PART I—
EAST TEXAS:
1934–1951

Chapter One—
Sodom

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Negro National Anthem, 1921

It cost $7 to bring Willie Lewis Brown Jr. into the world.

His father paid the fee to Chaney Gunter, a Negro midwife who delivered him on March 20, 1934, in his grandmother's drafty, whitewashed clapboard house in Mineola, Texas.^[1] The children she brought into the world all called her "Aunt Chaney," and she delivered nearly every Negro baby in Mineola at the time. Gunter almost certainly could not read or write, and no birth certificate exists from the day marking Willie Brown's inauguration into life. That he was born at home was not unusual, nor was the lack of a piece of paper commemorating it. For Brown, the paper trail came later.

Mineola was a rural community located about eighty miles east of Dallas on the map but spiritually sitting on the edge of the South. The Sabine River, the symbolic dividing line between the old South and the new Southwest, was just a few miles to the west of Mineola. In a very real sense, Mineola was a gateway to and from the South, and it sat on the side of the old South.^[2] Mineola was chiefly known to outsiders for its mineral water, drawn from a pump under a tower oddly placed in the middle of the town's muddy main intersection. The water was said to have "high medicinal properties."^[3]

There was not much upsetting the order of things in Mineola on the day Willie Brown was born.^[4] The war that would change everything was seven years away. If anything, it looked as if the Great Depression was bottoming

out and Mineola might emerge unscathed with the old order unchanged. New cotton gin figures were in that month and production was up. The forty-room Beckham Hotel, the best in town, was counting receipts from a St. Patrick's Day dance for more than one hundred youthful revelers. After weeks of rehearsals, the Mineola Colored High School Jubilee Singers performed "When Love Comes Tricklin' Down." About the only crisis in town was the report of a missing jersey cow, cream-colored, branded with an X on the left hip. And the county clerk that March reported that 3,923 adults in Mineola had paid their poll tax of $1.75 each and were eligible to vote. All of them were white. The voting franchise did not extend to blacks.

Willie Brown was born into a sharply segregated world where only the edges have dulled over time. An accident of his birth, the color of his skin, was the fact that mattered more than any other. Of all the events of his life, nothing loomed larger in shaping who he was, and what he was about, than being born black in the segregated East Texas of the 1930s.

The "Whites" and "Colored" signs are now gone in Mineola. But as a new century dawns, blacks in Mineola still live in small, sometimes ramshackle houses south of the railroad tracks while whites live to the north in suburban-style homes.^[5] Even in death, segregation is the hidden rule in Mineola. A chain-link fence runs down the center of Mineola City Cemetery, evoking the ghosts of an era that will not rest. The well-manicured graves of whites are east of the fence, and the sometimes unkempt plots of blacks are west of the fence. If there ever was a headstone for Willie Brown's grandmother, Anna Lee Collins, it is gone. By the early 1990s all that remained in her family plot was the headstone for an unnamed infant who died in 1903.

In Wood County in the 1930s, the county of Willie Brown's birth, whites outnumbered blacks 85 percent to 15 percent.^[6] Most blacks in the county lived in Mineola, composing slightly more than one-fourth of the town's population. Black women outnumbered black men. The gap between genders was widest for those between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, reflecting that black men moved away to find jobs, usually on farms, while black women stayed in town to rear children and work as domestic servants.

On the whole, Mineola was a backwater in American life. A fierce civic pride hid the grim fact that most Mineola adults—black or white—were poorly educated and few could look forward to opportunities beyond farm, cotton gin, or oil patch. By 1940 only fourteen in every hundred adults, black or white, had graduated from high school. The average twenty-five-year-old of either race had gone no further than the eighth grade. Only eight out of every hundred Mineola adults, black or white, had any formal education beyond high school. That Willie Brown and so many of his African American classmates went to college was extraordinary.^[7]

Brown was born black at a time when racial segregation was whipped furious by the economic havoc of the Great Depression. He was born black

in a place where a small tremor in the price of cotton sent shivers through the entire community. And no one lived more precariously in America than black Americans. Segregation was not just a system of racial separation at the lunch counter; it was a system whereby whites kept blacks on the bottom rung in everything from education to justice, jobs to health care. Segregation dictated where people shopped, where they went to school, where they worshiped on Sunday, and how they greeted each other on the street. It even determined where they got a drink of water or went to the toilet. There was nothing benign about segregation, nothing accidental.

For whites segregation required a set of values that were hard to change even after the system was discredited and had lost its legal authority. White attitudes about blacks were so deeply ingrained that an elderly white man who considered Willie Brown's father a member of his family could still matter-of-factly remark sixty years later, "He knew his place. Back then, you know, a colored was a colored."^[8] It was as if the old white man was fondly remembering an old beloved hound.

However whites romanticized segregation, there was no getting around its peculiar cruelties. A man who happened to be born "colored" in East Texas in the first half of the twentieth century was lucky if he learned to read and write, likely worked on a farm or in the oil fields, and probably saw little of his children. He endured indignities large and small and likely died relatively young, never having seen the inside of a hospital or a voting booth. Black women lived longer, but they were poorly educated, and to them fell the responsibility of holding their community together. At best, a black woman might look forward to the relative luxury of living away from home "in service" to a well-to-do white family.

Still, for many of those blacks who lived through it, including Willie Brown, segregation is remembered as a time when families were close-knit, everyone looked out for each other, and grandmothers ruled the neighborhood. Wealth could be found in the everyday joys of sharing food at the table, singing in the church choir, and celebrating the birth of babies. Work was hard, but there was much to look forward to at the end of the week: Saturday night dances, dice games, fishing on the bayou, and sitting around the radio enjoying the company of friends and family. Brown's earliest memory is of "all the friends and games and things of that nature."^[9] Significantly, his first memories are not of the harsher edges of segregation.

However, little can be understood about the values and methods Brown has as an adult without an understanding of the full backdrop of segregation in his youth. Whites in East Texas resorted to violence against blacks with alarming frequency. Segregation was the law of Texas, but it could not exist without an underpinning of violence that was outside the law and tolerated by those sworn to uphold the law. The violence was a tacit admission of how unnatural it was to separate two groups of people who lived and worked so

closely together. In a later day Willie Brown was scornful of the "law and order" slogans of George Wallace and Richard Nixon and the prison-building programs of California Republican governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. Brown's scorn was bred from his experience of seeing how the law operated on the south side, the colored side, of the railroad tracks in Mineola, Texas.

The first whites moving into Wood County were southern farmers looking for cheap land, and they brought black slaves with them.^[10] They settled in a corner of Texas that was culturally and historically apart from the rest of the state. Dallas, sitting on the open Texas plain, was only eighty miles to the west. But East Texas was not cattle country, for it was ill suited for ranching. It was, however, suited for cotton.^[11] The hilly, woody region had far more in common culturally and economically with the Dixie states to the east than to the rest of Texas. White settlers arriving in East Texas, both before and after the Civil War, generally came directly from other southern states, mostly from Mississippi but also from as far away as North Carolina. Wood County's white citizens gladly sent their sons off to fight for the Confederacy; later, 372 of them proudly claimed Confederate Army pensions from the state of Texas after the war—and were paid despite fighting on the losing side.^[15]

Mineola was built at the convergence of two railroads. There was really no other reason for it to be there. Established in 1873 by the Texas & Pacific and the International & Great Northern, Mineola was at a crossroads where agricultural products could be transferred from one rail line to another.^[12] There was little else in the surrounding countryside to commend Mineola as fit for human habitation. The land was swampy, filled with heavily wooded bayous thick with snakes and bugs in the summer and prone to floods in the winter. The muddy Sabine River periodically overflowed its banks and rearranged the boggy countryside. An early white settler wrote, "You either had to swim or ford your way out of the place."^[13] Before the railroads came, the inhospitable spot of Texas where Willie Brown was born was called Sodom .^[14]

In the decades that followed the Civil War, whites in East Texas stubbornly harbored an attitude about blacks that was extreme even by the white supremacist standards of the rest of Texas. Well into the 1940s railroad porters were required to pull down the window shades on the "colored" passenger cars as they passed through Grand Saline, the community just to the west of Mineola, to protect the upstanding white citizens from seeing black faces.^[16] By an odd coincidence, Terrell, a town a few miles farther west on the same rail line, also had its name stamped on segregation laws throughout Texas. During a short-lived era of racial progress, blacks in the 1880s won a majority of seats on the Terrell city council, horrifying the legislature in Austin. Laws requiring racial separation followed. Finally, state politicians stripped blacks of the right to vote through a poll tax, known as the "Terrell law," named for its legislative author, A. W. Terrell.^[17]

East Texas had a terminology of racial hatred all its own. "Whitecapping" was an East Texas word loosely defined as violent intimidation short of death inflicted on a Negro.^[18] Whippings, warning shots, threats, and the destruction of property were methods of whitecapping in the East Texas of Brown's youth.

Lynchings, the most chilling of crimes by whites against blacks, were notorious in East Texas.^[19] The region was considered one of the worst in the nation at the turn of the twentieth century. One of the most gruesome episodes in American history occurred in 1897 in Tyler, ten miles south of Mineola, where a black man, Robert Henson Hillard, was suspected of rape and murder. Before he could stand trial, a white mob pulled him from jail and burned him at the stake.^[20] Willie Brown's grandmother, Anna Lee Collins, the central figure in his upbringing, was in her twenties when Hillard was tortured and murdered. Such incidents shaped how an entire generation of African Americans in East Texas reared their children and grandchildren.

The violence in East Texas proved too much even for the politicians in Austin, though they were not acting out of purely humanitarian instincts. After Hillard was burned alive, Texas businessmen were fearful that such crude violence would scare away northern money, and they pushed the Texas legislature into passing a series of antilynching laws at the turn of the century.^[21] At first the violence continued unabated because no county sheriff in East Texas would enforce the antilynching laws, and sheriffs were more powerful than elected mayors and legislators. If anything, the sheriffs considered whitecapping, and the threat of whitecapping, a valuable tool for keeping public order. Between 1900 and 1910 more than one hundred blacks were lynched in Texas, mostly in East Texas, giving the small region the distinction of ranking as the third worst in the nation.^[22] The worst year was 1908, the year before Willie Brown's mother was born, when twenty-four Negroes were lynched in Texas. Older whites in Mineola still remember a black man hanged from a water tower a few miles north.^[23] The reason for the hanging is lost to an earlier generation.

White state leaders were still uneasy with the violence, and in 1920 the governor sent a representative to Texarkana for a meeting of the newly formed Interracial Congress. A year later white businessmen started the Texas Committee on Interracial Cooperation to oppose the violence. Finally, the state militia was brought in to break up white mobs, ending the lynchings.^[24] But state leaders did nothing to repeal the segregation laws. If anything, they saw the need to strengthen the social and political shackles of segregation so that lynching would be unnecessary. Segregation deepened.

The largest influx of blacks into East Texas occurred just after the Civil War, when emancipated slaves came looking for farmland. Many found it, but many others ended up working for whites.^[25] From Reconstruction onward, blacks continued to migrate into East Texas from elsewhere in the South.

Most blacks settling in the area did not travel far, arriving in wagons from a few miles to the east in Arkansas and Louisiana. Among them were Willie Brown's immediate ancestors. How they got there, and why they came, is largely lost to time, but it was probably a story that was typical for the era.

Willie Brown's great-grandparents were in all likelihood slaves; his paternal grandmother, Ella Roberts, may have been born into slavery in 1862 in nearby Smith County, Texas.^[26] Willie Brown, the most powerful politician of his generation in California, could plausibly claim to be the grandson of a slave, although there is just enough doubt about his ancestry that he has never done so. He has known little about his father's parents and, as an adult, has largely avoided contact with that side of his family. But he certainly grew up among older blacks who had known slavery firsthand. For Willie Brown the concept of slavery was not something out of a Negro history book.

On his mother's side, Brown's grandmother, Anna Lee Nolan, was free-born in Smith County, eventually moving to Mineola.^[27] Little is known of her childhood, but she is still fondly remembered by older blacks and a few whites in Mineola. Anna Lee, as she was called by her family for her entire life, had three sons and a daughter, and an infant who died in 1903. Her husband, Richard Collins, was from Louisiana. He has been variously described as a gambler or railroad worker, and he was probably a bit of both. He left his family when his children were young, probably before World War I, and moved to Fort Worth. "He wanted to sell the place," said one of his sons, Rembert "Itsie" Collins, reaching back for memories and family lore of more than eighty years earlier.^[28] "He wanted to get some money—he done sell the horse and buggy. He wanted to borrow some money on the place. Mama wouldn't sign the deed. And so they separated on that account." Anna Lee remarried, but her next husband tried to hustle her money and the marriage did not last. She remained known as Anna Lee for the rest of her life.

Ask Brown about his childhood and he will tell of how poor his family was, and that was true enough.^[29] But it is not the whole story. Compared with most whites, his grandmother's household was indeed poor. But relative to other blacks in Mineola, Anna Lee's household was on the top of the hill.

Anna Lee was small and wiry and wore modest full-length cotton dresses made from flour sacks. She was not physically imposing, but she was a fear-some disciplinarian nonetheless. She firmly ruled her roost. Anna Lee's word was law not just in her household but also on the whole block. "My grandmother was everybody's boss," said one of Brown's sisters, Gwendolyn Brown Hill.^[30] Usually Anna Lee's stare was enough to set a child straight, but she also resorted to a switch when she deemed it necessary. Her grandson James Walton, the half-brother of Willie Brown, remembered Anna Lee's temperament well: "You'd almost have to be dead before you could miss a day in

school."^[31] She was provider, educator, disciplinarian, and, in the end, the one who allowed Willie Brown to leave Mineola for his own good. Without her blessing, Willie Brown would never have moved to California.

Anna Lee's house was on the tallest hill on the south side of the railroad tracks. "We had a nice house to live in," her daughter, Minnie, once recalled.^[32] In front was a porch, and in the back, a walnut tree. Anna Lee's house had electricity and a radio. The radio antenna on the roof was a prominent sight and a source of endless fascination to young boys.^[33]

And Anna Lee owned her home.

"They were some of our Big Negroes," said Patty Ruth Newsome, who grew up next door. "They had a little money."^[34]

Anna Lee's first two sons, Itsie and Son, had automobiles. There was always plenty of food and an extra place at the table for children who wandered in. The minister at church was a regular guest for Sunday dinner. Anna Lee raised hogs and chickens and grew most of her own vegetables, putting them up for the winter. Her grandchildren remember eating chicken, greens, rice pudding, and a dish called "smother steak," a cheap cut of beef drenched in onions and gravy.^[35] Anna Lee's passion was fishing for catfish in the bayous along the Sabine River a few miles away. All her grandchildren, including Willie Brown, remember eating plenty of catfish, but as often as not, she gave the fish away to neighbors in greater need.^[36]

Adults in the neighborhood gathered at the Collins house to sing songs around the piano and listen to radio programs. Many of her neighbors still remember listening to broadcasts of Joe Louis fights on her radio. It is hard to overstate how much of a hero Joe Louis was to Negroes living everywhere in the United States, especially in backwaters like Mineola, Texas. The black world champion beat white men in the ring, making a mockery of white supremacy. There was no one else like him in America at the time. His triumphs were shared by those standing tall around Anna Lee's radio.

Anna Lee's youngest child, Minnie, was born in 1909. She was outgoing and funny and had a stream of suitors. Her brother Itsie remembered her as a "party girl."^[37] At age seventeen she became pregnant by Roy Tuck, whom she married in March 1926. The two were forced by Anna Lee to marry, although Itsie believed it was a big mistake. He turned out to be right. Minnie gave birth in September 1926 to a daughter, Baby Dalle Tuck, but the marriage soon disintegrated. A few years later, Minnie became pregnant by a new suitor, Lewis Brown, who was a waiter at a local restaurant, and she gave birth to another daughter, Lovia, in 1931. A year later, Minnie was pregnant again by Lewis Brown, giving birth to Gwendolyn in June 1932. And two years later, Minnie Collins had a son, again by Lewis Brown. His father named him after himself, including his first name, which he had dropped: Willie Lewis Brown Jr.

Brown's birth date, March 20, 1934, cannot be known with absolute certainty. Blacks were rarely given birth certificates, and Willie Brown was no

exception. The earliest his name appears on any official document was when he was ten years old, listed on a school census form, "For Negro Scholastics Only," signed by his grandmother and sent to the county courthouse in Quitman.^[38] Willie Brown did not get a birth certificate until after he moved to California and enrolled in college in 1952. His birth certificate, eighteen years late, was signed in San Francisco by Itsie Collins and mailed back to the Wood County courthouse in Texas.^[39]

On the night Willie Brown was born, the Lawson Brooks orchestra was playing at the Collins brothers' dance hall. His mother, Minnie, wanted to go to the dance, but his birth intervened. His father took credit for nicknaming him "Brookie" to forever tease Minnie about the dance she missed.^[40] The nickname stuck. "Brookie" became the name Willie Brown was known by most of his childhood. He was to say years later that he did not even know his name was Willie until he was ten years old. His three closest boyhood friends all had nicknames ending in ie , and they called themselves "the I. E. Boys"— Brookie, Jackie, Bootie, and Cookie. The four went everywhere together, riding bicycles across fields and through the sandy streets of Mineola. Later, in his early teens, Brown's nickname changed to "Pete" for reasons now obscure.^[41] He was the smallest of the four, but easily the most flamboyant and the most outgoing.

"He was the one who, with uncles and aunties, had a little more money than one or two of us. And when a new bicycle would come out, Willie would have a new bicycle. Or new shoes, new things like that," recalled his best friend, Frank "Jackie" Crawford.^[42] "Willie had a Western Flier, and oh boy—he fixed that Western Flier up with a carriage on the back, different decorations on the handlebars, and all that kind of stuff, and we'd just ride every Sunday."^[43]

But the truth was that no matter how comfortable they were, no matter how much food was on the table, Anna Lee Collins and her family were still second-class citizens in their own community. Their status was driven home in big ways and small. As children, blacks and whites played together; only when they got older were they separated. "We raise up together," Itsie Collins recalled for a white visitor. "I mean, I be knowing you all of your life. When I get twenty-one and you get twenty-one, I got to say 'yessuh' and 'nosuh' to you."

No black person dared to walk through the front door of the Beckham Hotel, in the center of town, except as a porter carrying a white person's baggage from the railroad station across the street. Not every store in Mineola was open for business to Negroes. Anna Lee bought what she needed at Spate's, a local general store that gave credit to Negroes. Years later, Mineola blacks said they suspected that Spate's cheated them on their credit chits, but there was nothing they could do about it because it was the one store that extended them credit. Although Spate's welcomed the Negroes' business, any white who happened into the store was served first.

"The colored people had to walk in against the wall and go to the counter," Itsie Collins remembered.^[44] A delivery boy served the Negro customers, and if he was out, "you had to wait until he come back before you get what you want."

Sometimes it was the small indignities that stung the most. "You drive to the filling station to get some gas—they had a cup that you drink out of painted black," Collins remembered at the age of eighty-seven. "You couldn't use the restroom. You had to wait 'til you go out in the woods on the highway. I remember them days."^[45]

East Texas remained a risky world for blacks when Willie Brown was a child. By the accounts of her granddaughters, the potential for danger was never far from the mind of Anna Lee, and with plenty of reason.^[46] When Brown was about a year old, a white man, J.C. Chrieztberg, shot and killed a black man for accidentally driving his car through his garden in Quitman, fifteen miles to the north of Mineola. Chrieztberg, known as a something of a town bully among whites,^[47] was charged with murder, but no record exists that he stood trail for the crime.^[48]

Segregation was also stupid. The second most important accident of Willie Brown's birth was that he came into a family that found its way around the boundaries of segregation.

For an older generation of African Americans, the lesson of segregation was simple: survival required playing a subservient role to whites, at least outwardly. But there was another lesson as well percolating in the black community, namely, that whites could be outsmarted, and some blacks knew how, among them Willie Brown's uncles. Anna Lee Collins's household income came principally from the Shack, a dance hall, casino, and saloon run by two of her sons, Rembert and Rodrick, better known as Itsie and Son. Today a church stands on the site of the Shack, and all that remains of it is a few boards and pieces of the roof lying on the ground. But in the 1920s and 1930s the Shack was the center of nightly social activity for blacks throughout the area.^[49] The Shack was a simple, wooden hall with a cafe in back serving up hamburgers. Around the side was a small shed where the Collins brothers sold moonshine whiskey. The brothers hired Negro orchestras from as far away as Mississippi. There was nothing quite like their hall in the region, and it gave Mineola and the Collins brothers a reputation among blacks throughout East Texas. "The Collins' were just kind of the big shots," recalled Patty Ruth Newsome, their next-door neighbor.^[50]

"We looked to the Collins'," said Jewel McCalla, who grew up in the neighboring community of Hawkins. "My grandfather would come down there to buy their moonshine."^[51]

Brown's family provided him with an extraordinary set of skills that are, as it turned out, also well suited to the art of politics. Willie Brown is expedient, he can improvise, he can think and talk fast on his feet, and he has a flexible ethical code. Six decades after his birth, Gale Kaufman, his

top political assistant, observed, "He's never done anything that wasn't in his best interest. He's just redefined what his best interest is on a regular basis."^[52] Although said in the midst of a political battle, her observation could apply to all Willie Brown's life from childhood forward. His values and talents and the very method he brought to his political craft had their origins in racially segregated Mineola, Texas.

If his white political opponents found his methods unsavory or too clever, they rarely understood how his methods were the product of white segregation. If they did not like how he used his campaign funds to beat political rivals, they did not understand how his family used moonshine money to beat segregation.

Willie Brown was born on the wrong side of the tracks, but he was not born a loser, not for a single day of his childhood nor any day in his life. He was never taught to think or act like a second-class citizen. His family was always at the center of everything, and Willie Brown was the center of attention in his family from the second he was born. He has never given up the spotlight for a single moment. Brown grew to expect—even demand— that attention. He is self-confident, makes friends easily, and can put anyone at ease or cut them down to size in a flash. He fills every room he enters, whether it is a small church hall in Mineola or the Oval Office of Bill Clinton.

The Collins family ran their small corner of the world. His last name was Brown, but he was very much a Collins. Not surprisingly, Willie Brown was reared to run things, to defer to no one, to stay on top. It was a trait that would get him into constant trouble as a child and later as an adult. Real political power was but a natural progression from the hill that was his grandmother's domain. If Brown had been born white, he might well have attained power in his native state. But if Brown had been born white, he might not have learned the political skills that are uniquely his.

Itsie was able to open the Shack with money he had won gambling in the oil fields east of Mineola. "Lots of colored people had oil, and they didn't know what to do with that money. Wherever gamblin' be at, that's where I be, and when the East Texas oil field opened up, I made my headquarters in Kilgore."^[53] Itsie Collins cruised the oil fields in a succession of new Buicks, enticing the gullible with cards and dice games. "You couldn't pay me to take a drink while I'm gamblin'. But after I get through gamblin', then I drink as much as anybody. I made so much money there, I was scared to go to sleep."

Still, the marks of segregation were never far. Years later, Collins bitterly recalled that a bank would not accept his first $100 bill because the teller had never seen a Negro possessing such a large note. Itsie took his gambling winnings back to Mineola and opened the hall on the hill, just around the corner from his mother's house. The hall had no formal name, being known variously as "Itsie's and Son's" or just "the Shack." During the day, older men played dominos, usually for no stakes, and at night they threw dice, always for

stakes. Children such as Willie Brown and his friends were fascinated, and they sneaked over to the Shack and peeked.

Son Collins primarily tended to the moonshine end of the business. Prohibition ended in the United States in 1933, but it did not end in Wood County, Texas, which remains a dry county to this day. That did not mean that a person could not get a drink. In fact, it is harder to get a drink in Mineola now than it was during Prohibition. Bootlegging was common among both blacks and whites in those years. Whites frequently crossed the color line to purchase liquor from blacks. Not surprisingly, the Collins brothers were well-known sources of illicit alcohol among the whites of Mineola. Some older whites in Mineola, who do not want to be named even a half-century later, can recall buying a bottle of moonshine from Son and Itsie Collins.^[54] Sheriffs usually turned a blind eye on bootleggers, especially if they got a cut of the profits. When arrests were made, white juries in Wood County were reluctant to convict even black bootleggers. That fact reached into the Collins household shortly before Willie Brown was born.

In February 1934 Son Collins stood trial on felony bootlegging charges in the Quitman courthouse.^[55] The record of his trial is contained in a small in drawer in the courthouse attic. The Quitman courtroom has changed little in appearance since the 1930s. It was built more like a wide theater with rows of seats beneath tall ceilings and wide windows. Fans slung from the ceilings kept warm air circulating in the winter and provided a little relief from the sweltering humidity of East Texas in the summer. Negroes were not allowed to watch from a balcony overhanging the court but were not allowed in the seats on the main floor of the courtroom. Judges rode a circuit, and their time in Quitman was at a premium, so trials were typically completed in a day or less. Even murder trials, from jury selection to verdict, were finished in a single day. Son's lawyer told the all-white jury that the police caught him with someone else's whiskey, and Son Collins was found innocent. With the acquittal of Son Collins and the birth of young Willie a month later, Anna Lee's household had much to celebrate in the spring of 1934.

Always staying one step ahead of the law in the 1930s, the Collins brothers hired a man to steal five-hundred-pound sacks of sugar off trains bound for a Dr Pepper soft drink plant.^[56] A sack or two from a boxcar was hardly noticed, but it provided the nectar for gallons upon gallons of moonshine. The sugar was taken to the Big Woods, a boggy, hilly, and heavily wooded country to the north of Mineola. The woods were known as a dangerous place where bootleggers jealously guarded their distilleries and sometimes stole from each other. A man could lose his life by stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time. The law was definitely at a disadvantage in the Big Woods. The trees grew right up to the edge of the highway. It was easy to disappear from sight by stepping off the roadway a few yards into the woods, or emerge just as quickly on cue seemingly from nowhere with barrels of whiskey for shipment or sale. The Collins brothers' sugar was buried in the

woods until it was needed. By the time the sacks were dug up, they usually had crystallized in the moist soil. "When you cut at it, it would be soft in the middle, but that damp would make it set hard," Itsie recalled. "I bet I got some sugar out there right now." The brothers usually ran two or three stills in the woods at the same time.

Marcus McCalla, a childhood friend of Willie Brown's, remembered the adventure—and the danger—of riding with Son Collins to the Big Woods to pick up a whiskey shipment and bring it back to Mineola.^[57] "When we got out of school, they'd come by and pick us up and Willie Brown and another of my friends. He took us off to the Big Woods and left us in the car. We was scared," said McCalla. The young boys sat in the car, waiting for Son Collins. Finally he emerged from the woods. "A guy come up with a Winchester rifle, and he come up to escort Son out of there. He had a big keg of whiskey, and he scared the living daylights out of us. We were real small. We didn't know what they was doing. He rolled a big keg up, pushed it in his car. We didn't know half of what was going on during that time when he was a moonshine man. They was some smart guys."

The moonshine was transported in kegs and then bottled in Anna Lee's basement. The Collins brothers kept their liquor hidden beneath a trapdoor under her dining room table; Anna Lee's trapdoor is still the source of much mirth and lore in the family. Everyone in the house—adults and children, Willie included—had a hand in the business, whether it was cleaning bottles or making deliveries to secret drop-offs for customers. "On Sunday mornings, and especially Monday mornings, we would pick up the bottles for a penny apiece, because my uncle would refill them," recalled Baby Dalle Hancock, the oldest of Minnie Collins's children and Willie Brown's half-sister.^[58]

Anna Lee made her own brew for home consumption, fermenting peaches and apricots in large crocks, and then squeezing the juice through pieces of cloth. The alcohol-saturated dregs were fed to the hogs. "They was just staggering, they were just grunting and drunk. It was really funny to see them," said Hancock.

As they grew up, Willie and his younger half-brother, James Walton, gravitated to different uncles. In a way, their adult career paths mirror the uncles they followed. Willie favored the gambler, Itsie, and the higherstakes game of politics. Walton gravitated to the quietest of his uncles, Richard "Baby" Collins, a highway construction worker who apparently had little, if anything, to do with the family's gambling and whiskey business. Walton became another sort of builder, an assistant city manager in Tacoma, Washington.

Sitting in his Tacoma city hall office in 1993, a universe away from Mineola, Walton maintained that Itsie Collins's influence on Willie Brown was enormous. "Itsie is just kind of an amazing person in his own right in terms of his ability to make it and strive," he said.^[59] "Itsie's always been probably more entrepreneurial than anyone else, and a lot of the same

kind of spirit or stick-to-itiveness that people see in Willie was in Itsie as well," said Walton. Itsie was a flashy dresser, loved to show off new cars, and always enjoyed an audience—descriptions a later generation ascribed to Willie Brown as he grew in stature and power. But Walton believes that Itsie Collins's influence on Willie Brown went far beyond a superficial style. From Itsie Collins, Willie Brown learned how to take risks. There were others later in Brown's life who showed him the political ropes. But his basic instinct for gambling, improvising, and playing his hand to the last card came straight from Itsie Collins.

"Willie is in his own sense a gambler. He has the same kind of attitude; there are no defeats, they are temporary setbacks," said Walton. "Because in the world Itsie was functioning in, gambling has peaks and valleys. You're high one day, and the next day you're down. But if you are down, you have to be in a certain frame of mind to be able to get back up. There's no such thing as defeat; there just was a defeat today, but tomorrow is going to be a different day."

Itsie and Willie have "a vision. They can see the impossible and figure it out before other people can get a hook on it," Walton said. Walton's observations were made more than a year before one of Brown's greatest triumphs at gambling—his reelection as Assembly Speaker in 1995 despite having lost his majority of Democrats in the California Assembly.

"One thing I've never done," Willie Brown said in a 1993 interview, "I've never planned my next move my whole life. I went to law school by accident. I got elected by accident. The one time I planned to be the Speaker, I failed."^[60]

As a very old man, Itsie Collins explained his philosophy of gambling in an interview for this book. "I never lose all the money I got in my pocket, I never try to win all the money I see." Collins looked for his opportunities and never got greedy.

His advice could have also stood as Willie Brown's philosophy of politics.

Chapter Two—
Lewis and Minnie

Brown was so unusual. He could wait on seventy-five people without any problems. He learned their names.
Art Turk
Mineola restaurant owner,
remembering Willie Brown's father

A series of black and white photographs were taken in 1936 to mark Mineola's contribution to the Texas Centennial of that year.^[1] Most of the cards are unremarkable snapshots, but among them are the only known photographs of Al's Place, the restaurant where Willie Brown's father, Lewis Brown, once worked as a waiter. Even more remarkable, two of the postcards show Lewis Brown.

The postcards picture Art Turk, who ran the place, and all the employees lined up in front of the brick roadhouse. Behind them is a sign advertising Southern Select Beer, the low-alcohol brew of the day. Watery beer was all that was legal in Wood County. The whites in the picture are lined up on the left, the blacks on the right. Everyone looks wooden, terribly unsure of what they are supposed to be doing for the camera. One waiter holds a tray, with his arm stiffly on his waist. Everyone looks awkward; that is, everyone except Lewis Brown. He is striking a pose by holding a tray with two beer bottles on it. In one postcard Lewis holds his tray with his body turned to his left in a walking pose as if he is bringing a beer to your table. In the other postcard he is striking a formal pose, standing rigidly at attention, his tray at shoulder-height. In both pictures Lewis Brown is wearing spotless white shoes, white pants, a white duck jacket, and a white cap. He is sharp, the only person, white

or black, in the postcards exhibiting any sense of elegance or showmanship. He is the only one who looks as if he knows exactly what he is doing. Lewis Brown may not have been around much for his young son, but his influence on him is unmistakable.

"Brown was so unusual," said Art Turk, the former restaurant owner, remembering his best waiter four decades later. "He could wait on seventy-five people without any problems. He learned their names."

A year before his death, Lewis Brown talked about his life and the day the photographs for the postcards were taken.^[2] He said he clearly remembered holding his tray that day fifty-seven years earlier. "I wanted to have something in my hand to show I was a waiter," he said, visibly delighted to see copies of the postcards after so many years. As he scanned them, he pointed out "Seecut" Williams, an old friend, now dead, who was the restaurant's cook. Williams, whose nickname came from mumbling the words, "See the cook," lived next door to the Collins household, where Lewis's children were growing up.^[3] Lewis Brown was still mentally sharp when he was interviewed, and his pride in his son showed. But there was pain in his voice as well, and it was not easy for him to hide it.

Willie Brown has spoken little of his father, saying only that Lewis Brown abandoned him in childhood.^[4] The subject of his father is one of those few that make the hardened politician visibly uncomfortable. His father, after all, was not much of a father. He left town when young Willie was about four or five. Even when Lewis was in town, he did not have much to do with his children. It has become a part of the legend and lore of Willie Brown that he is the "son of a railroad porter," as if the profession of railroad porter could excuse his father for his absence from Willie Brown's life. However, not the least of the difficulties with the legend is that Brown's father was a waiter, not a railroad porter. He did not work for a railroad until long after he had left Mineola and his children, and then only briefly. The real story is a good deal more telling about the origins of Willie Brown's talent and character than the legend.

Brown inherited his father's intellect, his gift for remembering names in an instant, and his sense of elegance. Willie Brown's relationship with his father not only influenced his psychological character but also helped shape his view of public policy. CNN journalist Judy Woodruff once asked whether the lack of fathers in welfare-dependent households was the root cause of poverty. "I grew up in a single-[parent] home without a father," he replied during a televised interview. "I'm not sure that I was disadvantaged."^[5]

The underlying suggestion left in such exchanges is that Willie Brown owed nothing to his father and scarcely knew anything about him. However, Willie Brown was considerably more familiar with his father than he let on in public. Their relationship was complex, enigmatic, and illuminating about his political talents, his attitude about family and marriage, and his defensiveness on some political issues that strike close to home.

Brown's father was born in Mineola on December 22, 1908, and he was named Willie Lewis Brown Jr.^[6]His father, the first Willie Lewis Brown, was a railroad worker who was forty when his son was born. The first Willie Brown was born in Louisiana, probably in 1868, three years after the Civil War. "I have part of his name, but they gave me his middle name. I was mostly known as Lewis Brown. They didn't call me 'Willie.'"^[7]

Lewis Brown's mother, Ella Roberts—the politician's grandmother—was born in Smith County, Texas, in 1862, during the Civil War, and may well have been born a slave. They had three girls and Lewis. Little else is known about either of Willie Brown's paternal grandparents. Lewis Brown never really knew his father, who died when Lewis was about ten. Lewis lived with his mother until he left Mineola as an adult.

Those who knew Lewis Brown as a young man remembered him for an extraordinary memory for names and details. Lewis Brown knew everyone, white and black, and a good deal about everything and everyone in Mineola. "In those days you didn't have to meet people officially like we do now. You just know 'em when they're born," he said.

His daughters firmly believe that those talents were inherited by his son in abundance. "Willie is outgoing. My dad is like that—quick, snappy," said Lovia Brown Boyd, one of his daughters.^[8] Lewis Brown, she declared, "snaps like Willie, features and all. Willie is just like him, the way he talks when you listen to both of them."

Standing just over six feet tall, Lewis Brown was larger and more muscular than his son, whose small physique he inherited from his slightly built mother. But in their faces there was no mistaking the relationship of father and son. Both had a high forehead and flaring nostrils. Their eyes could instantly flash from mischievous warmth to furious ice. Most striking of all, father and son possessed huge smiles, making those they met feel instantly comfortable. They could make a person laugh at their jokes even when they were not particularly funny.

As a young man, Lewis Brown wanted to go to college and become a doctor, but in those years Negroes in Mineola were barred from going past the tenth grade. Lewis left town to pursue his education in Marshall, Texas, and to live with an uncle who flourished selling land to blacks. Lewis enrolled in a college preparatory program at a local black college, and he received a high school diploma, a considerable accomplishment for his day. But his uncle's fortunes collapsed, and, Lewis said, he was "run out of town" by whites envious of his previous good fortune. After his uncle moved to Mexico, Lewis returned to Mineola, probably in 1925 or 1926.

Lewis got a job as a porter at the Bailey Hotel, a boxy three-story red brick building just south of the railroad station on the edge of the "colored side" of Mineola. At the Bailey a traveling salesman could get a bed for a few

dollars, and a woman for a few more dollars. The Bailey Hotel paid Lewis $4 for working seven days a week. If he wanted a day off, Lewis had to pay a substitute.

"I knew how to make extra money. See, I would sell a little whiskey to the patrons, and I had girls who would come down and work like what they call prostitutes now. What the girl would do is give me $1 and she'd keep $2 for herself. So if a man come in and ask me, 'Say, can you get me a girl?' I'd say, 'Sure, I can get you one.' I would make extra money in that line—money to shoot dice with and everything. I'd make $15 to $20 a week." He made four or five times his regular wages by pimping.

Lewis Brown worked at the Bailey for several years. But by the early 1930s Brown found a better job at Al's Place, waiting tables and earning $10 a week plus tips. Working as a waiter was also a step up in status from carrying suitcases and arranging for call girls. Al's catered to traveling oil workers and to the better-off whites of Mineola. It was a modern roadhouse, complete with a drive-in designed for the new age of motorists. Around back, Al's rented small bungalows to motorists for the night. Years later, the highway was relocated and the restaurant was torn down, but until then Al's was the best place in town.^[9]

Al's was run by a family from Minnesota, the Turks, who brought a small measure of racial progress to Mineola. Blacks were not served in the dining room of any restaurant in Mineola, Al's not excepted. At most, blacks could get a meal in the kitchen. But the Turks took a step forward, serving Negroes in their cars at the outdoor drive-in just like whites. The Turks not only served blacks but also hired them for more than just menial labor. The Turks trusted black employees in every job in the restaurant, including those involving money, and considered their employees part of their family.

"I'd punch the cash register like anybody else," Lewis Brown recalled. "[Whites] said, 'Lookit—they got a nigger in there running the cash register.' They'd say, 'You niggers have it good here, don't you?' 'Yeah, we do all right, we do okay'—that's all we said."

A half-century later, Al's nephew, Art Turk, said there was no question that Lewis Brown was the smartest waiter the place ever had. "He was always so polite. He could take all them orders and get 'em right," Turk observed. Of all the waiters who had come and gone over the years, Lewis Brown still stood out in Art Turk's mind for how well he treated customers.^[10] "I don't know where he'd get their names—but he would," Turk continued. "And he would hang their coats up for them, and when they got done eating, he would take that coat and brush it whether there was anything on it or not. And his tips were so much better. Back then, ten cents or a quarter was a usual tip. But he never got less than bills. And they wouldn't let anybody but Brown wait on them."

Among the stories told about Lewis is that he once brought finger bowls to the table for patrons eating fried chicken, but they drank out of the

bowls—to the muffled chuckles of everyone who worked at Al's.^[11] Lewis Brown knew what to do with a finger bowl even if the white people did not.

Each day, Lewis Brown wore a fresh white shirt, a dark bow tie, and a white duck jacket. He polished his distinctive white shoes before going to work and was careful in keeping mud off them on his walk to the restaurant. "I wanted it all to match," Lewis recalled. Clothes and names, he said, were important—fine points his politician son also embraced.

In his off-hours Lewis went "up the hill" to Itsie and Son's Shack. He had known the Collins family, including Itsie's and Son's sister, Minnie Collins, since childhood.^[12] Lewis was a year older than Minnie, but the two were not particularly close growing up. She was a party girl; she loved to go to dances and enjoyed the company of boys. He had serious ambitions and moved away to go to school. While he was away, Minnie Collins became pregnant and was forced to marry in 1926. Her brief marriage to Roy Tuck ended at roughly the time Lewis returned to Mineola. When Lewis returned, with his solid physique, dashing style, and sense of humor, he proved irresistible to Minnie, and they were soon enjoying a sexual relationship.

Lewis lived on Wells Street, a block away from Minnie. It was easy enough for him to slip out of his mother's house and cross an open field to see Minnie, who lived on Baker Street with her mother, Anna Lee. Lewis eventually fathered three children with Minnie. But the two never married, and they never lived together under the same roof. For Lewis Brown it was still an uncomfortable subject nearly sixty years later. He said that Minnie's mother, Anna Lee, did not approve of him. She wanted him to stay out of her domain. "She didn't care for me too much. She was kind of a tough customer, anyway."

Minnie and Lewis Brown stood little chance of setting up their own household during the Great Depression. In Mineola black grandmothers commonly raised their grandchildren, sending their grown daughters off to find work as maids or cooks on the white side of town or in Dallas. Sons lived with their mothers and were expected to find jobs that brought the household income. According to the 1940 census, two-thirds of Wood County's Negro women over the age of fourteen were domestic workers. Two-thirds of the black men worked on farms or in farm-related jobs.^[13] Like other young black women her age, Minnie Collins was sent by her mother to work as a maid for a Mineola white family. She was paid $3 a week and brought the money home. "We were always working, we always had a nice house to live in," Minnie once told an interviewer.^[14] "But I was happy I left. I enjoyed the time I lived here, but wouldn't go back."

The grandmother-centered extended family was, in fact, the common family structure for African Americans throughout the South, a structure with its roots in slavery.^[15] Black families were periodically broken up by slave owners, and a slave could expect to be sold at least once in his or her lifetime. Rearing children became the job of the full slave community—mothers and

fathers when available, but mostly grandmothers and older uncles, aunts, and neighbors. The offspring of such unions were not stigmatized. The basic family structure lived on through segregation, proving a practical method for rearing children in a farm-based economy in which working-age black adults commonly needed to leave home to find work. That Lewis Brown did not marry and stayed away from his children was not unusual. But though his general lack of engagement with his children was typical for his time, his absence nonetheless formed the basis of a lingering resentment for the child who most resembled him in appearance, intellect, and temperament: Willie Brown.

Lewis Brown was exceptional in ways that his son did not fully appreciate. He held what for a man was a rare service-sector job in a rural economy, giving him more familiar contact with whites than most of his black contemporaries. His respect among whites may even have created a window of tolerance among them for his precocious son, although the son was probably unaware of it. And Lewis was involved with his children to some extent.

"We would see him not often," his daughter Gwendolyn recalled.^[16] "But at Christmas time—the only thing I remember him giving us—he would always give the girls fabric material that you have dresses made [of], and he would give Willie a shirt. He didn't make any contribution toward our lives as such, financially or physically. It was just really Minnie and my grandmother and my uncles."

The children had pet names for their mother and grandmother: "Ma Minnie" and "Ma Dear," but like everyone else they addressed their father as "Lewis."

As the economy collapsed around them in the Depression, jobs for blacks became scarcer. Blacks began leaving Texas and the rest of the South, and Lewis Brown became a part of that exodus. In his view there was nothing holding him in Mineola.^[17] Anna Lee would not allow him much participation in the upbringing of his children, driving wedges between him and Minnie. He saw little future in Mineola beyond waiting tables in a declining town. Even his employer believed he could do better, and deservedly. "He was so much better than [to] be in Mineola. He should have been in a bigger town," said Art Turk years later.^[18]

Lewis Brown went to Los Angeles at the invitation of his sister Idora, who told him he could earn better money there. He was later unsure of the year, but he most likely left Mineola for good in 1937 or early 1938, when Willie Brown was about four years old.^[19] Within a year of Lewis leaving Mineola, Willie Brown's mother also left town to work for white families in Dallas as a maid, earning $15 a week. Her reasons for leaving are not entirely clear. Her daughters maintain that the family needed the extra money and that she could earn more in Dallas, all of which was true. But it was also likely that once Minnie and Lewis broke up, Minnie felt the need to leave, too. Minnie was never to live in Mineola again, though she would make brief weekly

trips home. As an adult, Willie Brown has kept submerged whatever psychic scars he must bear from both parents abandoning him before he even started school. His mother, at least, returned to Mineola to see her children. Lewis never did.

Minnie Collins lived "in service," as it was called, with the families for whom she worked in Dallas. She wore a uniform that was freshly pressed each day, and she lived in servants' quarters in the back of the house. She earned the loyalty of the white families for whom she worked, some of whom came to her funeral decades later.

In her weekly trips home, Minnie always brought part of her earnings to her mother along with presents for her children. But it was not long before Minnie was involved with a new suitor in Dallas, and she became pregnant for the fifth and final time. She gave birth to James Walton, her last child, in January 1939 in Dallas. Soon after, Minnie sent her newest baby back to her mother in Mineola. Her mother reared all of her children.^[20]

Meanwhile, Lewis Brown lived for a time with his sister and her husband in Los Angeles, finding work as a waiter at a Hollywood drive-in. However, he did not get the same respect he had gotten as a waiter at the best restaurant in Mineola, Texas. He then became a porter on a Pullman railroad car, considered just about the best job a Negro could get at the time.^[21] Porters could earn up to $810 a month plus tips, a salary as high as that of many black doctors.^[22] But he did not care for the extended travel, and the hours were long. The average porter worked a minimum of three hundred hours a month. After two years of riding the rails, Lewis quit.

At the outbreak of World War II, Lewis Brown enlisted in the still-segregated Army (and got a birth certificate in the process), and he spent the war at a camp near El Paso. Anna Lee tried to garnishee his wages for child support. The Army rejected her appeal, although he claimed he was willing to comply. By then he was married to a woman in Los Angeles, and she was not pleased by the potential loss of her soldier's income. Lewis found himself caught between two strong-willed women, and his children were the losers. Anna Lee blamed Lewis for not caring for his children, he later said, and the bitterness remained for years.^[23] Willie Brown himself was never fully aware of the conflict between his grandmother and his father, but the conflict played a role in his settling in San Francisco rather than Los Angeles.

After the war Lewis got a job in a stove foundry in Los Angeles, from which he eventually retired. He had a reputation as something of a gambler, and he kept in touch with his old friend, Itsie Collins, in San Francisco.^[24] Lewis Brown lived out his final years in poor health in a convalescent home in Huntington Park, in Southern California. In 1994, at the age of eighty-four and a year before his death, he recounted in an interview the events of his life as best as he could remember them. Some details were fuzzy, others sharp. Although physically frail at the time, he did not fatigue mentally. He sat in a wheelchair, asking the author to push him around the

hospital and out into a courtyard. He occasionally interrupted his tale to flirt with the nurses. He called them his "girlfriends."

Lewis Brown's pension was quietly supplemented by his politician son. He was hurt by the stories of estrangement from Willie Brown, and was anxious to prove that his son cared about him no matter what journalists wrote. To prove it, Lewis pulled from a bedside drawer envelopes with a return address of Willie Brown's law office in San Francisco. Checks came in those envelopes, he said. Even so, his son rarely visited.

Administrators at the convalescent home were protective of Lewis Brown's privacy and screened his visitors at the behest of the Speaker of the California State Assembly. They had standing instructions to shield Lewis from media inquiries. But few reporters knew he was even alive, let alone where to find him. Brown also had one of his closest political associates, Congresswoman Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, keep tabs on his father. Interviewed in her Washington, D.C., office, she warmly described Lewis as "my friend." When Lewis was healthier, Waters took him to political fund-raisers so that he could hear his son speak.^[25] Lewis lived in her district, and she helped father and son stay connected. As with many of Brown's friends, especially those closest to him, the line between a personal and a political favor did not exist.

Lewis Brown died peacefully^[26] on January 23, 1994. In contrast with his mother's death a year earlier, Willie Brown staged no public ceremony. Lewis Brown was laid to rest quietly.

Chapter Three—
Anna Lee

One day I said there has got to be a better side of life. You know, where you just look over the tree? There has just got to be something on the other side. There has just got to be a better life than this.
Lovia Brown Boyd
Sister of Willie Brown

World War II was a wrenching turning point for African Americans, and Mineola's blacks were swept along in the national tide. King Cotton collapsed throughout the South and life changed forever. One of the greatest migrations in American history began, as blacks left the South and began filling northern and western cities. "If we understand the death of cotton, we understand many things about modern America," writes Dale Maharidge in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book about southern tenant farmers.^[1]

The corner of East Texas where Willie Brown grew up mirrored that national trend, and the collapse of cotton profoundly touched the life of his family. By the middle of the Depression, farm acreage in Wood County had already declined by almost half; during the war, cotton nearly fell off the map.^[2] By 1945 Wood County's cotton amounted to a mere 7,500 acres; more than 80,000 acres of cotton had gone out of production in a twenty-year span. The cash value of the crop was cut in half. New Deal price supports kept some farmers afloat but did nothing for the blacks who depended on cotton-related jobs. As cotton production declined, so did jobs at Mineola's cotton gin plant, which primarily employed blacks. Wood County's population steadily fell as well, from a pre-Depression peak of 27,700 in 1920 to a low of 21,000 in 1943.

One-fourth of the population had simply upped and disappeared.^[3] Among them were Itsie's and Son's customers. The exodus would ultimately include the Collins brothers and eventually their nephew, Willie Brown.

At the outset of the war, East Texas planters held high hopes that cotton would revive as a war industry. A headline in the Mineola Monitor newspaper, "Cotton Second Only to Steel in Winning War," reflected the belief.^[4] Cotton production did pick up in the early months of the war, but it then nose-dived for good as a major industry in Wood County. By November 1943 Mineola's cotton oil plant was crushing soybeans shipped south from Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio—everywhere but East Texas.^[5] Throughout the South cotton production moved westward from the mid-1930s onward. In the deepest South, Alabama, there were 230 million acres of cotton in 1936; by the 1980s there were 300,000 acres left. The old Cotton Belt became a region of pine woods, and California's Central Valley and West Texas became the new kings of cotton.^[6]

The rural collapse was told in the decreasing number of farmers still plowing in Wood County, where the decline was sharpest among black farmers. In 1925, there were 577 African Americans who owned their own farm^[5] ; by 1945 that number had dwindled to 263. The decline in black sharecroppers^[7] was even more pronounced: from 135 in 1930, just before the Depression, to 19 by the end of World War II in 1945. Petroleum was discovered in Wood County in 1940, and by the end of the decade it had replaced cotton as the economic underpinning of Wood County.^[8]

The cotton bust was an economic cataclysm throughout the South, and no one felt it more than blacks.^[9] African Americans headed north to Chicago and New York and west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The migration represented a vast emptying of the South between the Depression and the Korean War, an epic exodus rivaling the migration of blacks following the Civil War.

To Itsie and Son Collins there was nothing grand about it. The Shack was doomed. Those who stayed behind in Mineola were primarily women and children, such as Willie Brown, his three sisters, and his brother. Older blacks who stayed behind in town still remember World War II as "the bad times."^[10]

Itsie and Son did their best to keep the Shack operating, but events were rapidly overtaking them. Itsie Collins said he paid bribes to keep from being drafted so that he could keep the dance hall open.^[11] "I was paying to stay out of the Army," Itsie Collins admitted in an interview a half-century later. Collins capitalized on the reluctance of southern draft boards to induct Negroes into the military. Itsie Collins was not unusual among either blacks or whites in East Texas, where draft evasion was an open secret in World War II. Courts regularly gave prison sentences to draft dodgers in the region.^[12] A few refused the draft on religious grounds. In nearby Winnsboro the Texas Rangers were called out in December 1942 to quell a riot sparked by Jehovah's

Witnesses passing out draft evasion literature.^[13] But other draft-dodgers, like Itsie Collins, had purely personal reasons for avoiding military service.

Collins said someone in the Selective Service caught on to his methods and shook up the local draft board: "Some white guy got onto what was going on. Oh, they had a big fight. So they had to move the draft board out of my county." There are no records verifying Itsie Collins's story, but local newspapers hinted at scandal in July 1942, when the draft board was inexplicably moved from the county courthouse in Quitman to the U.S. Post Office in Mineola, effectively ending local control. The Mineola Monitor mentioned in its front-page story that the move "came as a complete surprise to all members of the local board."^[14] By August the board was reclassifying men at an increasing pace to make them available for military service.^[15] The revitalized Wood County draft board also stepped up the induction of Negroes and publicly pursued those considered to be evading registration.^[16] Itsie Collins reached the point where the only legal way for him to stay out of the military was to get a job in a war-related industry. "They told me I had to work or fight." He decided to go to California, where he could get a war-industry job. His decision was to have far-reaching consequences not just for himself and his family but also for California. It was because of Itsie Collins that Willie Brown eventually moved to California.

Itsie Collins became part of a huge migration of blacks from the South into the San Francisco Bay Area. During the war the booming shipyards of Northern California and the aircraft factories of Southern California were a magnet for southern blacks, and they were all the more drawn by the absence of legal segregation. The stories of those who had gone ahead drew others left behind. "We had heard about oranges hanging over the trees," said Hamilton Boswell, whose family moved from Dallas to Los Angeles ahead of most other African Americans before the war.^[17] Boswell would cross paths in California with Willie Brown and his family much later. Even more fanciful stories of California filtered back to East Texas. "We thought the streets were paved with gold," said one of Brown's sisters.^[18]

One of Itsie Collins's childhood friends from Mineola, Jack Harris, was already in San Francisco and arranged for a job for Itsie at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard, south of the financial district. The shipyard built warships at a record pace, launching them for battle in the South Pacific. Most likely, Itsie Collins got the job in 1942. His brother Son also moved to San Francisco and got a war-industry job.^[19] The Shack in Mineola was out of business.

Itsie Collins worked at the shipyard at Third Street until his thirty-eighth birthday, July 13, 1943, the day he was ineligible for the military. He quit the yard and took up where he had left off in Mineola, running a gambling joint, only this time in San Francisco. The gambler returned home to Mineola from time to time to show off his newest car and his latest clothes, but he was no longer the central source of income for his mother's household. Itsie's role

in Willie Brown's life faded for the moment. But his image in Brown's young eyes was larger than ever. "Itsie was never in Mineola for long," Brown was to say, "and he always demonstrated great wealth by our standards. He always had a very fancy car. He always wore very fancy clothing, and he'd come down to leave money for his relatives and then he would leave. He did it because that's the way his mother raised him. That was standard, and that's been that way in the family all the years I've known; I know no other way."^[20]

Back in Texas, Minnie Collins, a Dallas maid, became the major financial provider for her children and her mother, Anna Lee, living in Mineola. The children called their grandmother "Ma Dear" because that was what Minnie called her. They called their mother "Ma Minnie."^[21] Not until they had children of their own did they call her "Mama Minnie." The children had nicknames of their own. Besides "Brookie," Baby Dalle was "Baby Doll," Lovia was "Lovey," Gwen was "Bumblebee," and James was "Jitter."

Anna Lee ruled the house and was rearing Minnie's children. She was not unusual in rearing her daughter's children. Grandmothers raised every child in the neighborhood. "I don't know whether grandmothers then thought they were everybody's parents," said Willie Brown's sister Gwendolyn Brown Hill.^[22] "They just automatically took over, I guess." No one was more strong-willed or more important to the neighborhood than Willie Brown's grandmother. "She raised her children and everybody else's children," recalled one of her friends, Rosa Lee Staples, who reared ten of her own. "She was sweet. Yes, she helped with me."^[23]

Sitting in the shade on a muggy Mineola day not long ago, ninety-one-year-old Rosa Staples remembered Anna Lee as an older lady who had no husband. The women knew just about everything about each other, but little about the men in each other's lives. They were not around much. "I didn't know the father of them children but I knew the mothers well," said Staples. "Like I say, I never did know Miss Anna Lee's husband."

With Son and Itsie now gone, Anna Lee Collins survived on the money her daughter earned as a maid in Dallas and whatever income her daughter's children could pick up. In the summer, Willie Brown and his sisters walked to the foot of Read Street at the main highway before dawn, and a truck picked them up and took them to Lindale fifteen miles south to pick berries.^[24] "There wasn't much cotton around as there was the potatoes and the peas and the berries," said Lovia Brown Boyd.^[25]

The average pay for migrant farmworkers in Wood County was supposedly about $5 a day.^[26] However, Willie Brown's older sisters said that the pay was more like seventy-five cents a day. They also agreed that Willie Brown, who was about ten or eleven at the time, commonly picked more than everyone

else. He spurned breaks and usually brought home more money than the others. His sisters were not nearly as enthusiastic. "I hated the field," said Lovia.^[27]

As he grew older, Willie worked in the pea-packing plant down the hill from his house for a few extra dollars. The plant is still there today, and some of his schoolmates ended up working there for their entire lives. Brown also swept floors and shined shoes on the white side of town at Parker's Barber Shop for twenty-five cents a pair plus $4 a week in salary.^[28]

"The real mean ones would sometimes come in with cowboy boots on," Brown remembered.^[29] "And they'd want to pay you the same price for cowboy boots, which of course had horse manure and cow manure and all other kinds of horrible stuff on them. They wanted those boots to look new, and you'd have to work really hard. And then they'd end up probably throwing your money into a spittoon for you to fish out. Well, you did it and didn't allow that to bother you too much."

Brown endured, but he remembered the indignities. Growing up black in Mineola, he said, "caused us to be so competitive wherever we were."^[30] Decades later, when he was Speaker of the California Assembly, he could not help but gloat, his eyes twinkling: "When I lived in Mineola, Texas, I couldn't have a glimmer that one of these days I would be handling $30 billion of mostly white people's money!"^[31] He never hated whites, but he was always aware that his blackness set him apart. And it pushed him.

"Yes, we knew that we were treated differently because we were black," Brown's half-brother, James, reflected years later from his office in Tacoma city hall.^[32] "But that wasn't a statement on us. That was a statement on someone else. What did we really have going? What were the ingredients? People say youngsters need role models. Well, we had role models. We certainly had a strong family structure, high expectations, all those things that the learned people say you need to make it. I just don't recall us ever feeling sorry for whatever our plight might have been."

Anna Lee's grandchildren also had chores around the house. Anna Lee put up with no nonsense. "She didn't even have to punish us. She could just look at you and you knew what to do," remembered Lovia.^[33] There was no running water, so they hauled water from a well. Cutting and stacking wood in a shed was an endless demanding chore. In most homes on the South side, including Anna Lee's, cooking and heating were done entirely on wood stoves. Her house had two wood stoves, one for cooking and the other for heating. Each stove required a different size of wood, and the children sorted the wood before stacking it. By the time Willie Brown was born, the countryside around Mineola was nearly stripped bare of trees for firewood.^[34] Today the woods have grown back amazingly thick, but in the 1930s the view from Anna Lee's hill was spectacular. Her grandchildren climbed the walnut tree and saw the trains chugging in from Louisiana heading west toward Dallas, and beyond to California. Dreams of escape, of going "over the tree"

as one of Anna Lee's granddaughters put it, were made atop a limb on the walnut tree in back of her house.^[35]

The high point of the week for the children was Minnie's visit home. The white families in Dallas gave their black maids living "in service" Thursday off so that they would be available for weekend duty. Thursday became known as "Maid Day" in Dallas, the day when all the maids were gone. Minnie caught an early morning train, riding in a separate "colored" car.^[36] She arrived at her mother's home in Mineola before her children were home from school. She always brought a small gift for each child. Her visits were like Christmas once a week. "I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life," James remembered. Minnie stayed the night and all the next day, and then departed from her family on Friday evening aboard a train that pulled into Mineola at 6:18 P.M., returning to her life as a servant. From their backyard on the hill, her children watched the train coming from miles off to take their mother away. Lovia could not stand living in Mineola, and as a teenager she went to live with her mother in Dallas.^[37]

As an adult, Willie Brown spoke of his mother in glowing terms, and indeed they were close as adults. Minnie provided a softness for her children that offset Anna Lee's sternness. Minnie became more important in the rearing of her children in her weekly visits than she had ever been while living with them in Mineola. Her bright, outgoing personality rubbed off on her son. Like him, she was a story teller who did not always let facts get in the way of a good yarn.^[38] Willie Brown credits her with his fastidious nature, although both his parents were meticulously neat. Brown was particularly impressed with how his mother carried herself. He once told an interviewer, "She went to the white woman's kitchen and looked like she was on her way to shop at Neiman's. She got there and put on her uniform, and it was equally as spiffy. When she left there, she took it off and you didn't know she was working as somebody's maid. The wearing of overalls is not part of our image."^[39]

Minnie Collins had another side her children gradually began to appreciate. She was devoted to duty. If the family she was serving needed her on a special occasion, then she was there, even if it meant taking time away from her own family. Those times away were painful for her children, and they did not always understand. "We couldn't see it," said Lovia. "We thought, 'Why don't you just tell them you're not coming in.' But she said, 'Oh no, I'm going in.'" Only later did her children understand. The family she worked for repaid her loyalty in kind, helping support her in her retirement.^[40]

Minnie and Anna Lee, neither of whom had much education, pushed Willie and his siblings to get as much schooling as they could. The two women saw education as the best way out of segregation. However, it was not easy for blacks to get a good education. Many of Mineola's black children earned money in the fall by picking cotton hundreds of miles away in West Texas. If the harvest went late, they missed school, and as a result many black

children had been held back two, three, or four grade levels by the time they reached high school age. Anna Lee forbade her grandchildren to pick cotton. "She would not let us pick cotton because we'd miss school," said Gwendolyn.^[41]

Their school was not much, but it was all there was. Mineola Colored High School was a small red-brick building where teachers taught multiple grades in a handful of classrooms. There was no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no running water. Children relieved themselves in outhouses constructed behind the school. As an adult, Willie Brown had a simple description for the school: "the shits."^[42]

Separate was anything but equal in the schools of Mineola. Whites went to schools that were vastly better; until the 1940s, blacks were not even allowed to go past the tenth grade. Brown's oldest sister, Baby Dalle, took a bus every day fifteen miles past the white high school to Quitman to get her high school diploma at a "colored school." Lovia, the second daughter, moved to Dallas to live with her mother and got her high school diploma in that city. Gwendolyn, the third daughter, was the first member of the family to graduate from high school in Mineola.^[43]

The disparity in education could be seen in how the town distributed funds between the white and colored schools.^[44] In 1940, the year Willie Brown entered the first grade, Mineola spent an average of $32.40 per white student while spending $9.55 per colored student. There was one teacher for every thirty-five white students compared with one teacher for every sixty colored students. The only library in Mineola was at the white high school. Desks, books, and other supplies for blacks, if available, were shopworn castoffs from the white schools. As often as not, books lacked covers and pages were missing or torn. The furniture was usually in disrepair by the time it got to the colored school.

Anna Lee was dead serious about her grandchildren attending to their studies. For the exceptionally bright Willie, that was not a problem. Finding something to read, however, was not always easy. There was no lending library in Mineola open to Negroes. "In those days Willie was a very studious kid because his grandmother was very strict on him," said Clarence "Cookie" Slayton.^[45] As an adult, Willie Brown also credited his grandmother for the discipline she imposed on him. "Everybody in my family had always insisted that the kids had to have an education. They absolutely beat that into us—that you had to go to college," he said.^[46]

As an adult, Willie Brown has had little good to say about Mineola or his school. "Mineola had nothing, absolutely nothing, going for it," he said in a 1986 interview for the Texas Monthly .^[47] His comments infuriated the white establishment in his hometown, but in many respects he was less harsh about Mineola with the Texas magazine than with California journalists. In the magazine interview, Brown credited Mineola Colored High School with giving him something of lasting value. "It gave you discipline and made you

believe in yourself. It gave you confidence that you could learn," he said. "And that's what I learned in that black school. I didn't fully appreciate it, I suspect, at the time, but on reflection—especially now—as I see what kids are getting in California schools—I'm telling you that there is something to be said for those all-black schools. The black mothers and fathers and teachers might not have been qualified, but they knew they had to equip me to survive in this world. You learned that it was really awful to drop out. Period. We didn't have any dropouts in Mineola. It was ingrained in us that there was no such thing as people who were so totally stupid that they could not perform. That quality came from the heart and soul of the black community, and it's still there."

Brown and his classmates still remember their school years fondly despite the hardships.^[48] Brown and the "I.E. Boys" were inseparable. "We'd just go all over this city," his best friend, Frank "Jackie" Crawford, remembered. "We always had jokes about each other, but it was all fun."^[49] Brown's best friends remembered him as bookish when the fun was over.

As a student, Brown developed his gift for words. He was good at math and considered it his favorite subject. His sisters recall that he was an avid reader, consuming whatever books he could find. "He would spend his time reading, and trying to find something to read, anything he could pick up that had print on it to read," says Gwendolyn, who became a teacher and school principal in Dallas. "And he could find something to discuss from it or question from it."

He also had an unquenchable and independent curiosity as a child, with nearly disastrous results for his sisters when they took him one year to "Negro Day" at the state fair in Dallas. It was the one day when blacks were allowed to go to the fair. His sisters lost sight of him. They scoured the fairgrounds looking for their younger brother, panicking over visions of the punishment awaiting them from their grandmother for losing him. Finally, they found their young charge completely absorbed studying an exhibit. He was unfazed, never aware that he had been "lost."^[50]

Willie was a bratty brother, tagging after his sisters when they tried to escape their grandmother's household for a secret rendezvous with a young man. "Willie would almost follow us," Gwendolyn recalled. "The fellows couldn't take us from home, but we would try to see them after we got there. And he would report it to her. He would report it! I think some of the guys even tried to bribe him."^[51]

When he was not annoying his sisters, he displayed a gift for creating games that positively delighted them. First he would study a game, and then he would suggest a new set of rules. He kept things interesting. "He would stand to the side, and I guess he would be figuring it out, and then he would come out with an idea in the game that we had never thought about," Gwendolyn remembered.^[52]

As a teenager, Brown tried out for the football team. "All males in Texas play football. You have to play football, that's just part of the deal in high school," he explained.^[53] But Brown weighted a mere 110 pounds, and the Mineola Colored High team was filled with players who were larger and stronger from working in the fields. A number of the players spent five or six or even seven years playing football in high school, unable to graduate because they had missed so much school picking cotton. There were no limits on how long a player could continue to play football, and a number of them were into their twenties and hitting the scales well over two hundred pounds. They could have easily whipped the white high school team across town if they had ever been allowed to try. Brown's football career lasted for one play in a practice scrimmage.

"First time out there in the football game, the goddamned fullback on the other team breaks through the line, breaks through the next line of defense, and there's nobody but me and him. Now he could have gone around me, obviously, but he apparently chose not to. And he got close enough, and I put my head down and closed my eyes."

Willie Brown woke up at half-time.

"Sit right here, boy, and don't you move, you almost got killed," the coach ordered.

The coach never let him play again, but Willie Brown talked the coach into letting him keep his uniform.

Instead of playing, Brown followed the team to its games and then returned to the school to describe it for his classmates who could not go. He was soon giving his play-by-play description for the entire school at assemblies. "From beginning to end—the kickoffs and the scores and sort of like how they do it now, play by play," said his sister Gwendolyn.^[54] He was entertaining, funny, and melodramatic. His performances remain one of his schoolmates' fondest memories. His classmates nicknamed him "the reporter."^[55] He also wrote short items about the games for the Mineola Monitor newspaper, which regularly ran chatty stories about events in the "colored" community, although he never got a byline. It was Brown's first exposure to the media.

Brown was outgoing and made friends easily. Virginia London, who was older than Willie but had fallen back a few grades because she had picked cotton and missed school, remembered hanging out with him during lunch hours at a hamburger stand called "Bar Twenty" near the high school.^[56] The bar was little more than a wooden hut with loose floorboards and a jukebox. London still lives in a small wooden house near the site of the old Bar Twenty. "We'd go there and dance," she remembered, showing a visitor where it once stood. After partying, Willie often invited his schoolmates to his house. "We used to go up to the house all the time, and his grandmother would always tell us fun stuff, and we was laughing all the time," London said.

Brown used his gift of gab to get out of trouble with his grandmother, not always with success. When a neighbor's rooster crawled under the porch at his house, an impulsive Willie shot the chicken with his BB gun through a crack in the floorboards, killing it with a perfect shot to the head.^[57] The neighbor, Mr. Adams, was furious when the deed was discovered and demanded that Anna Lee find out who killed his bird. Equally furious, she assembled her grandchildren and demanded that the culprit step forward. She asked each grandchild what he or she knew about the dead rooster. Finally she got to Willie. "Come here Willie—don't you lie to me. Did you kill Mr. Adams' rooster?"

"Ma Dear, I shot straight up in the air and that BB came straight back down and hit that rooster right on top of the head," he pleaded. It was an accident, he insisted; he was only practicing. His grandmother didn't buy a word of it, however, and Willie got a licking.

Willie's talent for words was put to more productive use in school and church. He could hear a lesson, synthesize it, and repeat it back more clearly than it was told in the first place. His talent proved an invaluable tool when he later entered politics. In church he was asked to review aloud each Sunday's lesson for all of the assembled children. "He would get up and take over the whole entire Sunday school," said Lovia. "He'd get the microphone and take over the whole time."^[58]

Willie Brown's style of oratory can be traced directly to his small C.M.E. church down the hill from his house. The letters now stand for "Christian Methodist Episcopal," but in Brown's youth they stood for "Colored Methodist Episcopal"—a southern segregated offshoot of the Methodist church. The church played a huge role in the life of Brown and family. With his penchant for showmanship, the church provided a perfect stage. More importantly, the black church provided the glue that held the community together in the face of segregation. It was an important early training ground for future leaders such as Willie Brown.^[59]

As a teenager, Brown was painstakingly neat and began to develop his love of clothes. He had two pairs of khaki pants and carefully ironed them. He ordered clothes out of a Sears catalogue. Forty years after he purchased them, he could still remember a pair of burgundy boots with a gold chain on each. "It took Sears so long to get the shoes that my feet had grown two sizes. But you had to wear them. They were cardboard but they looked good."^[60]

Brown's ambitions were big, though unfocused.^[61] "I think the only two things I really ever wanted to be—from a studied, planned standpoint—was either a math teacher or a clothing designer," he explained in an interview for this book.^[62] The remark probably revealed less about his vocational ambitions than it did about his strong need to enjoy the luxuries of life. One thing Willie Brown knew at an early age was that his dreams could not be fulfilled in Mineola, Texas.

Chapter Four—
Whitecapping

The white folk had a way of letting you know.
Gwendolyn Brown Hill
Sister of Willie Brown

It was one of those hot East Texas summer nights that never cool off, a night when people sit on their front porch until they can stay awake no longer. It was a night older blacks still talk about in hushed voices as if just remembering it still poses a danger. It began as a private dispute in a back alley, and it ended in a murder that ignited all of Mineola. Willie Brown, only ten years old at the time, remembers little detail about that night long ago, but the aftermath was seared into his memory forever.^[1]

A half-century later, many of the details about that summer night can be pieced together from memories, skimpy newspaper stories, and affidavits contained in a tin drawer in the dusty attic of the Wood County courthouse.^[2] On the night of Wednesday, July 5, 1944, James Bonner Christie, a white truck driver whose friends called him "J.B.," lost his life. Who really killed him will probably never be known.

The murder of Christie, and especially what followed, profoundly shaped Willie Brown's attitude about the relationship of blacks and whites in America. Much that followed in Brown's life—his involvement with civil rights demonstrations, his election campaigns, his self-image as an outsider, and even his going to California—was molded in the summer of 1944. As an adult, Brown was accused sometimes of having a "chip on his shoulder" about whites. He replied, "I don't have a chip, I got a redwood forest on my shoulder. It means it's permanent."^[3] A major part of how it grew can be traced to July 5, 1944.

Late that day Christie and a friend, Harmon Powell, went looking for Listress "Lobo" Jackson. Christie and Powell were white, and Jackson was black—a fact that mattered more than anything else in the world. The two white men claimed that a Negro named "Adelle" owed $50 to Christie for a car and $22.50 to Powell's gas station. For some reason they believed that Jackson could lead them to Adelle. Earlier in the evening Christie had chased Jackson down a street in Mineola, cursing and threatening him.

Around 11 P.M., looking for Jackson, Christie and Powell came through a back alley to the kitchen door where Jackson worked at Cowart's Cafe in the Beckham Hotel. The Beckham, in the center of town, was about as upscale as it got in Mineola. A three-story brick building, it sat on the north side—the white side—of the railroad tracks facing the Bailey Hotel, on the black side south of the tracks. Blacks could enter only through the back alley, and then only as a maid, porter, or cook.

Christie wanted his money, and his earlier confrontation only made him angrier. He demanded that Jackson come outside to relay a message to Adelle. When Jackson came outside, Christie cornered him. "We have got you now," Christie told Jackson, stepping between him and the door. Jackson protested; Christie cursed him and told him he'd kill him if he did not give his message to Adelle. Hearing the commotion, Robert Crabtree, who went by the name "Barthie," stepped outside into the alley. He was Jackson's father-in-law, and he, too, was black. Poorly educated, Barthie Crabtree could barely sign his name.

Exactly what happened next is not clear. As best as can be pieced together, Crabtree was thrown to the ground and then almost immediately a scuffle ensued. When it was over, J.B. Christie—the white man—lay dead in a pool of blood, his throat slashed with a kitchen knife. Powell, the other white man, was beaten. At least one witness, Jackson's wife, said that Crabtree was struck to the ground and never had a chance to defend himself, much less kill Christie.^[4] That night, however, the fact that mattered the most was that one, and possibly two, black men were arrested for murdering a white man.

In the days that followed, the Mineola Monitor could not have done much more to inflame whites if it had tried. The newspaper reported in a front-page story that the whites were attacked by Negroes as they were exiting the rear door of Cowart's Cafe. Why the whites would be leaving by the "colored" door was left unexplained.^[5] The newspaper claimed that the Negroes had threatened the whites earlier in the day—not the other way around, as witnesses later swore in court documents. The newspaper graphically described the aftermath in the alley: "Blood stains on the ground and concrete at the scene of the murder told plainly a story of considerable scuffling and fighting during the affray." Finally, the newspaper gave a hint—but only a hint—of other trouble: "Because of the high feeling Wednesday night—still rampant Thursday morning—officers rushed the prisoner to an undesignated out-of-county jail."

The "high feeling" among whites made life a living hell for blacks in the days and weeks that followed. Young white toughs roamed the black neighborhood south of the railroad tracks shooting at homes. They torched Crabtree's house. They posted signs on trees and telephone poles reading, "No niggers in town after sundown."^[6] They went about the business of old-fashioned East Texas "whitecapping."

The town newspaper never reported what was happening in the black neighborhood in the days following Christie's death. Instead, the Mineola Monitor ran bland editorials defending the wisdom of segregation. In one such rambling editorial, the Monitor concluded, "Losing our heads over the race problem will not solve the problem, and we can be thankful that members of both races in Mineola have been thoughtful enough to avoid trouble since the unfortunate incident of last week."^[7]

But whites were losing their heads. A black waitress at the Beckham Hotel remembered that the hotel asked her not to come to work that week, fearful that she might become a victim of white retribution. Years later she told her story, ironically, in the lobby of the Beckham Hotel at a reception hosted by the hotel for the visiting former students of Mineola Colored High School. She did not find out about the killing immediately, but only later when she went home. "They never told me when I came to work because they felt like I wouldn't stay."^[8]

Marcus McCalla, who was five years older than Willie Brown and lived around the corner, remembered that the well-to-do whites in Mineola warned the white toughs to bypass the homes of their maids and servants. Keeping Negroes out of town after sunset was, of course, absurd since so many families and businesses relied upon them for help. "They wouldn't just go by and shoot up everybody's house because these rich white people hired black people who raised the white people's kids," he said. "They were protecting their help. My grandmother worked for the rich people in town—you see, the rich people didn't go for that. They were the ones that kept things from getting out of hand."^[9] But the wealthy were complicit in the violence by not stopping it completely.

Patty Ruth Newsome, who lived next door to Willie Brown and his family, remembered the numbing fear most of all. "There used to be truckloads of kids would come through here throwing things if you were out," she said. "I know I was so afraid. We would have to get in before dark. Mama would make us come in before dark and lock up because it seemed like they would kind of go from door to door."^[10]

Willie's mother, Minnie Collins, working as a maid in Dallas, somehow heard about the trouble back in Mineola. She took the unusual step of telephoning her mother in Mineola to check on her family. Anna Lee had no telephone. She went across the street to take the call at the only house in the neighborhood with a telephone. When she picked up the phone, "Ma Dear was talking real low, she wouldn't talk loud because she thought maybe

somebody—the white people—were listening on the phone," recalled Lovia, who was with her mother in Dallas at the time.^[11] Anna Lee whispered her reply to Minnie: "I'll tell you about it when you come down here." That's all she would say. "She didn't even want to discuss it on the phone. She was afraid, because [Crabtree's] house had got burned that night," Lovia remembered.

Decades later, a man who seemingly feared no one repeated the tale of terror of when he was ten years old.^[12] "For many days and weeks, any car coming down the streets—if you were black, you got as far away from the roadway as possible because one of the retaliatory processes engaged in was to knock you off the roadway with the car—hit you," said Willie Brown, telling the story to a crowd of reporters on the floor of the California State Assembly. Asked if he was ever hit, Brown crossed his arms, rocked back on his heels, and replied, "Hell no. I stayed off the roadway. You know, I've been half-assed smart all my life."

Brown has told the story over and over all his life, although he rarely put the story in the context of the Christie murder. Being chased off the road was one story Willie Brown did not embellish. "You knew you were going to be hassled. You were constantly the object," Brown once told an interviewer. "You had to worry about the automobile approaching, because many times it was being driven by a white person, particularly a young white person."^[13] And, he added, "Nighttimes were even worse in Mineola."

In May 1945 an all-white jury in Quitman recognized that Crabtree and Jackson were not culpable of murder, and it was not about to cause their execution. But the jury was not about to let them off, either. Crabtree, who was probably on the ground when Christie was killed, received a five-year suspended sentence, and Jackson, who was probably defending himself, was given a seven-year prison sentence.^[14] Their sentences were light for the time—a tacit acknowledgment by the jury that they were not murderers and that times were changing. A few years earlier in East Texas, they probably would have been lynched. But the verdicts and sentences hardly represented justice for two men defending themselves against two town bullies. The white-inflicted terror on the black side of town subsided, but the fear it instilled did not. The ever-present white toughs were always lurking.

There was one more incident in the 1940s that touched Anna Lee's family directly. Itsie Collins came home for a visit, and on his way out of town he took Gwendolyn back to college in Tyler in his newest car, a Hudson Super Six. Collins was now a San Francisco gambler, no longer a familiar fixture in Mineola. During his visit Collins heard a few comments in town from whites who were bothered that his car was better than any of theirs. "The white folk had a way of letting you know," Gwendolyn remembered.^[15] "It was the attitude once you came back in a good-looking car like that, because you were just not supposed to do that. And statements were made to him like,

'Itsie, you can never live here anymore.'" Collins paid them little mind. But then, as he drove out of town with Gwendolyn, the two were tailed by young whites. "We went through Lindale and they followed us almost all the way to Tyler. I was afraid, naturally," she said.

And Anna Lee fretted for her grandchildren. Most of all she was afraid for Willie. Her grandson was cocky and was prone to shooting off his mouth at whites. Her worries deepened as he became a teenager. He had a hankering for hanging around "uptown"—the small commercial center in Mineola that included places like the Beckham Hotel. He got a job washing dishes at the Henry Hotel, a flophouse up the street where brawls among whites were common.^[16] He cut the grass at the Victorian mansion of a white dentist.^[17] He shined shoes at a barbershop. Decades later, when Brown returned as an adult, he remarked that "the white people living there were just as evil looking" as in his youth.^[18]

Brown was drawn uptown all the same. "He would always be uptown, and we would always be afraid for him," Lovia remembered.^[19] Even as a young boy, to his grandmother's horror, Willie challenged the police when they raided the house looking for whiskey. Willie knew enough to ask for a search warrant. He did not know that his uncle, Itsie, was bribing the police and would take care of things later. "He'd talk noise. Back then, you just didn't talk back," Lovia said. "You would tell Willie to hush." But Willie Brown would not hush. The police were annoyed by the mouthy youngster. "Well, Anna Lee, you better talk to this smart boy," his sisters recalled the police telling their grandmother.^[20] "She didn't want anything to happen to Willie, but Willie, he just said whatever come to his mind, whatever he thought," Lovia said. "She was always afraid because he would talk."

His taunts brought him perilously close to crossing an invisible line, as when a white man once asked him, "Say, junior, what time is it?" using a pejorative term reserved for black males. Willie Brown Jr. did not immediately answer. The white man asked again, repeating "junior." Finally Brown snapped, "You guessed my name. Now you can guess what time it is."^[21] His sisters are still amazed that he was not beaten. Somehow he kept out of harm. It may have helped that he was physically small and not much of a threat. It may have also helped that he was Itsie Collins's nephew and Lewis Brown's son. The whites in Mineola generally respected Itsie, and they liked Lewis Brown, a solicitous waiter who remembered their names.

In later years Brown said he came to California to seek opportunity and the big-city life. But it is equally true that his grandmother wanted him out of Mineola for his own safety. "He had a way about him, and I think she was just really afraid. At that time, white men would do whatever they wanted to young blacks, especially to black males," Gwendolyn observed.^[22]

Brown graduated from Mineola Colored High School in May 1951, exactly three years before the United States Supreme Court declared that racially

segregated schools such as his did not meet the Constitution's standard for equal protection under the law.^[23] It took another twelve years before Mineola complied with the law and the colored school was finally abandoned. Not until 1966 could black children go to the same high school as whites in Mineola.^[24]

From his grandmother's point of view, Willie Brown graduated from high school not a moment too soon. He stood second in his class of about a dozen, just behind his best friend, Frank Crawford. Brown later joked that the only B he received was for "comportment," an old scholastic term for good behavior.^[25] Like many young men just out of high school, Willie Brown went through a period of indecision. That he wanted to go to college seemed set. That he wanted—and needed—to get out of Mineola was also certain. But where? He was "colored" and had graduated from a "colored" high school, and that made him ineligible for the University of Texas, the state's best public institution, which remained closed to "coloreds" by state law.^[26] Brown could have gone to one of the black colleges in Texas, and for a time he seemed headed in that direction. Brown attended a two-week freshmen orientation camp at Prairie View A&M, an all-black school near Houston, which turned out good farmers and teachers but not much else.^[27] But he hated the place, and he never enrolled. Brown found the rules constricting, there was never enough to eat, and he was put off that athletes dominated college life. "If you were unfortunate, and you were assigned to a table with football players, all of whom in many cases were friends, you may never get any food," he remembered. "I did raise a stink about it."^[28] He was especially put out that the jocks got the girls. Brown left Prairie View and went to Dallas, where his mother lived, and worked for a few weeks in the library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, a school he did not have a prayer of getting into.

Brown was a natural-born lawyer, but he stood about as much chance of acquiring a first-rate legal education in Texas as he did of becoming a fullback for the University of Texas Longhorns. When Homer Rainey, the university's president, suggested that the state could be more generous in its educational facilities for the Negro population, he was summarily sacked. By the late 1940s there were 7,701 white lawyers in Texas and only 23 black lawyers.^[29] When the University of Texas was sued over the issue, the school set up a "separate but equal" law school in the basement with three rooms and three part-time instructors in 1947. The university was sued again in 1950. But for Willie Brown the court battles for integration in Texas would come too late.

Brown's father, in Los Angeles, offered to take him in, although it appears that his offer was never relayed to Willie. "They had planned for him to come to Los Angeles. But then they changed plans," Lewis Brown said.^[30] A year before his death, Lewis hinted at the unresolved hurt from decades earlier. "I would take him in," the old man insisted, "give him a place to stay, and

help him through school and everything because I was working and she [his wife] was working. We was making good money here." But Willie Brown said he was unaware of the offer. "I don't ever remember that invitation," he said, looking taken aback when asked about it in an interview shortly before his father died.^[31] "I don't doubt that he is sincere when he says that, but it certainly was never communicated to me and I'm not sure I would have accepted it because I didn't know him."

In truth, the pull was stronger from Itsie Collins, the flashy gambler from San Francisco. Besides, Anna Lee never trusted Lewis Brown anyway, and she was not about to entrust him with her bright grandson. But before she would let him go, Anna Lee made Willie promise that he would seek his education in California and not fall into Itsie's hustler life.^[32] Brown readily agreed. "I had no other options," Brown explained. "The only option I had was to go someplace where somebody in the family was an anchor tenant. Because there was absolutely no money available for a college education and my uncle, Itsie, had always been lobbying my mother for years to get his hands on me. And that option was quickly exercised, and I came out with the intentions of going to Stanford and becoming a math professor."^[33]

His mother, Minnie, exacted one more promise: that he would join a church in San Francisco.

Promises sealed, seventeen-year old Willie Brown packed his khakis—the pride of his wardrobe—and a few other belongings into a cheap cardboard suitcase from Sears and boarded a train bound for San Francisco in August 1951. He carried a shoe box filled with fried chicken, his only meal on the long trip. He could not afford to eat in the dining car. But the discomforts of the train did not matter to him at that moment. "I was only thinking about what California would really be like," he remembered.^[34] "It was just a total whirl of excitement—absolutely, absolutely. I don't even remember looking out the windows of the train, I was so eager to get to California."

Soon after passing El Paso, the train crossed the state line out of Texas. As it chugged across the expansive New Mexico desert, the "Colored" signs came down in the train, and Willie Brown could go anywhere he wished.