travel experiences accentuated the prevalence of segregation and discrimination. At a debate competition at Baylor University, Johnson recalled that they stayed in segregated, lower-scale housing near Paul Quinn College and remembered white Wacoans hurling insults and spitting at the Texas Southern students. These racist encounters reinforced her interest in pursuing justice, especially at the local level.

After briefly working at Riverside National Bank, the first African American-owned bank in Houston, she decided to take a social work position at John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, now part of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Her work there motivated her to return to school, and she graduated from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio with a master’s degree in social work in 1965. Afterward, she relocated to Waco to be near her ailing mother in Teague, and as her mother’s health improved, Johnson moved to work in the civil rights movement.

Previously, while at Texas Southern, she helped connect those arrested in sit-ins to defense attorneys and managed funds for movement efforts. Then, in 1969, she joined the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and moved to Mississippi until 1971. Under the auspices of the NCNW, she sought to provide public housing for Mississippians in need, working alongside women like Fannie Lou Hamer in Indianola. Her work at the grassroots further cultivated her desire to serve local communities and meet their needs in tangible ways.

Johnson later returned to Waco, worked for the local Methodist Home, and decided to pursue her doctorate. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1985. As her professional life progressed, she also married Howard Andrew Jackson, with whom she had a stepdaughter, foster son, adopted daughter, and biological daughter. Motivated by her work in the civil rights movement and with the NCNW, Dr. Mae Jackson grew active in the local Democratic Party. She campaigned for Texas Democrats, including Governor Ann Richards, who later appointed Jackson to the Texas State Board of Pardons and Paroles. There, she aimed to improve racist parole policies in Texas prisons by addressing prison overcrowding, harmful living conditions, and a lack in resources needed to care for incarcerated people.

Locally, she served on the Waco City Council, District I, from 2000 to 2004 before she won the mayoral election in May 2004. Dr. Mae Jackson was the first African American woman to become mayor of Waco. During her time in office, she sought to promote education, economic development, and tourism. She sought to upgrade Waco’s Central Library, expand job opportunities in the city, rejuvenate the downtown area, and renovate the convention center. Further, she hoped to better Waco’s water quality and create improved, equitable housing. Sadly, she passed away during her first term on February 11, 2005, leaving a community in mourning. While her political career was cut short, her legacy lives on. Elected to the Waco City Council in 2018, her daughter, Andrea Jackson Barefield, represents District I. Local government leaders regularly meet in the Dr. Mae Jackson Development Center on Franklin Avenue, named in memoriam, and participate in organizations like the Greater Waco Community Education Alliance, formed from Jackson’s vision for education improvement in McLennan County. Dr. Mae Jackson’s influence on the city persists, along with her visions for equality, improved education, and justice for those in Waco, in Texas, and across the country.

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In 1969, in response to health-care disparities in Waco and McLennan County, local leaders and physicians established the Family Practice Center, now called Waco Family Medicine. Prior to these efforts, many Wacoans lacked access to adequate medical services. In fact, the patient-doctor ratio was 1,200 to 1. Seeing a profound community need, a partnership between community leaders and the McLennan County Medical Society sought to bridge this divide between patients’ needs, particularly those in poverty, and health-care access. Further, they officially started the Waco-McLennan County Family Practice Residency Program in 1970, the first of its kind in Texas. Through this program and the establishment of the Family Practice Center, they hoped to attract new physicians to Waco and to provide medical care to those in need.

The Family Practice Residency Program accepted its first two residents, Bing Oei and Julia Esquivel, on July 1, 1970. Learning from local physicians, including the first hired faculty Dr. May Wang, they graduated in 1972. Over the years, the residency program continued to expand and emphasize medical education as one of their primary goals as they trained physicians locally. While some went to practice in other states and countries, many stayed in Texas. As of 2017, over 300 of the 400-plus graduates practiced in the state. Further, McLennan County’s active physician population increased as the program expanded. Within thirty years, the number of family doctors in the area increased from 130 to over 300. In addition to resident education, the Family Practice Center also opened the Faculty Development Center in 1978, where practicing family physicians could continue learning, staying up to date on evolving medical practices.

During the Family Practice Center’s initial community outreach efforts in the 1970s, they also opened their first clinic at 1700 Providence Drive. At this location, they began their mission to provide care for residents with lower incomes and those without private or government-supported health insurance. Further, beginning in 1971, the Family Practice Center worked to meet the needs of community members without access to transportation. Thus, their mobile clinic went into communities across Waco and McLennan County, offering medical options to those who could have otherwise gone without care. These efforts ended in 1976 as the Family Health Center began establishing additional health centers across the community. With easier access, mobile clinic use decreased, and patients were able to commute to the clinic nearest them.

The rise in physician, resident, and patient numbers required building expansion. In 1983, the Family Health Center relocated up the road to 1600 Providence Drive; a shift made possible through their fundraising efforts and subsequent, generous donations from the public. Previous CEO Dr. Roland Goertz and other leaders within the clinic also saw a need for federal funding to assist their community care goals. As of 1999, the clinic became a Federally Qualified Health Center, able to receive federal funding to sustain their expansive services and enable continued growth. Since then, additional clinic locations have been added, expanding sites available to the public.

CEO Dr. Jackson Griggs and local board members renamed the Family Health Center Waco Family Medicine in 2021, a name that reiterates the clinic’s dedication to providing primary care for the community. With a variety of locations across Waco and McLennan County, Waco Family Medicine’s physicians and staff work to ensure better medical access for patients in the area. They persist in their original mission to provide health care for underserved populations and to offer educational opportunities for physicians. Their outreach in the community continues, as they offer care for medical, dental, and behavioral health to those in need throughout McLennan County.

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Long before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, attorney Richard D. (R.D.) Evans waged the fight for civil rights from his Waco law office. As Waco’s first African American attorney, he became one of the most influential early twentieth century civil rights lawyers in Texas.

Born in Burleson County, circa 1873, Evans graduated from Prairie View Industrial College and worked as schoolteacher in Burleson County until 1909. Three years later, he graduated from Howard University’s law school and returned to Texas. Evans practiced law briefly in Brenham before settling in Waco in 1913. Slowly building a career serving the legal needs of Waco’s Black community, Evans soon established himself as the champion of Black Texans’ voting rights.

While he handled cases regarding jury selection and other civil rights, Evans rose to prominence constructing the legal challenge to the Texas white primary system. Disenfranchisement in primary elections and general opposition toward any African-American voting prompted Evans to take the case of Waco grocer E.L. Sublett in February 1919. In Sublett v. Duke, Sublett sued the Waco Democratic Executive Committee for its failure to allow African-Americans to vote in primaries. Judge George Clark ruled in favor of Sublett and Evans, a stunning decision that temporarily expanded voting rights. His success in defeating the white primary led Evans to head the Texas NAACP’s efforts to challenge the disenfranchisement at the federal level. Simultaneously, Texas moved to reinstate the white primary in 1922. Two years later, Evans brought a white primary for review by the Supreme Court. Love v. Nixon proved unsuccessful, but the language of the Justice Holmes’ majority opinion left open the possibility of a future challenge.

Evans' victories and defeats provided the precedents upon which the NAACP secured voting rights for African Americans beginning in the 1940s. In the wake of Love, the Texas NAACP, and eventually the national office, sought to make defeating the white primary one of its primary objectives. It was a struggle in which Evans remained deeply invested. The white primary persisted despite two successful Supreme Court cases—in 1927 and 1932—brought by El Paso doctor Lawrence Nixon. However, the Texas NAACP also expanded in size and scope during the 1930s due to the efforts of Evans, Juanita Craft, and A. Maceo Smith. After years of successfully litigating civil rights cases and active leadership, Evans became president of the Texas NAACP and in 1936 was elected to NAACP national board of directors. Connecting to the national NAACP brought its attorney Thurgood Marshall to Texas in late 1938 to help develop a federal legal strategy to combat the white primary. In 1944, it was Marshall’s Supreme Court case for Lonnie Smith in Smith v. Allwright that ended the over twenty year reign of the white primary in Texas.

Unfortunately, R.D. Evans did not live to see this victory. He conducted his litigation on behalf of civil rights during the 1920s and 30s under constant threat of violence to himself and his family. Still he persisted in that work. On June 26, 1938, a train in downtown Waco collided with a car driven by Evans, killing him. The circumstances surrounding Evans' death remain dubious, but likely unresolvable. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery. Evans’ life-long dedication to civil rights made him a seminal figure in securing equal voting rights for African-Americans in Texas. When President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act it served as the culmination of years of grassroots efforts by Evans and many others to ensure the voting rights of all Americans, regardless of color.

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When Ramiro “Ramsey” Muñiz ran for governor of Texas in 1972, he became the first candidate of Hispanic descent to run for the state’s gubernatorial seat. Despite Muñiz’s controversial legacy, his career was, for many, as inspiring as it was polarizing.

Ramsey Muñiz was born in Corpus Christi in 1942 to Rudy G. Muñiz and Hilda [née] Longoria. One of five children, the young Ramsey worked to help make ends meet for his large family, sometimes picking cotton from daybreak until evening. The future candidate was exposed to Mexican-American politics from an early age and often volunteered his time to help with the campaigns of Chicano politicians as a teenager. As a student, Muñiz excelled both in the classroom and on the football field at Corpus Christi High School, and eventually received a scholarship to attend Baylor University. He graduated in 1967 with a bachelor of science degree and went on to attend Baylor University Law School. Muñiz, who had played football for the Baylor Bears during his undergraduate years, worked as an assistant coach to support himself through law school and graduated in 1971 with a doctor of jurisprudence. The new attorney stayed local after graduation to work as an administrator for the Waco Model Cities Program, then headquartered at 1818 Columbus Avenue.

Muñiz’s college and law school years coincided with the heyday of the Chicano movement in American politics, as a growing number of Mexican Americans united to call for economic, social, and political equality. Many Chicano activists felt that neither of America’s major political parties were prepared to fight for the Mexican American cause. La Raza Unida Party (RUP) emerged in 1970 as the answer to Chicano calls for a third party that would represent the interests of Mexican Americans in Texas. Thanks to leaders such as Jose Angel Gutierrez and Mario Compean, the party’s initial success at the local level in Crystal City inspired some RUP members to establish a party presence at the state level in 1972.

After several well-known Democratic politicians turned down the RUP nomination for governor, Ramsey Muñiz emerged as the party’s most viable gubernatorial contender. Muñiz had joined the party in 1968 while still a law student. The aspiring governor selected as his running mate journalist Alma Canales who, at twenty-four years of age, did not meet the minimum age requirement for lieutenant governor. Muñiz, however, felt that as a young, college-educated activist, Canales represented the RUP’s average supporter and would help to win the vote of the party’s female members. The duo’s platform centered around bilingual education, women’s and workers’ rights, and the establishment of Mexican American political power at the local level.

The Muñiz/Canales ticket brought in 6.28 percent of the vote in the November election, most of which came from smaller Hispanic communities in South Texas. While Democratic candidate Dolph Briscoe emerged victorious over Republican Henry Grover with 48.79 percent of votes cast, the RUP was so successful in siphoning off Democratic votes that Briscoe became the first candidate to win a Texas gubernatorial election without a majority. The 1972 loss deterred neither the RUP nor Muñiz from seeking the governor’s seat for a second time. Muñiz ran again in 1974, along with several other RUP candidates seeking state and local offices. This time, the RUP attempted to recast itself not simply as a Chicano party, but one that represented the everyman. The 1974 platform proposed improvements in medical care, transportation, education, environmentalism, and urban life. Muñiz, however, was unable to gain the support of many urban Hispanic voters, and received less than 200,000 votes when election day arrived. Dolph Briscoe nabbed an easy victory as a result.

In the years immediately following the election, the party suffered from internal divisions and lack of external support. This decline was exacerbated when Muñiz was arrested in 1976 for the attempted importation of over three tons of marijuana from Mexico. The former politician fled south to Mexico, but was apprehended five months later, and received felony drug charges for which he served five years in prison. During his time in prison, the RUP continued to suffer a string of political defeats and largely faded out of the public eye. Shortly after Muñiz’s release from prison, he was again arrested in 1982 for possession of cocaine, for which he served a two-year sentence. While he found work as a legal assistant following his second release, his career was short-lived. In 1994, Muñiz received a third charge for conspiracy to distribute drugs when, during a traffic stop, police located a large supply of narcotics in his car. Muñiz pleaded not guilty, insisting that neither the car nor the drugs were his and arguing that the traffic stop was without probable cause. Many others questioned the proceedings surrounding Muñiz’s conviction, claiming that evidence pointed to a set up. In the end, the former politician was sentenced to life in prison.

To many, Muñiz was a political prisoner, unjustly accused to silence an entire party. The “Free Ramsey” movement ceaselessly fought to liberate the politician in the decades following his imprisonment, and eventually secured his “compassionate release” on December 10, 2018. The persistence of this effort testifies to the lasting impact of Muñiz and the Raza Unida in Mexican American history and on the American political landscape.

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