The Impact of the 1928 Plan
The inequality extended beyond the walls of the institutions themselves. The 1928 Austin City Plan deliberately concentrated Black residents on the east side of the city and made no corresponding adjustment for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute for Colored Youths, which remained on the far west side near what is now Camp Mabry. The plan did not move the school. It moved the community away from it, and left deaf and visually impaired Black children to solve the distance themselves. The Texas School for the Blind catalogue documents that the state understood getting disabled children to school as its own obligation: indigent white families could submit a sworn affidavit and tax certificate to receive transportation assistance, a formal administrative process built on the assumption that the state owed them a way to get there. No equivalent process, provision, or administrative record has been located for students at the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute for Colored Youths, or the DDBICY, despite the Board of Control's meticulous documentation of every other institutional function.
This page is a list of promises. Clothing, meals, medical care, books, materials, transportation, each item represents something the state of Texas considered itself obligated to provide to students who were white and disabled. Read alongside the absence of any equivalent document for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute for Colored Youths, it becomes something else: a record of who the state's obligation extended to, and who it did not. The transportation provision described in this catalogue begins from an assumption that a disabled child's path to school was the state's problem to solve, an assumption that was never extended across the city.