Eddie Bernice Johnson is a champion of minority and women’s rights representing Texas in the United States House of Representatives. Not only that, she fights to support the sciences and women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) fields.

Though a public servant of the 30th district in Dallas County, Eddie started her life in Waco, Texas. Born to Edward and Lillie Mae Johnson in Waco on December 3, 1935 (her childhood home pinned below on map), she attended A. J. Moore High School, the only school in Waco for African Americans at the time, where she graduated in 1952, third on the honor roll. Just as she would be very active in the community later in life, she participated in many organizations at A. J. Moore as well, including the Dramatic Art Club, J. A. Kirk Chorus, Book Lovers’ Club, National Honor Society, Student Council, library staff, Elm Wood Y-Teens, and editorial staff of the Moore Highlight.

Eddie came to her love of learning and community involvement naturally, as her parents emphasized such values. Her parents stressed education and culture, reading novels to their children from a young age and taking them to plays at Baylor University. These options were more limited, though, as the family could only attend plays on the designated “black days” at the theater. Both Edward and Lillie Mae then became activists after African Americans succeeded in breaking the state’s white primary system in 1944. Committed Democrats, they worked hard to educate fellow African Americans on the importance of voting and helped to get them to the polls. Eddie affectionately referred to her mother as a “little crusader,” fighting to better the rights of African Americans in Texas and in Waco. Her parents’ dedication to hard work and views of progress led Eddie to believe neither her race nor gender should ever hold her back.

Eddie then attended St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame and received a nursing degree. She would follow this degree with two more, a bachelor of science in nursing from Texas Christian University, and two decades later a master’s in public health from Southern Methodist University. Eddie was hired right out of St. Mary’s as a psychiatric nurse at the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital in Dallas. Little did she know, the administration did not realize she was black when they hired her. Upon her arrival, she had to fight to keep her job, and she was not allowed to live in the dormitory with the other nurses. She endured extreme racism from her colleagues and was continually denied the ability to help with projects. But soon her work spoke for itself, and a year and a half later Eddie was promoted to chief nurse, a position she would hold at the VA in Dallas for sixteen years. Early in her tenure at the VA she also met and married Lacy Kirk Johnson and had one son, Dawrence Kirk.

After the birth of her son, Eddie had her hands full with her job, her husband, and now a child, but she soon added activism to the list. While shopping in Dallas, she was barred from trying on a hat in a store because of her race. She discovered that as a rule black women were not allowed to try on certain clothing items in stores before buying them, and this infuriated her. She immediately organized a boycott of the department store and others with fifty other African American women. The boycott worked quickly, and soon those stores were allowing black women to try on items before purchase. Eddie had her first taste of activism, and she turned next to ardently supporting African American politicians. She would famously push young Dawrence, who goes by Kirk, in a stroller while passing out campaign materials for various African American candidates in shopping center parking lots.

Though this involvement was a far cry from running for office herself, circumstances soon changed for Eddie. After a painful divorce, a friend suggested that Eddie run for the Texas House. She originally rebuffed the idea, worried about caring for her son and maintaining the stability her career as a nurse provided, but the seed had been planted. The final push came in 1972 when Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus offered her an executive assistant job if she would run for office. Kirk even took cooking classes at school to be able to help his mother at home during her campaign. Eddie Bernice was officially set to run for House District 33.

Eddie was clearly the underdog with only $5,000 and no manpower. She set up shop in her own dining room, making campaign calls herself and going door to door with Kirk. She emphasized to the African American community that she was ready to fight for their rights, campaigning on her prior role as president of the National Council of Negro Women among other civic organizations. She also emphasized her career as a nurse and her service of veterans, wanting to fight for better health care if she were elected. She said of her campaign, “I [was] interested solely in the people and in reflecting the needs of the constituency.” Reflect her constituents’ needs she did, and she won in a landslide to became the first black woman to serve in an elected office in Dallas. From there she was the first African American woman vice chair of the Texas State Democratic Convention and helped to form the Black Legislative Caucus. She was also chosen to chair the House Committee on Labor, the first woman to ever hold this position. Her main issues of focus were health care, education and science, public housing, and women’s rights. Eddie’s work in the legislature did not go unnoticed, and after three terms in the House she was called up by the Carter administration in 1977 to be regional director of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the first woman and first African American in this position. After serving faithfully, her tenure ended with Carter’s defeat and she took a hiatus from politics.

But the call to serve came again in 1986 when Eddie ran for and won the senatorial position for the 23rd district of Texas. She was the first Dallas woman and first African American elected to the Texas Senate since Reconstruction. Her concerns continued to be people oriented, as she focused on issues of health care, housing, race, gender, economic development, and employment. She served in the finance and education committees and chaired the subcommittee on health and human services. Opportunity then came knocking once more in 1991 when Eddie was chair of the subcommittee of congressional redistricting. The committee’s efforts created a new 30th district, one composed of mostly minority voters, for which Eddie decided to run in 1993. She again scored an astounding victory—107,830 votes to 37,853 votes—becoming the first nurse elected to the US Congress. Her work in Congress mirrored her work in the state legislature and her focus remained on equality and advancement for all people. Even after accusations of gerrymandering led to a Supreme Court ruling against the Texas legislature, Eddie continued to win her seat for the redrawn 30th district. She has served on and led several committees, and she is currently in her thirteenth term at the age of eighty-three.

Eddie Bernice Johnson has lived a life of many firsts and paved the way for many women and African Americans in politics. Her emphasis on STEM education, women and minority rights, and more have changed the face of Dallas County, and Waco is proud to claim her as one of its own.

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Waco was a city on the move at the turn of the twentieth century, and its run into modernity was aided by the advent of the interurban electric railway.

Although Waco had other forms of mass transit since the days of the stagecoach, with first mule-hauled and then electrically-powered streetcars, it was the Texas Electric Railway that ultimately inherited the early rights-of-way to do business in the city, though several transit firms vied for traffic in its early days.

Citizen’s Railway Company, formed in 1877, used eighteen mule-drawn cars, and ten electric ones after 1891, to get commuters and shoppers where they needed to go until 1912. Southern Traction Company succeeded it, reconstructing tracks and adding extensions. Additionally, a streetcar company named Huaco Heights leased equipment from Citizen’s Railway Company and operated from 1913 to 1918, servicing the Huaco Heights real estate development.

It took John Frank Strickland, a man of vision and drive, to pull together the diverse elements to craft an efficient system. Strickland traveled to Texas by wagon train in 1878 from his native Alabama. He later went on to create the largest interurban rail system in the Southwest, with more than two hundred miles of track connecting commercial and cultural centers throughout the state.

Working his way up through plowing, cotton ginning, and then the grocery trade, Strickland became involved in electric power generation in Waxahachie in 1892. He later served as president of companies such as Texas Power & Light and Dallas Power & Light, positions he held until his death. Strickland and partners saw construction of interurban railroads as a complementary function of their power companies, and in 1908, a Strickland company began interurban service from Dallas to Sherman.

By 1911, Texas Traction operated seventy-seven miles of track from Dallas and Denison as well as local lines in Sherman, Denison, and McKinney. In 1912, interurban transportation from Dallas to Waxahachie began. The company extended the line to Waco in October of 1913, and absorbed streetcar lines in Waxahachie and Waco.

On New Year’s Day in 1917, Strickland merged Southern Traction Company and Texas Traction Company to create the Texas Electric Railway Company. The rail also served as the right-of-way for the electric power lines. Area drugstores and hotel lobbies sold tickets, offering different rates for children, clergy, and “excursion” groups. As ridership soared and business boomed, Strickland also won a postal contract to transport US mail, and employed a clerk to sort the letters and packages along the way.

The system’s usage peaked around 1920, when some 819,000 passengers rode the rails. The interurban’s decline began during the Great Depression, and the line started taking freight to make up for the loss of passenger revenue. Business rallied again during World War II, when gasoline shortages and rationing of rubber made rail travel more attractive than driving.

But after the war, the lure of private-car ownership and the development of better roads led to the system’s decline. The streetcar operations of Texas Electric Railway were sold to Waco Transit Company in 1946. As part of that sale, the streetcar continued to run from downtown to East Waco along the Texas Electric’s city track. But streetcar service ended when Texas Electric Railway ceased operations on December 31, 1948. Commuter service lasted for another year by the Texas Electric Bus System before being entirely phased out. Within days of the company’s closure, workers began pulling up tracks and taking down copper wire to sell off the assets and liquidate.

Remnants of the interurban railway remain visible in downtown Waco today. Pylons which once supported the interurban bridge as it spanned the Brazos River (noted on the Waco History map) offer a constant reminder of the interurban’s legacy of providing citizens with a convenient and economical means of transportation both throughout the city and the state.  

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Paul Quinn College is the oldest historically black college in Texas. Though it is no longer located in Waco, it remains an important part of the city’s history as the “Athens on the Brazos.”

In 1872 the African Methodist Episcopalian Church founded the Connectional School for the Education of Negro Youth in Austin as a means to provide education to former slaves. Five years later, the campus moved to Waco, where it occupied a small building located at Eighth Street and Mary Avenue until an increase in funding allowed the school to relocate to a new facility on Elm Avenue. In 1881, officials renamed the school for Bishop William Paul Quinn, a Methodist missionary.

Paul Quinn acted as an academic alternative for black students excluded from other institutions of higher education in the pre-Civil Rights era. Early on the college focused primarily on vocational training although it did offer a few courses in theology, English, Latin, music, and math. In the mid-1960s, options for many college-bound students expanded when two new schools joined the higher education landscape in Waco, McLennan Community College and Texas State Technical College. For black students, Paul Quinn remained the only option, and it was a largely unsatisfactory one. Its academic standards were not competitive with the other schools, its facilities were sub-par, and it was unable to receive sufficient funding to improve either situation. When Baylor, MCC, and TSTC racially integrated, Paul Quinn’s appeal dropped so far that the school was in danger of closing permanently.

In the mid-1960s, the Paul Quinn administration appointed a new dean named William Milton Collins, in the hope that he would be able to revitalize the college. Dean Collins did not disappoint. He established a new education department and introduced fine arts classes. He also began an accreditation process that would help Paul Quinn’s academic program improve.

The period between the late 1960s and the early 1970s was one of dramatic change at Paul Quinn. Enrollment greatly increased and administrators oversaw the construction of two new residence halls and a library by 1968. The college launched major development initiatives to help fund student scholarships and provide for campus expansion, but were also intended to increase community involvement and support.

In the late 1980s, African American businessman Comer S. Cottrell presented Paul Quinn with the opportunity to take over the property of the vacated Bishop College in Dallas. With the hopes of revitalizing campus life and opening up its programs to a larger urban market, Paul Quinn seized the opportunity to move north. In September of 1990, the school transferred all operations to the former Bishop campus with the assistance of several corporate sponsors. Paul Quinn College is still in existence in Dallas.

The historic Paul Quinn College campus in Waco fell into temporary disuse after the school’s relocation, but has since entered a period of renewal. Many of the original buildings are now being utilized by Rapoport Academy, continuing the goal of educating future generations.  

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