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.
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