The President of the United States integrated us on New Year's Eve
From Lyndon, Merle Miller's oral biography of LBJ. Speaking of the Forty Acres Club at the University of Texas at Austin, which was segregated. On New Year's Eve 1963-64, President Johnson was to attend, as his long time friend Horace Busby was the special honoree that night. Professor Ernest Goldstein, who had resigned from the club because of its segregation policy, was asked to attend, and did so reluctantly, and only out of respect for Busby. Here is what he relates:
"So we get there. All of a sudden the Secret Service appeared. And in walked the president of the United States along with a very handsome black woman named Miss Gerri Whittington, then one of his secretaries. The sight of Miss Whittington was one to gladden my Yankee heart. And I went up to Bill Moyers and I said, 'Does the president know what he's doing?' He looked at me with a great twinkle - I should never have asked it in that stupid fashion - and he said, 'He always knows what he's doing!'
"And so after that magnificent evening, on the morning of January 2, I called the club and said we were having a meeting in the University Methodist Church, and I would like to reinstate my membership and bring in some of my Negro guests from the meeting next door. 'Oh', they said, 'no problem at all.' And I said, 'Are we really integrated?' And he said, 'Yes, sir. The president of the United States integrated us on New Year's Eve.'"
Miss Whittington, when asked later about the incident, said that she had been not a little nervous and had asked, "Mr. President, do you know what you're doing?" To which Lyndon had replied, "I sure do. Half of them are going to think you're my wife, and that's just fine with me."
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