They arrived a year ago in the pre-dawn darkness under the protection of federal marshals: four black families picked to integrate an all-white public housing complex in a town pilloried as one of the nation's most hateful.
One of the families already has moved out. Two more want to.The first black families, and some of those who followed, are tired of the constant racial taunts they face when they venture beyond the complex's green fence and $500,000 security system.
And they're frustrated by the lack of opportunity in a town that remains nearly all white. Eighteen black families now live in the 74-unit complex - but no one from those families has found work outside of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which integrated the project.
"I don't want to say anything against stopping them from desegregation," said Donise Jackson. "But if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have come."
In September, a man threatened Jackson and her children in a grocery store parking lot. "He had a knife, and he said he wanted to kill me and my nigger babies," Jackson said. An 18-year-old is awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge of making a terroristic threat.
Her feelings about Vidor represent a sharp change from just four months ago, when she spoke fondly of her neighbors and was confident she made the right decision.
Some of the black families here still feel that way.
"It's been nothing but opportunity for me," says Valerie Reed-Stredic, who helped integrate the project on Jan. 13, 1993. She is a HUD trainee in the complex's management office and says that despite the occasional slur, she has made friends and enjoys her new home.
Vidor, long labeled a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity, is one of 70 public housing authorities in 36 east Texas counties targeted by a 1980 class-action discrimination lawsuit. A federal judge ordered the desegregation effort in 1993.
Later that year, Bill Simpson - the only black person living in the project - became so fed up with racial harassment that he fled to nearby Beaumont, only to be shot and killed a few hours later in a street robbery.
Soon after, Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros seized control of the Vidor housing authority. He demanded the resignation of its director and vowed that blacks would live in the town of 11,000 people 100 miles east of Houston.
The complex has undergone a physical face lift since then as well: a new fence, central air conditioning, a community center.
But is Vidor worth the effort?
Mike Daniel, the attorney representing 10,000 black families in the federal lawsuit to integrate east Texas housing, says Vidor has proved it doesn't deserve any federal housing funds.
"They can't stay, only under conditions of overt and abject racial conditions," Daniel said. "If there was ever a case for cutting federal funds, it is places like that."
Daniel said HUD should concentrate efforts on other areas where blacks want to live. Many of those brought to Vidor came from Beaumont, 10 miles away.
HUD officials vehemently disagree.
"If we give up on Vidor, we'll have to give up on every place," said Roberta Achtenberg, the department's Fair Housing chief.
"We had to take a stand," said Joe Shuldiner, assistant secretary of HUD's public housing division. "We had to go forward and say there will be no public housing that excludes people in the United States."
Shuldiner characterizes the integration as "a work in progress." Indeed, some blacks say the promises HUD made to persuade them to move to Vidor remain unfulfilled.
"I was going to get a job, I was going to have brand new furniture. A whole bunch of stuff," said Shelley Ledet, another member of the original four families who is looking to leave.
Ledet is still unemployed. Programs such as GED training at the complex and other vocational benefits have yet to materialize. And Ledet's son left town to live with his grandmother. "She's afraid something might happen to him here," Ledet said.
Starting this week, HUD will interview all 18 families to listen to their complaints.