Download or read book Civil Rights in Black and Brown written by Max Krochmal and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. Far from the gaze of the national media, African American and Mexican American activists combated the twin caste systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow. These insurgents worked chiefly within their own racial groups, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. The movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice. Civil Rights in Black and Brown draws on more than 500 oral history interviews newly collected across Texas, from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and everywhere in between. The testimonies speak in detail to the structure of racism in small towns and huge metropolises—both the everyday grind of segregation and the haunting acts of racial violence that upheld Texas’s state-sanctioned systems of white supremacy. Through their memories of resistance and revolution, the activists reveal previously undocumented struggles for equity, as well as the links Black and Chicanx organizers forged in their efforts to achieve self-determination.

Download or read book Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands written by Will Guzman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1907, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. Will Guzmán delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the NAACP, and the man's own indefatigable courage, Guzmán also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands--as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.

Download or read book Fighting Their Own Battles written by Brian D. Behnken and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1940 and 1975, African Americans and Mexican Americans in Texas fought a number of battles in court, at the ballot box, in schools, and on the streets to eliminate segregation and state-imposed racism. Although both groups engaged in civil rights

Download or read book Mexican American Civil Rights in Texas written by Robert Brischetto and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights six-day hearing in San Antonio that introduced the Mexican American people to the rest of the nation, this book is an examination of the social change of Mexican Americans of Texas over the past half century. The San Antonio hearing included 1,502 pages of testimony, given by more than seventy witnesses, which became the baseline twenty experts used to launch their research on Mexican American civil rights issues during the following fifty years. These experts explored the changes in demographics and policies with regard to immigration, voting rights, education, employment, economic security, housing, health, and criminal justice. While there are a number of anecdotal historical accounts of Mexican Americans in Texas, this book adds an evidence-based examination of racial and ethnic inequalities and changes over the past half century. The contributors trace the litigation on behalf of Latinos and other minorities in state and federal courts and the legislative changes that followed, offering public policy recommendations for the future. The fact that this study is grounded in Texas is significant, as it was the birthplace of a majority of Chicano civil rights efforts and is at the heart of Mexican American growth and talent, producing the first Mexican American in Congress, the first Mexican American federal judge, and the first Mexican American candidate for president. As the largest ethnic group in the state, Latinos will continue to play a major role in the future of Texas.

Download or read book Blue Texas written by Max Krochmal and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-07 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the other Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community organizing, liberal politics, and civil rights activism. Beginning in the 1930s, Max Krochmal tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the state's marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow. Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation's most conservative states. Blue Texas remembers the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier--and it shows why their story still matters today.

Download or read book Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West written by Bruce A. Glasrud and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1927, Beatrice Cannady succeeded in removing racist language from the Oregon Constitution. During World War II, Rowena Moore fought for the right of black women to work in Omaha’s meat packinghouses. In 1942, Thelma Paige used the courts to equalize the salaries of black and white schoolteachers across Texas. In 1950 Lucinda Todd of Topeka laid the groundwork for the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. These actions—including sit-ins long before the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960—occurred well beyond the borders of the American South and East, regions most known as the home of the civil rights movement. By considering social justice efforts in western cities and states, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West convincingly integrates the West into the historical narrative of black Americans’ struggle for civil rights. From Iowa and Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest, and from Texas to the Dakotas, black westerners initiated a wide array of civil rights activities in the early to late twentieth century. Connected to national struggles as much as they were tailored to local situations, these efforts predated or prefigured events in the East and South. In this collection, editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz bring these moments into sharp focus, as the contributors note the ways in which the racial and ethnic diversity of the West shaped a specific kind of African American activism. Concentrating on the far West, the mountain states, the desert Southwest, the upper Midwest, and states both southern and western, the contributors examine black westerners’ responses to racism in its various manifestations, whether as school segregation in Dallas, job discrimination in Seattle, or housing bias in San Francisco. Together their essays establish in unprecedented detail how efforts to challenge discrimination impacted and changed the West and ultimately the United States.

Download or read book Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement written by Bruce A. Glasrud and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONE WINNER 2013 of the Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women, presented by the Texas State Historical Association Throughout the South, black women were crucial to the Civil Rights Movement, serving as grassroots and organizational leaders. They protested, participated, sat in, mobilized, created, energized, led particular efforts, and served as bridge builders to the rest of the community. Ignored at the time by white politicians and the media alike, with few exceptions they worked behind the scenes to effect the changes all in the movement sought. Until relatively recently, historians, too, have largely ignored their efforts. Although African American women mobilized all across Dixie, their particular strategies took different forms in different states, just as the opposition they faced from white segregationists took different shapes. Studies of what happened at the state and local levels are critical not only because of what black women accomplished, but also because their activism, leadership, and courage demonstrated the militancy needed for a mass movement. In this volume, scholars address similarities and variations by providing case studies of the individual states during the 1950s and 1960s, laying the groundwork for more synthetic analyses of the circumstances, factors, and strategies used by black women in the former Confederate states to destroy the system of segregation in this country.

Download or read book Black Texans written by Alwyn Barr and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: discusses each period of African-American history in terms of politics, violence, and legal status; labor and economic status; education; and social life. Black Texans includes the history of the buffalo soldiers and the cowboys on Texas cattle drives, along with the achievements of notable African-American individuals in Texas history, from Estevan the explorer through legislator Norris Wright Cuney and boxer Jack Johnson to state senator Barbara Jordan. Barr carries.

Download or read book The Accomodation written by Jim Schutze and published by Citadel Pr. This book was released on 1986 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses racial relations in Dallas during the 1950s and 1960s and describes the struggles of the black community to gain power

Download or read book In Struggle Against Jim Crow written by Merline Pitre and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Most accounts of the civil rights movement focus on male leaders and the organizations they led, leaving a dearth of information about the countless Black women who were the backbone of the struggle in local communities across the country. ... Lulu B. White was one of those women in the civil rights movement in Texas. Executive secretary of the Houston branch of the NAACP and state director of branches, White was a significant force in the struggle against Jim Crow during the 1940s and 1950s. She was at the helm of the Houston chapter when the Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Smith v. Allbright, and she led the fight to get more blacks elected to public office, to gain economic parity for African Americans, and to integrate the University of Texas"--

Download or read book The Mexican American Experience in Texas written by Martha Menchaca and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience. Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

Download or read book Doris Miller Pearl Harbor and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement written by Thomas W. Cutrer and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the morning of December 7, 1941, after serving breakfast and turning his attention to laundry services aboard the USS West Virginia, Ship’s Cook Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller heard the alarm calling sailors to battle stations. The first of several torpedoes dropped from Japanese aircraft had struck the American battleship. Miller hastily made his way to a central point and was soon called to the bridge by Lt. Com. Doir C. Johnson to assist the mortally wounded ship’s captain, Mervyn Bennion. Miller then joined two others in loading and firing an unmanned anti-aircraft machine gun—a weapon that, as an African American in a segregated military, Miller had not been trained to operate. But he did, firing the weapon on attacking Japanese aircraft until the .50-caliber gun ran out of ammunition. For these actions, Miller was later awarded the Navy Cross, the third-highest naval award for combat gallantry. Historians Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish have not only painstakingly reconstructed Miller’s inspiring actions on December 7. They also offer for the first time a full biography of Miller placed in the larger context of African American service in the United States military and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Like so many sailors and soldiers in World War II, Doris Miller’s life was cut short. Just two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller was aboard the USS Liscome Bay when it was sunk by a Japanese submarine. But the name—and symbolic image—of Dorie Miller lived on. As Cutrer and Parrish conclude, “Dorie Miller’s actions at Pearl Harbor, and the legend that they engendered, were directly responsible for helping to roll back the navy’s then-to-fore unrelenting policy of racial segregation and prejudice, and, in the chain of events, helped to launch the civil rights movement of the 1960s that brought an end to the worst of America’s racial intolerance.”

Download or read book Lay Bare the Heart written by James Farmer and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas native James Farmer is one of the “Big Four” of the turbulent 1960s civil rights movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. Farmer might be called the forgotten man of the movement, overshadowed by Martin Luther King Jr., who was deeply influenced by Farmer’s interpretation of Gandhi’s concept of nonviolent protest. Born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920, the son of a preacher, Farmer grew up with segregated movie theaters and “White Only” drinking fountains. This background impelled him to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. That same year he mobilized the first sit-in in an all-white restaurant near the University of Chicago. Under Farmer’s direction, CORE set the pattern for the civil rights movement by peaceful protests which eventually led to the dramatic “Freedom Rides” of the 1960s. In Lay Bare the Heart Farmer tells the story of the heroic civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. This moving and unsparing personal account captures both the inspiring strengths and human weaknesses of a movement beset by rivalries, conflicts and betrayals. Farmer recalls meetings with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson (for whom he had great respect), and Lyndon Johnson (who, according to Farmer, used Adam Clayton Powell Jr., to thwart a major phase of the movement). James Farmer has courageously worked for dignity for all people in the United States. In this book, he tells his story with forthright honesty. First published in 1985 by Arbor House, this edition contains a new foreword by Don Carleton, director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, and a new preface.

Download or read book Changing Perspectives written by Allison E. Schottenstein and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing Perspectives charts the pivotal period in Houston’s history when Jewish and Black leadership eventually came together to work for positive change. This is a story of two communities, both of which struggled to claim the rights and privileges they desired. Previous scholars of Southern Jewish history have argued that Black-Jewish relations did not exist in the South. However, during the 1930s to the 1980s, Jews and Blacks in Houston interacted in diverse and oftentimes surprising ways. For example, Houston’s Jewish leaders and eventually Black political leaders forged a connection that blossomed into the creation of the Mickey Leland Kibbutzim Internship in Israel for disadvantaged Black youth. Initially Houston Jewish leadership battled with their devotion to liberalism and sympathy with oppressed Blacks and their desire to acculturate. The distance between Houston’s Jews and Blacks diminished after changing demographics, the end of segregation, city redistricting, and the emergence of Black political power. Simultaneously, Israel’s victory during the Six-Day War caused the city’s Jews to embrace their Jewish identity and form an unexpected bond with Black political leaders over the cause of Zionism. Allison Schottenstein shows that Black-Jewish relations did exist during the Long Civil Rights Movement in Houston. Indeed, Houston played a significant role in the scope of Southern Jewish history and in expanding our understanding of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.

Download or read book Texas Mexican Americans and Postwar Civil Rights written by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, Mexican American veterans returned home to lead the civil rights struggles of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Many of their stories have been recorded by the Voces Oral History Project (formerly the U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project), founded and directed by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. In this volume, she draws upon the vast resources of the Voces Project, as well as archives in other parts of the country, to tell the stories of three little-known advancements in Mexican American civil rights. The first two stories recount local civil rights efforts that typified the grassroots activism of Mexican Americans across the Southwest. One records the successful effort led by parents to integrate the Alpine, Texas, public schools in 1969—fifteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unconstitutional. The second describes how El Paso's first Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles, quietly challenged institutionalized racism to integrate the city's police and fire departments, thus opening civil service employment to Mexican Americans. The final account provides the first history of the early days of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and its founder Pete Tijerina Jr. from MALDEF's incorporation in San Antonio in 1968 until its move to San Francisco in 1972.

Download or read book Fair Ways written by Robert J. Robertson and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation In the summer of 1955, six African American golfers in Beaumont, Texas, began attacking the Jim Crow caste system when they filed a federal lawsuit for the right to play the municipal golf course. The golfers and their African American lawyers went to federal court and asked a conservative white Republican judge to render a decision that would not only integrate the local golf course but also set precedent for desegregation of other public facilities. In Fair Ways, Robert J. Robertson chronicles three parallel stories that converged in this important case. He tells the story of the plaintiffs-avid golfers who had learned the game while working as caddies and waiters-of their young lawyers, recent graduates from Howard University law school, and of the Republican judge just appointed to the bench by President Eisenhower. Using public case papers, public records, newspapers, and oral histories, Robertson has recreated the scene in Beaumont on the eve of desegregation. Fair Ways gives a vivid picture of racial segregation and the forces that brought about its end.

Download or read book No Mexicans Women Or Dogs Allowed written by Cynthia Orozco and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-11-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light, restoring its early twentieth-century context. Cynthia Orozco also provides evidence that perceptions of LULAC as a petite bourgeoisie, assimilationist, conservative, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the realities of the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.