Working Behind the Scenes for Civil Rights: William J. Durham (Jan 21, 2024)
by Scott Sosebee
One of the most frustrating things about teaching, researching, and writing history is that one often is limited in who to present to the public, which quite often means that only a few people “get written up” in the history books while the vast majority of those who actually made change happen go unnoticed. The civil rights movement may be the era in which such oversight occurs more than any other time. Thousands of unrecognized or little-noted people marched, protested, boycotted, and even silently supported the actions to finally begin to bring equality before the law and society to our nation. One such person was William J. Durham of Dallas.
Like so many of his generation, Durham grew up on a farm. Born in Sulphur Springs in 1896, Durham’s younger years were spent working on his parent’s small plot, an existence that was truly hand-to-mouth. The young Durham did demonstrate a keen capacity for learning at an early age; his teachers often noted that the bright young man was often years ahead of his classmates in his abilities, and he exhibited a very quick and able mind. When he finished his primary and secondary studies, Texas’ segregated higher education system meant that he had to leave the state to attend college. He had just settled in and completed one year at Emporia State College in Kansas when the U.S. entered World War I. Durham left school and volunteered to serve in the army. He saw combat in France during the harrowing fighting in 1918.
When he got back home, he decided that further schooling would just delay his chosen profession, which would be the law. In those days, one could enter legal practice by “reading” the law under a licensed attorney and passing the bar exam. Durham studied under a white attorney in Sherman, passed the bar exam in 1926, and immediately set up a practice. He became counsel for an insurance firm, which paid the bills, but his real passion was civil rights cases. His ardor for such cases grew when a white mob rioted in Sherman in 1930. It began, like so many riots of that time did, over an alleged rape. A young black farm laborer, a man who exhibited many characteristics of someone with mental illness, stood accused of raping the wife of a man for who he had worked. He had also fired upon law enforcement officers when they came to question him. While the incident involved a lone man, racial tension, exacerbated by the trials of the Great Depression, led to a riot, and a white mob burned the black business section of the city. One of the torched buildings included William J. Durham’s law office.
After the riot, Durham began to devote even more time to civil rights cases, and his reputation grew so that he was soon recognized as the leading African American attorney in the state. He became particularly skilled at filing and arguing pre-trial motions, as well as formulating the strategy of a case, skills that often became the difference between winning and losing in the courtroom. He began to work extensively with the NAACP, bringing suits that attacked school segregation, voting rights, and equal pay.
During World War II, Durham relocated his practice to Dallas. The move only accelerated his work on civil rights. Most significantly, he became one of the lead attorneys for the NAACP on the Heman Sweatt case, the ultimate result of which was the ending of segregation in state-supported business and professional schools. The case also served to crystalize and clarify the argument NAACP lawyers, including Durham and Thurgood Marshall, would use to argue the ground-breaking Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka case before the United States Supreme Court.
Throughout the rest of the 1950s and the 1960s, Durham continued pressing for social equality, both through the courts and in society. Along with such civil rights giant Juanita Craft, he became one of the most forceful advocates of African American voting rights, as well as employment equality. He pursued such goals until his death in December 1970, at 74, a force for change and good during his time, but today one of those we tend to overlook. Here’s hoping that is no longer the case.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.