We Shall Be Heard

This chapter describes the growing demonstrations during the 1960s, as the sit-in movement spreads to Texas. Elder activists join the young in expressing their demands. In less than three years after the first sit-ins, the revived African American civil rights movements would succeed in desegregating public accommodations in urban areas throughout Texas and the South, counting a major coup on the road to their larger goals of equal treatment, improved economic opportunities, and real political power.

Minorities Combine

This chapter describes the formation of a coalition between African Americans and Mexican Americans in San Antonio. The experiments in San Antonio in the fifteen years after World War II laid the foundation for future collaboration across the color line.

Forcing Us Together in Self-Defense

This chapter describes the difficult environment faced by unions amidst the Cold War. Communists and other radicals, who had proven themselves steady allies of African American and Mexican American working people from San Antonio to Houston, struggled to prove their patriotism. Veteran activists responded to this repression by redirecting their activism into new channels, often in the electoral arena.

Epilogue

The last hurrah of the statewide coalition occurred in 1966. It began in the Valley, when several hundred migrant farmworkers struck the melon harvest at La Casita Farms near Rio Grande City, in Starr County. Eugene Nelson, a Texas native who worked for the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the predecessor to the United Farm Workers, in California, asked permission to be reassigned to his home state and returned in March of that year. He made a tour of local unions and liberal leaders in Houston to raise a few dollars and then headed west toward the fields. There he connected with a local resident who had long sought to unionize the area’s farmworkers, and, on June 1, the NFWA’s new members began what they called ...

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

This chapter describes the growing militancy of PASO and African American activists from 1962 on. In response to conservative democratic gubernatorial candidate John Connally, African American and Mexican American activists would both take to the streets, reenergizing their respective civil rights movements with new campaigns for complete integration, real political power, and equal economic opportunity.

Prologue

On August 28, 1963, while much of America nervously watched the March on Washington, nearly one thousand demonstrators gathered in the all-black neighborhood of East Austin, Texas, to march toward the state capitol in 102-degree heat. Their two-mile route wound its way down crumbling streets, passed run-down houses and segregated schools, and finally crossed over into the white section of town, with its gleaming, pink granite capitol and lily-white Governor’s Mansion. Veteran activists of all colors from across the state flanked several hundred local black teen agers, while groups of white college students and Mexican American activists joined the procession. Picket signs calling for “Freedom Now” competed with a dizzying array of homemade placards. One linked Texas governor John Connally to the infamous segregationist George Wallace of Alabama. Others carried slogans that connected civil rights to labor: “No more 50¢ per hour,” read one, and “Segregation is a new form of slavery.” Still another praised the president while adding some Spanish flair: “Kennedy ...

Unions Are Needed So Desperately Here

This chapter shows how, in the late 1950s, a trio of local labor struggles would bring the African American, Mexican American, and white labor and civil rights activists together in new, surprising ways. Two union campaigns would force the San Antonio labor movement to reconnect to the masses of mexicano (and to a lesser extent black) workers in the city. In so doing, the unions would also be compelled to confront and better understand the growing black and brown civil rights movements.

New Power for Texas Minorities

This chapter describes how the assassination of John F. Kennedy sapped the energy of the Democratic Coalition. Disagreements within the multiracial alliance over goals and strategy and the pressure of its participants’ ongoing, unconscious white supremacy would produce interracial acrimony and suspicion that gradually displaced the hard-won mutual trust of the previous years and decades. Still, despite its gradual coming apart, the Democratic Coalition and its members would win their right to a remarkable degree. Their massive voter registration campaign in 1964 would break down the doors of the Democratic Party and would forever transform Texas politics.

They’ll Never Separate Us Again

This chapter describes the rise of the Democratic Coalition in Texas. Before it was extinguished, the coalition would reach deeper into the state’s black and brown neighborhoods than ever before, reactivating old networks of veteran activists and recruiting and training tens of thousands of new grassroots organizers. It would create additional space for PASO and labor to extend their joint organizing efforts and would help the Texas AFL-CIO become a civil rights organization in its own right. And it would support the arrival of the black civil rights movement on a statewide level, resulting in a new wave of direct action protests and culminating in the state’s largest demonstration to date.

Trying to Reach Substantially Unanimous Agreement

This chapter follows the 1961 campaign for Lyndon Johnson’s senate seat. Henry B. Gonzalez and Maury Maverick Jr., the two liberal legislators and frequent allies from San Antonio, each declared their candidacies for the seat. Meanwhile, Mexican-American organizers sought to convert Viva Kennedy clubs into a permanent organization and a force in Texas politics. Their new group, the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASO), would bring together a diverse collection of mexicano labor, civil rights, and political activists that—despite their common cultural heritage—would debate the organization’s program and methods throughout its formative years.