Almetris Marsh Duren: Advocate for Black Students at UT Austin (1910–2000)

Almetris Marsh Duren was a teacher, mentor, and advocate for Black students at the University of Texas at Austin during that institution’s integration on campus from the 1950s through the 1970s. She was born on April 11, 1910, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to Goree Marsh and Annie (McCarther) Marsh. Records show little about her family and early childhood. According to the 1920 census, she had at least two siblings and at that time, when she was nine years old, Almetris and her siblings lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the household of an aunt and uncle. In 1934 she lived in Muskogee and worked as a maid. She may have resided in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1935. On November 21, 1937, Almetris Marsh married Texas-born insurance agent Charles Edward Duren, Jr. They lived in Dallas, as listed in the 1940 census, which recorded that Almetris had completed three years of college and was working as a maid and cook for a family. Her spouse, Charles, worked as an elevator operator but later was an agent for Southland Life Insurance Company.

In the fall of 1948 Charles E. Duren, Jr., began to suffer serious heart problems, and on January 8, 1949, he was stricken with an aortic aneurysm and died. Widowed, Almetris Duren moved to Austin to finish her degree. She attended the historically Black college, Tillotson College (later merged to establish Huston-Tillotson College, now Huston-Tillotson University), where in 1950 she graduated and subsequently began teaching home economics.

In 1956 the University of Texas at Austin admitted the first group of Black undegraduates but provided little adequate housing. That same year Almetris Duren left Huston-Tillotson College and took the job as administrator and housemother of the Eliza Dee Hall, a dormitory that served both Huston-Tillotson and the University of Texas at Austin Black students. The Eliza Dee Hall, located at 12th Street and East Avenue, well east of the main campus, was the first residence hall opened specifically to house Black women college undergraduates in Austin. Duren led the Eliza Dee Hall until 1958, when the state of Texas slated the building for demolition for the construction of Interstate Highway 35. But she continued her work as housemother in late 1958, when she and the Black women forced out of Eliza Dee Hall were allowed to move to the Modifired Co-op (also referred to as Whitis dormitory at 26th Street and Whitis Avenue), a dorm previosly condemned but lightly renovated to house Black undergraduates. Soon the Whitis dorm became known to students as the “Almetris Co-Op.”

At the Almetris Co-Op, Duren not only hosted and counseled students but helped them fight UT’s bureaucracy. She often found avenues for their inclusion to help them make the most of their college experience in a dormitory that had no air-conditioning as well as structural issues and faulty wiring and plumbing. With the lack of adequate housing and limited social activities on campus, African American students—women and men—found Almetris Co-Op to be a safe haven where Duren held social gatherings, provided meals, and hosted Sunday school. Duren helped her residents withstand discrimination and racial strife. In one incident, for example, a group of White students, claiming to be members of the Ku Klux Klan, sent a letter threatening to bomb the dormitory. Fortunately, no violence occurred. Black students regarded Duren, with her steady resolve and protectiveness, as a second mother. Her “nurturing spirit” earned her the nickname of “Mama Duren.”

In 1968 Duren became a more powerful advocate of UT’s Black students when she took a job as a development specialist for minority affairs at the Office of the Dean of Students. She helped establish Project Info, the first program aimed at recruiting minority students to the University of Texas at Austin. In 1974 she helped African American students establish the Innervisions of Blackness Choir. Throughout her tenure, Duren spearheaded initiatives that offered tools for Black students to matriculate and graduate, but also to have safe housing and be able to seek counsel. She helped push for the first ethnic studies program as well. Her initiatives helped empower Black students across the University of Texas at Austin, and this activism earned her the unofficial title of “Dean of Black Students.”

As part of her long career on behalf of UT’s Black community, Duren published a book that chronicled the university’s integration process based on the events she witnessed, her experience, and efforts. The book, Overcoming: A History of Black Integration at the University of Texas at Austin (1979), has since become an important work often studied and cited by scholars researching the University of Texas at Austin’s three-decade integration period.

Almetris Marsh Duren retired from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981 and moved to California to live closer to her family. In California she remained active and was often seen engaging in events across her community. In 1984, seventy-four year-old Duren participated as an operations attendant at UCLA at the Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympics.

Throughout her life and experiences at the University of Texas at Austin, Duren collected thousands of documents, pictures, reports, newspapers, and memorabilia highlighting the process of integration and the challenges and accomplishments of Black students. Her collected documents range roughly from the early 1950s through the 1980s and are housed at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

Almetris Duren received many awards and recognitions throughout her long career as an advocate for Black students. In 1969 residents of Almetris Co-op honored her with a plaque of thanksgiving for her help and inspiration. Years later, the Innervisions of Blackness Choir wrote a song for her called “A Gift of Love.” In 1978 she received the Margaret C. Berry Award for outstanding contributions to student life at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1979 she was honored with one of the inaugural Presidential Citation awards for outstanding service by UT President Lorene Rogers. By the 1980s she had received the Distinguished Service Award for the Southwest Association of College and Unviersity Housing Officers, the Nowotny Medal, and Texas Exes recognized her with the Texas Exes Life Membership Award.

Ninety-year-old Almetris Marsh Duren died in Los Angeles, California, on October 13, 2000, and was burried at the Inglewood Park Cemetery. Duren also received the key to the City of Austin, and posthuomously in 2007, the Division of Housing and Food opened the Almetris Duren Hall named in her honor. She was the first Black person to have a residence hall named after her on the University of Texas at Austin campus. In conjuction with the Almetris Duren Hall dedication ceremony held on October 12, 2007, the Texas Exes raised more than $40,000 and established the Almetris Marsh Duren Memorial Challenge Grant Scholarship—a four-year financial grant designated for Black students who are entering freshmen and who demonstrate “academic excellence and financial need.”

In 2018 Duren’s nephew, Vidal Marsh, a Los Angeles-based television producer, commenced work on a documentary film based on the life of Almetris Marsh Duren. Widely known across UT’s Black community, she has remained a hidden figure to the public at large. The documentary, Still Overcoming, highlights Duren’s life and work and focuses on integration on the UT campus and the complexities of race, education, and gentrification in Austin.