Waco History Podcast

In the early 1960s, many Southerners fed up with racial discrimination were participating in restaurant sit-ins, hoping to change the status quo. Robert Cogswell of Austin, a social justice activist, recalls taking part in the movement in Houston: "It was customary for black people who were demonstrating to have a token white among them to show that they weren't exclusivists. And I was often the token white. My activism had to do with a small group of youth in the NAACP who challenged the idea that Houston restaurants were already integrated. We spent our Saturdays driving around to restaurants and walking in and sitting down and not being served. We received a lot of responses that bordered on the absurd. A waitress would ignore us for a long time and then come to our table. In one case, the waitress said to me, "Are your friends Africans?" And it developed that if they were Africans, she was willing to serve them, but if they were American blacks, she was not. "In another case, I went into a restaurant with