Black Mother of 5 Finds Home--and a Hug : Texas: So far, five minority families have moved into previously all-white housing complex. Officials are holding units open for 10 more.

Hugs were the last thing Donise Jackson expected when she and her five children moved in the middle of the night under federal guard into this town’s all-white public housing complex.

Death threats, taunts and slurs, perhaps. But not hugs.

“It really surprised me because I wasn’t looking for it and I don’t have to say a word,” said Jackson, 25, raising her voice to be heard over her children’s playful laughter in their freshly painted new apartment.

“They just come up to me and ask me, ‘Are you one of the ladies who moved out here?’ and I tell them yeah, and they just, you know, some of them hug me. Some of them shake my hand and greet me. It’s really not something I thought would take place.”

Not many did.

Not after last year’s disastrous desegregation effort by the Orange County Housing Authority, when the complex’s four black families were chased away by death threats and taunts. The last to leave, Bill Simpson, was killed less than 12 hours later in a random shooting in nearby Beaumont.

Shortly after, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, seized control of the authority, demanded the resignation of its director and vowed that blacks would live in Vidor, about 100 miles east of Houston near the Texas-Louisiana border.

Cisneros also ordered $2.1 million in improvements, including a new laundry facility, air-conditioning units, job training, GED classes and shuttle van transportation for residents.

And he beefed up security. The circling development of single-story duplexes sits behind a six-foot chain-link fence and 24-hour police guard shack. Outsiders are barred unless invited by a resident.

Federal marshals accompany the complex’s black residents to school, the store, visits to relatives in nearby towns, everywhere.

So far, five black families have moved into the 74-unit complex. Federal officials are holding apartments open for 10 more.

“I made up my mind from the beginning (that) I was coming, regardless of what had happened, because somebody just has to,” said Jackson, 25, who moved from Port Arthur about 20 miles away. “You just got to fight for what’s right. If somebody comes in here and harms one of us, somebody is going to have to answer for it.”

The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists have held rallies in Vidor against integration.

But the Jacksons have settled comfortably into their four-bedroom dwelling, highlighted by the collage of family snapshots carefully arranged on the living room wall. Jackson said her three school-age children have yet to report incidents of racial bias at their previously all-white school.

Whatever the problems in Vidor, Jackson said, it’s better than Port Arthur, where she and her children lived under the stench of oil refinery emissions in one of the town’s poorest sections.

“I feel like this is the best place for me and my children,” she said, pointing to the front yard and nearby play areas. “I don’t care who likes it and who don’t like it. Because I’m not going nowhere. I’m staying right here. I want the same things for my children that the people out here want for their children: to grow up in a decent place and have good schools.”

Orange County is one of 70 public housing authorities in 36 East Texas counties targeted by a 1980 class-action discrimination lawsuit. In 1983, a federal judge in Tyler ordered the desegregation effort.

Jackson, who during her childhood was shuttled from relatives to foster homes, says she doesn’t intend to spend her whole life in Vidor. She plans to take advantage of the GED classes and job training programs.

” . . . I want to be able to work,” she said. “I don’t want my daughters to grow up and see me stay on welfare for the rest of my life getting food stamps.”