My dad graduated from Valpo in '52 and immediately took a teaching job at the new Houston Lutheran High. At one Lutheran event of some kind, I think a BBQ fundraiser, he saw an African-American pastor sitting by himself. Being from Wisconsin and not knowing the ways of the locals, my dad went over and sat with him. He said it made that pastor so uncomfortable that he excused himself. People later told my dad that he shouldn't have done that because it wasn't fair to put that pastor in such an awkward position.
Because he was single with lots of free time and was the football coach, his weekend entertainment featured lots of high school football games. All segregated teams, but the stands were not segregated. So my dad went to a lot of the games between "Colored" teams and never had any problem. THe white and black teams used the same stadiums at different times. Segregation was so baked in that it just never even came up. But he was in Houston for four years and said that apart from standard greetings he never had an actual conversation with a black person after that first attempt at the church picnic. It just never came up. The school was all white, his church was all white, and in mixed public settings everyone was cordial but everyone just knew that you didn't go beyond cordial with the other race. My dad said that at the time he was just too much of an outsider to even get it, much less press any questions about it. It was just the way things were. He told that story often in his later years and I think it was one of his big regrets that he didn't know what to do or how to do it. He loved his time at the school and liked Houston well enough, but he knew early on he'd never "take" in the South and would not be settling down there long term. I don't think Houston Lutheran High would have admitted students from the black congregation founded by the woman in this article. And I don't think that fact outraged my dad at the time so much as it made him feel like he was out of his element in Houston.
