MANSFIELD -- Floyd Moody still vividly recalls what he was told 60 years ago.
Along with two other students, Moody was trying to become part of history by being the first African-Americans to integrate Mansfield High School.
Now a pastor at Mount Horum Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth’s Stop Six neighborhood, Moody, 76, was sitting across a conference table from then-Mansfield Superintendent R.L. Huffman in August of 1956.
“I can remember the conversation was very short,” Moody said. “It didn’t take very long for this man sitting across at the end of that table with those thick eyebrows saying, ‘You will never enter this school.’ Those were the words.”
Mansfield became the first Texas school district ordered to integrate when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court ruled that it was “unlawful” to prevent Moody, his cousin, Charles Moody and Nathaniel Jackson from enrolling at Mansfield High School on the basis of race. Charles Moody was the nephew of Mansfield NAACP leader T.M. Moody, who helped lead the effort to integrate Mansfield schools.
The lawsuit followed the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in the Brown vs. the Board of Education case that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.
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