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.

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