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.

Expelled from LULAC

 

This ideology shaped the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas. LULAC drew its membership from "small business owners and merchants, small landowners, skilled workers, artisans, [and] professionals." English was declared LULAC's official language. LULAC's racial politics can be deciphered by its name. By labeling themselves "Latin American," the middle-class group emphasized the community's European origins and American citizenship. 

Some LULAC chapters expressed their white identity by erecting a color line between the membership and blacks. One LULAC council expelled a member for marrying a "Negress,"and members socially shunned the interracial couple. A member of the council bitterly complained that "An American mob would lynch him. But we are not given the same opportunity to form a mob and come clean."

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

"There is no connection!"

 

A year after Sweatt v. Painter, the U.S District Court for the District of Kansas heard Oliver Brown's suit against the Topeka School District for refusing to allow his third-grade daughter, Linda, to attend the white elementary school, which was nearer to her house than the segregated grade school on the other side of a railroad switchyard.

When Wirin suggested in 1953 that the Mendez and Delgado segregation cases in California and Texas would likely influence the outcome of the Brown cases, [George] Sanchez exclaimed: "There is no connection!" Our cases really were on the "due process' clause[that segregation was] ('arbitrary, capricious') much more than on the equality...clause - whereas the present [Brown] cases attack the right of the states to legislate segregation (something which has never been done for Mexicans). "Does one of the present cases attack Negro segregation where there is no law decreeing such segregation? Only in such a case would we be concerned."

For Sanchez the overriding issue was not the constitutional right of states to legislate segregation, but rather the illegality of segregating Mexicans from other whites in the absence of state law. While Thurgood Marshall sought to overturn a half-century-old Supreme Court decision, Sanchez challenged local school districts that arbitrarily segregated Mexicans for their alleged language handicap.

Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.  

"Vote against integration. Don't look to a black future"

Mexican American civic groups fought to eliminate segregated Mexican Schools on the basis that Mexican-origin pupils were white. They made little mention of the segregation of African Americans in black schools. When the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board decision, Mexican American civic groups barely took notice...

And when the state legislature began passing laws to prolong segregation, the most prominent Mexican American organizations sided with the state government and not African Americans.

For example, some in LULAC debated the idea of joining forces with the NAACP to defeat the flood of racist bills coming from the legislature in 1957. League president Tijerina dismissed this idea. Similarly, LULAC's legal advisor, Phil Montalbo, explained to Tijerina, "[A] stand taken by you on such bills would tend to admit to our Anglo-American (sic) friends that we considered ourselves separate and apart from the majority of American citizens." Montalbo reminds us once again that, as whites, Anglos were the Mexican Americans' allies.

Numerous LULACers, and Mexican Americans more generally, agreed with this stance. For instance, A.G Ramirez stated succinctly, "[M]y district does not want our people and our beloved LULAC to be affiliated with the Negroes. We are white..."

Similarly, Dallas newsman Pedro Ochoa berated anyone wishing black-brown unity, explaining that many Mexican Americans "do not accept the integrationist precept at public schools, and perhaps churches and housing projects." Ochoa also warned Mexican Americans to "preserve your white race, vote against integration, don't look to a black future".

Behnken, Brian D. The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era. University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

"We are NOT a Civil Rights organization"

As late as 1954 Dr. [Hector] García claimed, “We are not and have never been a civil rights organization. Personally I hate the word.”... 

Dr. García, did not wish to alienate whites in Texas–or anywhere else–by appearing to join the struggle of black people for civil rights... 

By the early 1950s the American GI Forum, while still denying that it was a civil rights organization, sought to end discrimination in Texas schools, in employment, and in the use of public spaces. The core strategy depended on educating Anglos that “Americans of Spanish-speaking descent” or Latin Americans were Caucasians and that to identify them as anything but white, whether on birth certificates or traffic citations, was illegal. Making any distinction between Latin Americans and whites, he wrote, was a “slur,” an insult to all Latin Americans.

Neil Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line," in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest