Every day that classes are held at the University of Texas at Austin, a procession of students enter Homer Rainey Hall, which houses the Department of French and Italian. How many of them know who Rainey was? He is certainly not a saint in the pantheon of Texas history—a diverse bunch that includes, depending on who you ask, Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Juan Seguín, Audie Murphy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Larry McMurtry, and George W. Bush.
And yet, if you want to look back to the Texas past in order to understand the increasingly authoritarian grip that the Republican establishment has on this state, and the increasingly destructive ends to which it is using its power, no figure from our past is better suited than Rainey.
Ordained as a Baptist minister at age 19 and a standout athlete at Austin College, Homer Price Rainey achieved national fame and enduring historical importance by being fired as president of the University of Texas in 1944. University regents had fired four economics professors from UT for speaking in favor of federal labor laws at public hearings in Dallas, and then moved on to ban John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. novels from the curriculum and dismissed the English professor who had assigned them.
