Ancestral Austin: Means-Khabele Part 1

In 1962, Bertha Sadler Means put her foot down.

Furious that her children were not allowed to skate at the Ice Palace rink — on the same day she was turned away from a driving range on Burnet Road — she organized.

“Enough’s enough!” Means said. “I’ve had it. I’ve been discriminated against all my life. It’s time to stop that. I’m not going to let my kids go through what I’ve gone through.”

The educator didn’t stop calling leaders, making speeches and picketing businesses until the last remnants of Jim Crow segregation were swept from Austin.

How did this tall, striking and athletic woman — she still plays golf every week at age 93 — find the courage to face down the powers that be?

“I grew up playing sandlot football,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “When you get knocked down, don’t fuss. Just get up and say: ‘I’ll get you next time.’”

That kind of grit has served her family well through six generations in Texas.

Her grandfather, former slave James D. Sadler, founded one of the state’s oldest African-American communities and led its church and school near Valley Mills.

Her mother, Ludie Philips Sadler, picked up her seven children after her husband died and moved to Waco, where she worked as a domestic.

Means and her siblings worked in cotton fields as children during the Depression, then she honed her academic, athletic and office skills, winning a scholarship to college in 1938.

Her late husband, James H. Means Sr., was a distinguished professor of mathematics at what is now Huston-Tillotson University.

Their son, track star James H. Means Jr., 67, broke color barriers at the University of Texas, becoming, in the early 1960s, the first African-American to letter in UT athletics.

Their daughter, Joan Means Khabele, 70, fought segregation at Barton Springs and Zilker Park in 1960 before her mother’s Ice Palace protests. After earning a degree at the University of Chicago, she lived for three decades in Africa.

Means’ grandson, Khotso Khabele, 38, co-founded the private, globally themed Khabele School, which has grown rapidly on three Austin campuses.

Her great-granddaughter, world-traveling Naledi Khabele, 10, a budding performer, looks at this family heritage — which includes other relatives who became surgeons, accountants, educators and engineers — with the wide eyes of curiosity but also of natural acceptance.

“It feels like a normal family,” she says. “It’s awesome.”

Ancestral Austin

The members of the Means-Khabele family — the third in this newspaper’s Ancestral Austin series, which traces multi-generational civic and social engagement in Central Texas — have been active participants in each phase of modern Texas history.

Born in 1828, Bertha Sadler Means’ grandfather moved with his owner to Texas in 1854. Upon receiving his freedom after the Civil War, the Rev. James Sadler received $500. He used that money to buy land and establish a freedman’s community west of Waco. The large Sadler family remained prominent in Bosque County after his death in 1911.

“I remember vividly going across the creek from our house to the big house,” Means recalls. “It was posh. Player piano, lovely living room. One of my aunts was in a rocking chair. I asked: ‘Can you give me snuff?’ I was 3. She put it in my lips and that knocked me out. Never did that again.”

When she was 4, her father, Sidney Sadler, died. In Waco, her mother worked outside the home but was never far from the children.

“When I think of Michelle Obama, I think of my mother,” Means says. “She had a garden in the vacant lot next door. All kinds of vegetables. Fruit trees.”

All the kids pitched in.

“Every September we’d all go to the cotton fields,” she says. “I remember when I was picking cotton and this white man was weighing cotton and I thought: ‘Why couldn’t I be weighing cotton and he’d be picking it.’”

Still, the ever-competitive Means hustled to harvest more of that punishing plant than anyone else.

At school, she played softball, tennis and basketball. “I was a tomboy,” she says. “I climbed trees and played Jane in ‘Tarzan and Jane.’”

At A.J. Moore High School in East Waco, Means was devoted to studying English, typing and shorthand. She took her books into the cotton fields.

“I was taught fair-mindedness, loyalty, truthfulness, cheerfulness and perseverance,” says the woman who was voted school sweetheart. “I think that’s who I am now.”

Expected by her family to attend college, Means served as a secretary for the Tillotson College faculty. Yet when she got off the train in downtown Austin, she tried to hail a taxi for her first visit to the East Austin campus. The only ones available were Yellow and Roy’s cabs.

She first chose the Yellow. “I can’t take you across East Avenue,” the driver said.

“I had grown up in the Jim Crow era,” Means says. “I was quite accustomed to not being able to eat at restaurants and having to sit at the back of the bus … the back of everything.”

Roy’s, owned by an Hispanic family, could, however, cross the color line of East Avenue, which became Interstate 35.

“I’ve always admired Roy’s family for that gesture,” she says. “I didn’t realize that many years later that I’d be in the taxi cab business.”

Where she worked at college, one of the faculty members was a well-composed mathematics teacher.

“He never said a word to me; I never said a word to him,” she says. “I met him on the sidewalk one day, I said ‘Hello, Mr. Lewis.’ He said, ‘I’m not Mr. Lewis, I’m Mr. Means.’”

Later, on a school trip to Houston, they were assigned to ride in the same car. (She was never his student.) They got married in 1941, the same year they helped found St. James Episcopal Church.

“A lot of things happened in 1941,” she says. “The war started. I had a high school friend who was killed — Doris Miller. He was a student in Waco. We always teased him for having a girl’s name. After he was killed, (Austin) mayor Tom Miller named an auditorium after him: ‘Dorie’ Miller. I called the mayor and said: ‘His name is Doris. Would you change it?’ And he did.”

So how does an exceedingly polite but firm young woman, still in her 20s, get the nerve to call the mayor?

“I think I must have gotten it from my mother,” Means says. “I know I did. She would have a nice yard. She would encourage neighbors to have a nice yard. She’d go and complain if something wasn’t right.”

Bertha Means graduated with degrees in English and education. She taught at Blackshear Elementary, Kealing Junior High and Allan Junior High. When she expressed interest in graduate school, Means was steered by the UT registrar to historically black Prairie View A&M University.

Furious, she hustled through the UT Tower offices looking for the president.

“All of a sudden, Dr. Harry Ransom, who was an English professor, saw me and he said, ‘May I help you?’ And I said, ‘I hope you can.’ I was looking so country!” she laughingly told the American-Statesman in 1998. Ransom took care of the matter. “I was enrolled that day,” she recalls.

Means’ formal career included stints as director of Head Start, as district instructional coordinator and occasional college teacher. If she had stopped there, Austin leaders would at least name a school after her.

But Means didn’t stop there.