Hispanic Students Singled Out In Gainesville

This story about Gainesville High School hit home with me, because I lived in that city for several years and liked it very much. My son started his school career in Gainesville back in the 1980s and it seemed to be a good school system. If this story is true, then things have changed.

Gainesville is a small and beautiful city of about 15,000 residents. It is located about 90 miles north of Dallas and less than ten miles south of the Oklahoma border. It is the county seat of Cooke County (one of only four counties in Texas that voted to stay in the Union during the Civil War).

But the Gainesville Independent School District is currently being investigated by the Texas ACLU. The ACLU has requested all information on school assemblies this year. That's because some Hispanics are saying that Hispanics were singled out and brought to an assembly at the school, where Hispanics were accused of causing the school's unacceptable rating by scoring too low on their TAKS tests.

Hispanic parents believe that singling out Hispanic students for the assembly and accusation was racist behavior (and it certainly sounds that way). One of the parents, who's daughter is an honors student, said, "She felt like it should have been an assembly that was inclusive of the whole student body. I totally agree; I don't believe in segregated meetings. To me, it's a simple misunderstanding that they were discriminating against people."

Personally, I think it was not only racist, but stupid. The group of Hispanic freshmen they gathered in the assembly were not even in high school when the last TAKS test was given. They were in middle school, and their middle school received an acceptable rating from the Texas Education Agency (TEA).

Also, according to the TEA, Gainesville High School students did well enough on the TAKS test to be rated acceptable. The unacceptable rating was not given for low TAKS test scores, but for not maintaining a 75% graduation rate among all groups. Hispanics had a 73.3% graduation rate, but how can incoming freshmen be blamed for that?

This was simply a bone-headed move by one or more high school officials. If the school board is smart, they'll take disciplinary action against this official (or officials) and make sure it never happens again.

Gainesville Finally Faces Its Dark Secret

For the last 145 years, Gainesville residents have not wanted to speak of the horror that happened in their city during the Civil War. It's not the kind of thing a city could be proud of. In October 1862, Gainesville was the sight of the largest mass lynchings in America's history.

Gainesville is the county seat of Cooke County. When Texas voted to secede from the United States during the Civil War, Cooke County was one of 5 Red River counties that voted not to secede. These counties voted by 61-70% margins to stay in the Union.

Over 90% of the Cooke County residents were not slave-owners. When the Confederacy began to conscript soldiers, these men were angry that the 10% who were wealthy slave-owners were exempted from the draft. Many of those who had voted to stay in the Union formed a Peace Party, angering Texans sympathetic to the Confederacy.

A couple of Colonels in the Confederate Army (and slave-owners) arrested around 150 Union sympathizers and began holding "trials", in which a majority of 7 jurors (all slave-owners) could find the men guilty. Before a stop was put to it, around 41 men had been hanged (fourteen of them in one night by an angry lynch mob), and another had been shot.

Last Friday, Gainesville moved publically to finally exorcise their secret demon. A public park with 42 crosses was dedicated to remember the 1862 deaths. I am happy that this has happened. It is time for Gainesville to remember and bury its past.

Although I was not born there, I lived and worked in Gainesville for years, and learned to love the city. Both of my children were born while we lived there, and I would love to return there when I finally retire. It's a beautiful city.

That's why I'm happy that Gainesville is finally facing its past.

NOTE - The above postcard picture is of the Cooke County Courthouse in 1878.