Lanier Hall, May 1967

On the night of May 16 to 17, 1967, Houston police fired thousands of rounds into Lanier Hall, a men's dormitory at Texas Southern University, in what newspapers called the TSU riot and some historians have since described as a police riot. By one widely cited count more than 3,000 shots struck the dormitory, causing over $10,000 in damage. One officer, Louis Kuba, was killed, two other officers and a student were wounded, and 488 students were arrested and jailed. Tension had built for weeks. TSU students had protested the non-renewal of the contract of Mack Jones, the faculty sponsor of the campus SNCC group, and in May they joined demonstrations against the Holmes Road garbage dump where an 11-year-old boy, Victor George, had drowned in a trash-filled pond. Police sealed off the campus on May 16. That night officers reported gunfire from the dormitories on the 3200 block of Wheeler Avenue, and about 200 officers stormed the buildings on foot, with shooting continuing until about 3 a.m. Students were made to lie on the ground outside Lanier Hall while the rooms were searched.

Kuba, 25, had been a police officer for 34 days. Accounts of what the searches found differ, from a single small pistol to a rifle, a pistol and a shotgun, and later accounts concluded that Kuba was most likely struck by a ricocheting police bullet. Five students were charged in his death; the charges were dismissed about three years later for insufficient evidence, and no one was ever convicted.