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(49,394 posts) Sun Apr 6, 2025, 06:41 PM Apr 6

Brown, Black, and White in Texas

https://southernspaces.org/2012/brown-black-and-white-texas/

Review

"Let the Negro fight his own battles," declared Felix Tijerina, a Mexican American civil rights activist in Texas and the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), in 1957. Tijerina was responding to the suggestion by some LULAC colleagues that Mexican Americans ally with African Americans. "[The Negro's] problems are not mine," he retorted. "I don't want to ally with him" (1). Thirteen years later, Reverend D. Leon Everett, the lone black member of the Houston school board, and a leader of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), expressed pessimism over the possibility for black-brown unity after a Mexican American youth told him that "[w]e don't want to go to school with the Blacks because they are dirty!" "As a Black man I will join any group of oppressed people," he declared, "but when that group employs the same form of discrimination that I have been up against all these years, I will cut them loose." Everett proved just as susceptible to the monolithic view, denouncing Mexican Americans en masse as he too declared: "Let them fight their own battles" (1–2).

The rejection of interracial cooperation embodied in these mutual rebukes provides the starting point for Brian D. Behnken, an assistant professor in the department of history and the US Latino/a Studies program at Iowa State University. In the quarter of a century after World War II, both groups struggled for civil rights, pursuing courtroom strategies, exercising the franchise, and marching—and both achieved significant victories. Yet, "unification largely eluded these groups," argues Behnken. "Instead, two separate civil rights struggles occurred simultaneously. Despite repeated calls for cooperation and a number of examples of interethnic alliances, African Americans and Mexican Americans ultimately 'fought their own battles'" (2). Behnken examines these movements, both as mutually exclusive entities and in cooperation and conflict. Although devoting equal attention to both groups, he is most provocative in his discussion of Mexican Americans.

Responding to a scholarly tendency to study the civil rights movement as a southern phenomenon involving only blacks and whites, Behnken focuses on Texas, a state with significant Mexican American and African American populations in roughly equal numbers. Reflecting this demography, Texas maintained a "dual Jim Crow system" (5) which enforced discrimination against both populations through a hodge-podge of laws and customs, and separated both groups not only from whites but from one another. "Anglos had set these groups apart for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. To acquire power from whites, blacks and Mexican Americans had to work against each other" (230). Behnken proceeds from World War II to the early 1970s, examining the strategies and tactics employed by the black and Mexican American populations in their struggles, as well as the (usually fleeting) efforts of the two to work together. Eschewing more conventional historiography that emphasizes an abrupt shift from nonviolent protest to a more confrontational posture in the late 1960s, Behnken explores a generally neglected period of transition. Scholars have "largely ignored the period between the days of nonviolence and the days of Black Power and Brown Power," he writes. "Rather than one movement ending and another beginning, an evolutionary process took place—the Mexican American and African American movements evolved into something different, and Black or Brown Power were hardly forgone conclusions" (131).

Behnken provides an incisive examination of various obstacles to successful interracial coalition. One was the tendency of each group to internalize white-authored stereotypes about the other. "Some African Americans tended to regard Mexican Americans as foreigners who took jobs from the native born" and "as competitors who took political power away from African Americans and monopolized government aid programs" (9). A second obstacle was the proclivity of each group to seek the support of the other without having to reciprocate. A third was racial geography: with the exception of some of the larger cities, blacks and Mexican Americans lived in different areas of the state. In Crystal City, the site of a major Mexican American struggle, blacks "comprised only 2 percent of the population, or less than two hundred people," Behnken explains. "Few blacks traveled to Crystal City to join the political protests. By the same token, few Mexican Americans from South and Southwest Texas went to cities like Dallas and Houston to take part in the [black-led] sit-ins. Moreover, African Americans in Crystal City backed the Anglo political machine" (97–98).

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