Lynch Mob in Texas

 

Ginzburg, Ralph. 100 Years of Lynchings. United States, Black Classic Press, 1988.

The Texas slave who passed as Mexican

On the morning of March 14, 1909 …a tall man with penetrating brown eyes and carefully groomed mustache, attired in the latest fashion…caught the eye of authorities in Eagle Pass. Like the others on the Aztec Limited, the passenger had begun his journey from Mexico City in a first-class Pullman. Once he crossed the border into the United States, however, a new question arose. What race was he? For despite his elegant appearance, his skin had a somewhat swarthy tone—and, unlike Mexico, the Texas of 1909 possessed segregation laws, designed to limit contact between black and whites in everything from schools, restaurants, libraries, graveyards, and hotels to railroad cars. 

When asked, the newcomer insisted that he was a Mexican entrepreneur, on his way back to his office on Wall Street after negotiating the purchase of several rubber plantations in his homeland. His name, he offered, was Guillermo Enrique Eliseo—which,… could be translated into English as William Henry Ellis. Moreover, as an ethnic Mexican, he was legally white and not subject to Texas’s segregation statutes.

 Karl Jacoby , The Strange Career of William Ellis : The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire ( New York : W.W. Norton , 2016 )

The Jim Crow Accomplices

 

By 1948 a nine-square-mile community of 25,000 blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor whites lived on a low flood plain in West Dallas...

Desperation forced relatively prosperous blacks again to venture in the early 1950s in the Exline Park neighborhood, scene of the 1940-41 bombings. Twelve bombings in the next year and a half targeted homes sold to blacks in formerly all-white neighborhoods in a two-square-mile area of South Dallas. Not expecting white protection, African Americans armed themselves...

Dallas police arrested a series of suspects beginning in September 1951. The accused shared a decidedly working-class background and included parts pressers, machinists, and garage mechanics...

Yet only one of the suspects was ever put on trial- Pete Garcia, a member os Moore's South Dallas Adjustment League. Garcia was one of two Hispanics indicted in the bombings...

Garcia claimed Caucasian status, painting "For Whites Only"signs and placing them in the yards of families agreeing to not sell their South Dallas homes to black families. Garcia threatened other families at knifepoint to maintain the ban. Dallas newspapers, which had a policy of identifying black and Mexican American crime suspects by race, acknowledged Garcia's whiteness by frequently not mentioning his ethnicity. A chief witness at Garcia's trial testified that she had seen Garcia enter a vacant house moments before an explosion. She recanted her testimony, however. A jury deliberated for twelve hours before acquitting Garcia. 

Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001. United States, University of Texas Press, 2010.

Slavery is essential

I agree with you that the great development of your colony, and of the other colonies of Texas, depends among other things, upon permitting their inhabitants to introduce slaves; that by such action many men of property will come; and that without it only the wretched will come who cannot advance the province. But, my friend, in my Congress such arguments were not listened to. On the contrary, when slavery was discussed the whole Congress become electrified in considering the wretchedness of that portion of humanity; and it was resolved that commerce and traffic in slaves should be forever extinguished in our republic and that the introduction of slaves into our territory should not be permitted under any pretext.

...

I beg your excellency to interpose your influence so that the Supreme Government of the Union may grant to this department exemption from the decree which abolishes slavery; or communicate to me as quickly as possible your decision concerning the action that I should take. I assure you that on my part your order shall be complied with immediately. I have only sought to point out the evils that would follow the execution of the decree in this department. I estimate that the number of slaves in the new settlements is approximately one thousand of both sexes. Their owners value them at around 300,000 pesos.

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin to Stephen Austin, July 24, 1825

Learning about segregation in Texas

Race relations in Texas

 

The Mexican Slave Catcher

The most explosive incident involving runaway slaves in Laredo came ... on November 5, 1860. In a letter written to Henry and William Maltby's secessionist pro-slavery Corpus Christi Daily Ranchero, a forty-one-year-old Irish-born clerk named Michael Lidwell, a political ally of Santos [Benavides] who was living in Laredo at the time, said that a black man claiming to be a "free Negro" had arrived at Laredo with two dun horses and persuaded the ferryman to allow him passage to Nuevo Laredo. After the news was quickly passed along to Santos that the man was probably a runaway slave, he gathered ten vigilantes armed with rifles and pistols and at eight that evening crossed to Nuevo Laredo. "In the face of the entire population of the place," Santos was said to have "seized the negro" and succeeded in "making good his retreat [with] his men to the boat." ... Reaching the north bank of the river, the men dragged the wounded Mussett along with the runaway slave up the steep bank and scurried off to the safety of the town, where their captive was lodged in the city jail.

The Ranchero went out of its way to praise Santos for being "foremost in confronting danger in support of the laws and institutions of Texas." It was not the first time Santos had "distinguished himself in restoring runaway slaves to their owners," the Ranchero went on to say. The newspaper also praised him for his refusal to "receive any recompense for his exertions." The writers hoped that Santos, through his actions, had gone a long way toward alleviating the widely held idea in Texas that people of "Mexican origin" were not loyal to the state. His daring actions had proven that citizens on the Rio Grande frontier were as committed as the most "rabid orator." In a few comments on November 17, 1860, the Ranchero again praised Santos for daringly crossing into Mexico to retrieve the runaway slave."

Jerry D. Thompson. Tejano Tiger: José de los Santos Benavides and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891. The Texas Biography Series. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2017.

"All those without African ancestry"

"Segregation statutes consistently defined all those without African Ancestry as whites. Texas, for example, defined "colored children" as persons of mixed blood descended from negro ancestry for purposes of its school segregation laws and defined all persons besides those of African descent as white for purposes of its antimiscegenation and Jim Crow laws... Chinese and Mexicans were thus white under state laws governing the segregation of the races." 

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2015.

The Dallas Bombings of 1950

On a warm Monday night in May 1950, a handful of dynamite easily destroyed Robert and Marie Shelton’s American dream. The bomb ripped through the African American couple’s newly purchased home in South Dallas, demolishing their front porch, knocking the house off its foundation, and leaving behind a large hole in the ground… 

The main suspects were Mexican American men who felt threatened by the encroachment of African American families into white neighborhoods. One of these individuals, Pete Garcia, later admitted that he had painted “For Whites Only” signs in the neighborhood, threatened black home buyers with a knife, and chased two African American real estate agents out of the area.

Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas By Brian D. Behnken