Houston's African American community had grown significantly in the years following the end of the Civil War in 1865, with the growth of communities like Freedmen's Town in the Forth Ward being the center of Black life in the city. In the post-WWII years, the city's Third and Fifth Wards became the largest areas of Black housing. Houston's Mexican American population came of age in the 1920s following the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, with Mexican immigrants finding work in agriculture, railyards and in the Ship Channel, settling in the eastern and northern parts of the city where these jobs were found. The Northside in the city's Fifth Ward increasingly became an area where working-class Black, Brown and white communities intersected.[2]

From the beginning of the 20th century and into the 1960s and 1970s, a history of "redlining" and racist real estate practices left America's major cities racially segregated. Although the Northside remained predominately Anglo into the 1960s, like in so many cities around the country, the construction of new freeways and suburbs in the previous decade had accelerated the flight of many white families away from the inner-city schools. In Houston, while the Northside would remain a strong working-class community, increasingly Black and Brown families would become the main constituents of Houston's urban schools like Davis High.[3]

While the district's integration plan for Black students occurred at a painstakingly slow pace, small numbers of Mexican American students began attending HISD schools years earlier. While the district had historically relegated African American students to separate schools, for example, zoning African American living in the Northside to the newly opened Phyllis Wheatly High rather than Davis, because the law classified Hispanics as "white," despite their unequal treatment, schools tolerated some level of integration of Mexican Americans students to all-white schools like Davis prior to the 1950s. By the late-1950s, a demographic shift was becoming increasingly evident at Davis, with a growing number of Mexican American students beginning to attended the campus. By the 1960s, the Mexican American student presence was strong enough that in the 1963-64 school year students formed the "Los Amigos" club to represent the interests and concerns of Davis High's growing Latino population. Within a few years, the club was “One of the fastest growing and most popular organizations this year” with “well over a hundred members.” The school yearbook further noted that “This club is specifically designed for Spanish students. Their goal is to enrich and intensify the meaning and usefulness of the Spanish language as well as the Spanish Culture.”[6]

In 1964 and 1965, the civil rights movement across the country celebrated the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, laws which desegregated public facilities and guaranteed previously denied voting rights. In 1965, Houston’s civil rights struggle reached a turning point of its own. That year, civil rights activists in Houston began pushing for more immediate integration of HISD schools, and in May of 1965 Black civil rights groups organized a boycott of Houston's segregated schools. One protest sign that read, “Space Age Houston, Stone Age School,” spoke to the contradiction of a technologically progressive city that was still trapped in a Jim Crow mindset. As a direct result of the protest, HISD modified its "stair-step" integration plan to include 6th, 7th and 10th grades for the upcoming school year.[7]

The impact of these efforts was clear at Davis High during the 1965-66 school year. That year the first Black sophomores arrived on campus alongside the increasing Mexican American student population. And the following school year, the first Black seniors proudly appeared in the school yearbook. An increased racial diversity of student clubs signaled that the district's accelerated integration plan was bearing fruit. As the ratio of both Black and Brown students increased among the still majority Anglo student body, a truly integrated setting was beginning to take shape at Davis High.[8]

In 1968, as Davis High was becoming increasingly diverse, the movement for equality in the district had only just begun. Taking up the mantle of Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, Mexican American students first in East Los Angeles and then across the Southwest organized a walkout movement calling on students to boycott ongoing racial inequality in schools.[9]

Despite modest desegregation results through the 1960s, discrimination by teachers and administrators against Spanish-speaking, Mexican American students was still rampant in the district. Tapping into the broader movement, Mexican American activists in Houston organized walkouts for the beginning of the 1969-70 school year. On September 16, Mexican Independence Day, over five hundred HISD students, including one hundred from Davis High, walked out of class to protest ongoing discrimination. Students from Marshall Middle School across the street participated, with some even jumping from windows to escape an administration lock down of the school. Marshall and Davis students then joined together for a rally in front of Davis High before marching in solidarity to Moody Park. [10]

A diverse group of Black and Brown students from Davis participated in the walkout and were issued unexcused absences for their participation. Student protesters demanded that the schools create Chicano history courses, hire Chicano teachers, end the practice of “push-outs,” which forced students to drop out and end the Davis “pregnancy list”—a public list that shamed girls who became pregnant. Rather than meet these demands, HISD officials retaliated and set the stage for future confrontations over school equality.[11]

Desegregation continued in fits and starts throughout HISD and at Davis through the 1970s. By the early 1970s, the demographic shifts at Davis, which had historically been an all-white campus, were striking, with the Mexican American student population now the majority. A combination of successful integration efforts and ongoing "white flight" meant that the African American student body was also on the verge of surpassing the remaining Anglo student population. Asian American students also began to represent a small, but visible portion of the student body.[16]

By the 1971-72 school year, Davis High had a multiracial mix of Anglo, Black and Brown students that the campus had not seen before and has not seen since. The majority Black and Brown student population also brought an elevated racial consciousness to the campus. Reflecting the growing African American student population, Davis implemented a Black history course and a new African American club was added to compliment the Los Amigos club. The Dispatch reported of the new club that “This year the Club plans on having Dashikis as the uniform,” and declared “More Power to the Afro-American Club.” Equally significant, over the course of the decade, the majority Black and Brown student body was being taught by an increasingly multiracial faculty and administration [17]

It was in the 1970s and 1980s that public school activists brought economic inequality in schools to the forefront of the civil rights struggle with a case from the Edgewood school district in San Antonio. The 1973 Rodriquez v. San Antonio ISD case argued that inequality in school funding denied students in poverty an equal education. In the end, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that the Constitution guaranteed students an equally funded education and the issue was sent back to the states to decide. In 1984, another Edgewood case from San Antonio agued to the state courts that the funding of public education in Texas primarily thorough property taxes had produced an unequal school system. The state courts agreed and implemented a new school finance reform measure nicknamed "Robin Hood," which mandated that the excess revenue of property-rich school districts be "recaptured" by the state and then allotted to low income districts in order to meet a basic minimum. While this system has leveled previously egregious wealth disparities between districts, it has far from solved economic inequality in education. In the 21st century, as property values in urban areas continue to rise, districts like HISD with a majority low income student population are considered "property-rich" and must have their "excess" funds recaptured by the state. Decades after its inception, school finance reform has yet to deliver its promise of truly meritocratic education system.[18]

By the 1980s, stalled integration efforts by segregationist school board members and decades of "white flight" meant that HISD was now mostly a majority-minority district. To address the loss of tens of thousands of students to suburban districts, HISD developed a magnet program to achieve integration on a voluntary basis. While HISD had fulfilled its legal obligations to desegregate, the demographics of the district had changed so drastically that true integration of white, Black and Brown students was no longer possible without radical government intervention.[20]

In 1984, on the 30th anniversary of the Brown ruling, HISD declared the battle for integration over. The Chronicle reported that “The desegregation lawsuit against the Houston Independent School District has effectively ended in an out-of-court settlement at virtually the same spot it began almost 28 years ago—on the steps of Sherman Elementary School.” The symbolism of the two leading civil rights organizations, the NAACP and MALDEF, singing the settlement ending legal segregation underscored the struggle and sacrifice of the African American and Mexican American communities over the previous three decades. In Houston, while the struggle for desegregation was officially over, the following decades would be shaped by both the successes and failures of these years of struggle.[21]