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.

Passing for Cuban

Morton was making history, shattering the color barrier in recording for the first time, More than a decade before Benny Goodman received credit for doing so with Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. Still, the idea of white musicians collaborating with a black man —even one as light-skinned as the Creole Morton—posed problems for all involved, particularly when it came to hotel accommodations in provincial Richmond. So Morton was asked to pass, the boys in the band saying he was Cuban.

Gaines, William, and Reich, Howard. Jelly's blues : the life, music, and redemption of Jelly Roll Morton. Cambridge, Hachette Books, 2003.

Reggie Jackson's White Girlfriend

At Arizona State I encountered another form of prejudice. My football coach there, Frank Kush, told me that the Sun Angels boosters were upset because I was dating a Mexican girl, and that I should be careful... 

 In 1966 I was on the Arizona State baseball team when Bobby Winkles called me in and said, "I want to tell you that you're probably not going to be the number one draft choice in the country, even though you're head and shoulders ahead of everyone in ability." I asked him why, because it was a prestige thing to me. "Because you're dating a white girl," Winkles told me. I asked him how he knew. He said he'd heard it from the Mets. "They think it might cause some problems in the minors," Winkles said.

"We Have a Serious Problem That Isn't going Away", Sports Illustrated, May 11, 1987.

University of Texas

 

 

In May 1945, an Anglo private in the U.S Army and graduate of the University of Texas, PFC Robert Jones, wrote to Governor Stevenson that he attended high school with many Mexicans, some of whom "obviously had traces of Negro ancestry," and that at the University of Texas he saw "boys and girls with kinky hair and Negroid features from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other countries... I know from almost a whole lifetime in contact with Mexicans that they deserve more. I think the same can be said for the Negros." 

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

Lynching Data

  

We combed through 2,850 records of lynching victims, ultimately confirming 1,319 victims and finding 15 lynching victims not recorded in any data set, for a total of 1,334 victims of lynching. Lynching spanned 33 states over this period, with only Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont totally untouched. While searching, we also found three lynchings within the Tolnay-Beck states, one of which was previously unrecorded and two of which were incorrectly recorded by the NAACP and Chicago Tribune as having occurred outside the South. There were also many cases for which our improved data allowed us to identify and name a victim who was lynched at a similar time and place as a victim listed by the NAACP or Chicago Tribune inventories as “unknown.”

When combined with the new Tolnay-Beck data, we record 4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were unknown gender (although likely male); 3,265 were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1 was Japanese.

 

  Seguin, Charles, and David Rigby. “National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941.” Socius, Jan. 2019

Civil Rights was for the blacks.

 

"They was all white."

Creoles understood the benefits of exploiting whiteness for material gain. Sometimes, even having a person of color who looked white with his hand on one's shoulder was enough to reap benefits. Earl A. Barthé recalled that, when traveling through the South as a young man while looking for work,

there were these little highway diners. But if you were black, you might be able to stop and get gas but you couldn't go in to eat. You couldn't use the rest room. Not unless you were white. So, me and Harold [Earl A. Barthé's brother], we were travelling with a dark-skinned fella, we would sit in the back seat of the car and pretend he was the driver when we pulled in. We would get out and say "boy, fill up the tank while we get some sandwiches," and we would walk right in and order the food "to go."... They thought we was white. They didn't know... A white man might look at you twice but he wouldn't ask you if you was white if you carried yourself like you were white...we could be Mexican or we could be Indians or Italians and they was all white...we just wanted to get our food and get on to the next job, man! We were looking for work! We weren't on vacation!

Barthé, Darryl. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949. United States, LSU Press, 2021.