Episode 88 – From Reconstruction to DEI: The Long Arc of Race Relations in Texas

Episode 88 – From Reconstruction to DEI: The Long Arc of Race Relations in Texas Hello folks, I’m Hank Wilson and welcome to Episode 88 of the Hidden History of Texas. This is Episode 88 - From Reconstruction to DEI: The Long Arc of Race Relations in Texas In this episode I’m going to talk about a subject that a lot of folks like to avoid. That is the subject of race and race relations in Texas History. The story of the struggle that both African Americans and Mexican Americans faced in achieving their civil rights might be something you were unaware of.  While our image travels from reconstruction to today, and that is the title of this episode, the reality is also that our Mexican American citizens have fought to improve their political circumstances ever since the Anglos began showing up in the 1820s and especially after the revolution of 1836.  The struggle African Americans faced started after their emancipation from slavery in 1865. For the most part though organized campaigns for both groups really weren’t launched until the early twentieth century. In the years following the Texas Revolution Tejanos were often the focal point of Anglo hatred and mistrust.  In the 1850s, Anglos accused Tejanos in Central Texas of helping slaves escape to Mexico and many of the Tejano families were forced to leave their homes. During the Cart War of 1857 (which I covered in a previous episode) Tejanos around Goliad and San Antonio were attacked by Anglos. Two years later in 1859, Tejano’s in South Texas were attacked after Juan N. Cortina's captured Brownsville. And he issued a proclamation demanding the protection of Mexican-American land rights. Needless to say, this caused panic among Anglo residents who thought of him a nothing more than a bandit. This instigated the "First Cortina War" which grew in intensity and eventually required the U.S. Army, including troops under Robert E. Lee and local Texas Rangers, to eventually force him to retreat into Mexico by December 1859.  It was called the First Cortina War because Cortina returned during the Civil War (hence, the Second Cortina War), initially assisting the Union army this time, (after all he recognized that the Confederacy wanted to maintain slavery and continue to take the land held by Tejanos) and he succeed in taking control of steamboats, before being defeated in 1861 by Confederate forces under Santos Benavides. After the Civil War, both the newly freed slaves and Tejanos faced further atrocities. In the 1880s, White men in East Texas used lynching as their preferred method of maintaining political control. It became very common as a method of retaliation for alleged rapes of White women or for other insults or injuries that white people felt had been perpetrated. Mexican Americans of South Texas faced the same problems. The Ku Klux Klan, the White Caps, law officials, and the Texas Rangers, all served as official and unofficial enforcers of White authority, and they regularly terrorized both Mexican and Black Texans. For blacks emancipation eventually proved to be more of a symbolic action than anything else, because while slaves were freed from official bondage, they were still mostly blocked from fully participating in society.  Freedmen often found themselves barred from most public places and schools and often were  forced to live only in certain residential areas of towns. As the calendar changed to the twentieth century and reconstruction was abandoned, white politicians insured that such practices were written into the law. Even though Tejanos were not specifically targeted by these statutes they were still often subjected to them through unwritten social customs.  Through the 1880s and 1890s, both African Americans and Mexican Americans faced organized legal efforts to disfranchise them and if those didn’t work, Anglos turned to a variety of informal means to weaken their political strength. The most common method they faced were terrorist tactics, literacy tests, the stuffing of ballot boxes, and accusations of incompetence when they won office. White political bosses in South Texas and other areas with large Mexican-American population such as the El Paso or Rio Grande valley, meantime, dominated their areas by controlling the votes of the poor. Two of the more odorous methods used by the white politicians was the poll-tax law and the other was the white primary passed by Texas Democrats. The poll tax law  was passed in 1902 the legislature passed the poll-tax law which required every person who wanted to vote to “pay from $1.50 to $1.75’ for that privilege, which effectively disenfranchised those who were poor. (Poll Taxes for federal elections weren’t eliminated until 1964 when the 24th amendment was passed and then in 1966 for state election.) These mechanisms disfranchised Blacks, and Mexican Americans for that matter, for White society did not regard Tejanos as belonging to the "White" race. Progressive reformers