Edward Thomas, 95; was a policing pioneer in the South

Mr. Thomas, who died Monday at 95, was the first African-American to build an eminent career with the Houston Police Department, one that endured for 63 years. By the time he retired four years ago, two months shy of his 92d birthday, he had experienced the full compass of 20th-century race relations.

His days were suffused with the pressure to perform perfectly, lest he give his white supervisors the slightest excuse to fire him — and he could be fired, he knew, for a transgression as small as not wearing a hat.

They were also suffused with the danger he faced in the field, knowing that white colleagues would not come to his aid.

In 2011, when Mr. Thomas retired with the rank of senior police officer, he was “the most revered and respected officer within the Houston Police Department,” the department said in announcing his death, at his home in Houston.

On July 27, two weeks before he died, the police force renamed its headquarters in Mr. Thomas’s honor.

“He was a pioneering figure, not just in the Houston Police Department but in Southern policing in general, representing an era bookended by Jim Crow and the modern period,” Mitchel P. Roth, the author, with Tom Kennedy, of “Houston Blue,” a 2012 history of the city’s police force, said. “It’s very rare to find a person of color having as long a career and having had a career with as much respect.”

Mr. Thomas, by necessity and temperament so taciturn as to seem enigmatic, never spoke to the news media about his work. But interviews with his associates make it plain that the respect he earned was hard won, over a long time.

“We all know what America was like in 1948,” said Charles A. McClelland Jr., Houston’s police chief, the fourth African-American to hold that post.

“If you think about some of the milestones in the civil rights movement, when Rosa Parks would not give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, Mr. Thomas had undergone this disparaging treatment for seven years,’’ McClelland said. “When major civil rights legislation was passed in 1964 which made his treatment unlawful in the workplace, he’d been a cop for 16 years.”

On Jan. 12, 1948, the day Mr. Thomas joined the force, and for years afterward, he could not attend roll call in the squad room: His attendance was taken in the hall.

He could arrest only black people. Apprehending white suspects, he could merely detain them until a white officer was dispatched to make the arrest.

He patrolled his beat — a half-dozen-mile-wide swath spanning largely black neighborhoods — twice a day, alone, on foot: The department long refused to issue him a squad car.

“He told me,” McClelland said, “that the very first time he was given permission to drive a squad car, when the sergeant gave him the keys, his instructions were: ‘You better make sure that you don’t wreck it, but if you do’ — and he referred to him by the N-word — ‘you better pin your badge to the seat and don’t come back.’ ”

For years to come, to spare the car, and his job along with it, Mr. Thomas drove it to his beat, parked it, locked it and, as he had before, pounded the pavement on foot.

Edward Thomas was born on Sept. 23, 1919, in Keachi, La., near Shreveport. His father, Edward, was a local landowner; his mother, Dora, was a schoolteacher. When Edward was about 9, his father died, and he became the de facto man of the house.

As a young man, he attended what is now Southern University and A&M College, a historically black institution in Baton Rouge, but he was drafted by the Army before graduating. Serving in a segregated unit, he took part in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.

After his discharge, he returned home and embarked on a career as a postal worker. Then one day, while traveling by bus to visit family in California, he picked a stray piece of paper off the floor. The paper was an application for the Houston Police Department. He would graduate as a member of its first organized cadet class.

African-Americans had served with the department since Reconstruction, hired to patrol Houston’s black wards. In the 20th century, three are known to have preceded Mr. Thomas on the force.

But by the time he graduated from the police academy, he was the department’s only black member.

“The others were driven out of the organization: They were forced to quit,” C.O. Bradford, Houston’s second black police chief and now a member of its City Council, said. “He endured it.”

He endured vitriol not only from his fellow officers but also from the very community he wanted to serve.

“The police were not friendly to the black community during that era, and the black community did not welcome the police, for justifiable reasons,” Bradford said. “The black community did not want Mr. Thomas because he was the police, and the police did not want Mr. Thomas because he was black.”

Yet it was imperative that he win the trust of that community, not only for its well-being but also for his own.

Little by little, through an approach that would now be called community policing, Mr. Thomas won the residents over. Today, McClelland said, many Houstonians in their 60s and 70s warmly recall his escorting them back to school when they played hooky, rather than arresting them — truancy was then an arrestable offense.

Today, 53 percent of the department’s 5,300 officers are members of minority groups. The proportion begins to approach the demographics of Houston as a whole, with a population of more than 2 million that is now about 70 percent minority, making it one of the most diverse cities in the United States.