Texas Southern University, Nineteen Sixty-Seven: The Riot Houston Forgot

The confrontation that Houston forgot began not with a swimming pool, as the story is sometimes told, but with a dead child and a dump.

On May eighth, nineteen sixty-seven, an eleven-year-old boy named Victor George drowned in a polluted pond near the Holmes Road municipal dump in Houston's Third Ward, a body of water that served as an illegal dumping site in a neighborhood that had been absorbing the city's unwanted refuse for decades. Students at Texas Southern University organized a sit-in protest on May fifteenth, blocking the street outside the school in response to what they saw as an environmental injustice inseparable from the city's racial geography. Houston police sealed off the campus in response.

On the night of May sixteenth into May seventeenth, officers in riot gear advanced on the dormitories. What happened next is a matter of documented legal record: a Houston police officer named Louis Kuba, who had served on the force for only fourteen days, was struck by a bullet and died. Investigators and a federal judge later concluded, based on the forensic evidence, that the bullet was a ricocheted police round, not a shot from inside the dormitories.

Five students were charged with murder anyway. Their names were Douglas Walker, Floyd Nichols, Charles Freeman, John Parker, and Trazawell Franklin. The cases were eventually dismissed in nineteen seventy, the charges dropped for insufficient evidence. None of the five served prison time for the death.

Texas Southern University is one block from Emancipation Park. It is one mile from Cuney Homes, where George Floyd grew up three years after these events. The nineteen sixty-seven confrontation is virtually unknown outside Texas, which is one way of measuring how effectively a city can bury a story it does not want to tell about itself.