This book is about theotherTexas, 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 Texasremembers 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.
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.
2022 Best Book Award, Oral History Association Hundreds
of stories of activists at the front lines of the intersecting
African American and Mexican American liberation struggle
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.
Black workers became the foot soldiers of the civil rights struggle, physically protecting its leaders and taking its campaigns to desegregate public spaces to the streets, often at great personal ...cost. African American laborers brought the struggle for racial equality to work and the fight for economic justice to the larger community.
INTRODUCTION MAX KROCHMAL
Civil Rights in Black and Brown,
11/2021
Book Chapter
On February 6, 1987, a hundred people staged a rally in front of the Montgomery County Courthouse in Conroe, a farming town that was beginning to turn into a distant suburb of Houston, forty miles to ...the south. The demonstrators demanded the release from death row of Clarence Brandley, an African American school janitor accused of raping and murdering a young white woman who had come to town for a varsity volleyball match. It was neither the first such protest, nor the first incident in which a Black man had been accused and punished for similar alleged crimes. Indeed, an
Unlike San Antonio’s Black liberation struggle, the city’s Chicano/a movement has come to occupy a nearly mythic status in Texas political culture. Whispers of it are today deployed as badges of ...courage, proof of street cred, or evidence of the city’s ostensibly postracial present and future. It was on the Westside of San Antonio that the iconic organizer José Ángel Gutiérrez joined with four of his comrades at St. Mary’s University to found the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), the “avant-garde” of the movimiento in Texas and the progenitor of La Raza Unida Party, the movement’s national electoral wing. One
The long African American and Mexican American liberation struggles spanned the vast geographic bounds of Texas, put forward expansive visions for social and economic justice, and permanently ...transformed the state’s race relations, political configurations, and educational systems. Few if any traditions or institutions remained untouched. Yet a full or even a preliminary accounting of grassroots civil rights battles in the Lone Star State has remained elusive—until now. Indeed, this history likely would have remained lost, confined in the heads of ordinary activists and beyond the reach of present-day readers had it not been for the establishment of the Civil
