Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  In the first three decades of the 20th century, in which 60 percent of the Negro population congregated in municipalities, Texas—with Oklahoma and certain border states—was peculiarly noted for racial violence. There were several historic uprisings, both white and black. Negro soldiers in the federal service rioted at Brownsville and shot up the town with some fatalities. The national government refused to turn the suspects over to the state authorities, as one Ranger captain demanded, but whole units were dismissed under unfair conditions from the service. A similar rebellion erupted among Negro soldiers in Houston in 1917, and several of the participants were executed by the military authorities at Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio. In the era of nativism of the 1920s, there were several white lynch actions and innumerable smaller persecutions. In one incident, which served as a model for studies in mob psychology, the residents of a Texas town burned down their new courthouse and jail in order to incinerate one Negro prisoner. Actual mob violence was far more prevalent in Texas than in the Deep South, where lynchings were conducted with greater decorum. While all observers stepped warily in explaining this phenomenon, the greater democratization of Texas urban life in these years, with the influx of dirt farmers, probably was a factor. There existed no power structure with either the ethic or the power to deny mob action. Something like the great fear wave of 1860, when western counties lynched slaves whom the planters protected in the east, occurred.

  However, the Texas picture changed sharply in the 1940s, from one of the worst situations in the South to perhaps the best. One reason, certainly, was that the burgeoning economy and rapid metropolitanization of Texas—more than half of the population was metropolitan by 1950, almost three-quarters by the late 1960s—broke the patterns of Southern society. All of Texans' biases remained, but the social necessity of maintaining them disappeared. Powerful economic interests became increasingly important in the state; these interests, unlike local municipal officials and country sheriffs, were determined to force law and order even against the prejudices of the white lower and middle classes. Probably more important in the long run, the black population itself began rapidly to decrease.

  With World War II, and in the decades that followed, Negro emigration out of Texas became a flood. Some went West, most went northward up the Mississippi Valley. The higher wages in the North and West in those years, plus the hope of escaping the pervading caste system, drew Negroes in torrents. The Northern and Midwestern cities had thousands of openings for unskilled workers, at a time when the Texas Negro's usefulness at home had almost vanished. In time, after millions had gone, the social utility of the Southern Negro in the North also vanished; he had traded the Southern fields of degradation for the Northern cities of destruction. But that, as several Texans commented, was the North's problem; now the North could apply its own morality to it. A growing, horrifying national racial crisis each year, paradoxically, affected less and less the region where it had all begun.

  At the end of the Civil War, about one in three residents of Texas were black. By 1950, Negroes comprised 12.7 percent, by 1955, 11.6 percent. The figure stabilized in the 1960s at about 12 percent, with areas of high concentration rarely reaching more than 20 percent. With each announced decrease, the amiability of the white society toward the Negro problem tended to increase. Unlike many parts of the South, and now, almost all great cities in the North, the Negro offered the Texan politician nothing to fear. Thus, in Texas there was little resistance to the long, uneven trend of interference in state affairs by the Supreme Court and federal administrations that now aroused resentment and won few adherents in the South generally.

  Texans disapproved of the so-called civil rights movement; few were badly disturbed or frightened by it.

  The destruction of the Democratic Party's white primary law in 1944 at first aroused consternation; one reason the Negro had been quiescent in Texas, if far from content, was that since the turn of the century no officeholder had ever made him promises. But the fears of a new wave of demagoguery faded in the census figures. Unlike many states of the old Confederacy, few regions in Texas put up any obstacles to Negro voting. If a Negro paid a poll tax, he could vote without hindrance or let. His vote, except in a few areas, could not be decisive, particularly in a one-party state. Black votes could swing close state elections, as in 1960, but little else.

  In 1949, Texas moved strongly, for the first time, to improve Negro education. This effort was designed to justify the 1896 "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation. It came too late, and would not have affected the Supreme Court's decision in any case, since the Court was now operating under the theory of the desirability of social integration of the Negro with the white. However, most Negroes continued to attend segregated schools after 1954, and these were much improved. Equally important, by 1957 there were eight independent colleges, and two state institutions of higher education for Negroes. The level of average education rose dramatically, although the quality still left much to be desired.

  The 1954 Supreme Court integration decision again caused consternation, but significantly, little defiance. Polls and referenda and statewide elections, year after year, showed an overwhelming Texan disapproval of federal civil rights enforcement. In 1956, the Democratic primary revealed huge majorities in favor of strengthening laws against racial intermarriage, exempting white students from attending schools with blacks, and interposition of the state laws to offset federal court decisions. Later elections favored retention of the poll tax. But, as each social, educational, and political barrier was dismantled by the national government, the state accepted the changes with a remarkable amount of grace.

  Threats of violence attending school integration were quickly stifled by the state government. Governor Shivers sent Rangers to Mansfield in 1956, with orders to remove any troublemakers, black or white. A mob action to bar Negroes from Lamar State College at Beaumont, in deep east Texas, failed miserably. The power structure that had grown up in modern Texas had no belief in integration, but even less belief in civil disorder. In this, Texas resembled Virginia and South Carolina, where the vulgarization of society in the 20th century had become somewhat reversed. Law, not popular sentiments, prevailed.

  In 1957, Texas went through the painful, somewhat farcical process of legal interposition, trying to interpose its own laws between its people and the federal apparatus. A law was passed requiring a local election before Texas schools might be integrated, and another, closing any school at which troops, state or federal, had to be stationed. Important progress, however, was made with the 1957 local option law. School segregation under state laws had long worked a hardship on many western and southern Texas counties. Some had been required to build and maintain separate schools for only a handful of students. The vast majority of Negroes had always been found in the older counties of the east, and west Texas generally welcomed the end of segregation with relief.

  The single biggest factor causing the general amiability with which the state desegregated was the metropolitanization that had taken place. There were still deep-Southern, diehard counties, predominantly rural, east of the Brazos, but these no longer had much political power. Desegregation here worked a social revolution of a sort. But in the cities, desegregation did not mean integration, and it had almost no effect on society at large.

  Texas cities, unlike many of the older South, were rigidly segregated by wards and precincts; the Negro population invariably lived only in certain parts of town. The new, largely 20th-century metropoli were structured on the American plan of city building; neighborhoods and suburbs were defined by income. Education was still divided among local boards, local school districts. When San Antonio desegregated in 1954, without waiting for state sanction, the change moved only a handful of students from former schools. More important, perhaps, the end of legal segregation seemed to give actual impetus to de facto segregation. Where there was any large proportion of black students in a school, the white population tended to move ou
t, following a nationwide pattern from Washington, D.C., to Chicago.

  The same pattern took place when public segregation or discrimination was barred by law in 1964. Some cities, notably San Antonio, had already largely taken down the bars quietly long before. Fears continued to decrease when the white population realized it would in no case be overrun. In a region noted for its violence in the past, now there was almost none.

  Again, several factors were at work, besides the small proportion of black people, almost everywhere below critical mass. One was that the vast majority of unemployed Negroes, or families with no stake whatever in Texas society, had emigrated. Behind remained a far more able and responsible Negro community than most white Texans realized. It was still socially remote, living in its own part of town if not entirely in its own country; nowhere in Texas did or could whites and Negroes intermingle, except in political affairs, or in enclaves around universities. A rising proportion of this residue were middle class, in income and also, immensely more important, in ethic. Houston contained more Afro-American millionaires than any city in the United States. One of these families was descended from the slave who had made shoes for ten cents per pair before the Civil War.

  There were also several important Negro business organizations in Texas, including an insurance company. These provided balance. The great expansion and upgrading of Negro higher education was another large factor in providing an indigenous black middle class. Many of this group found more opportunity working within the black community at home than those who emigrated only to crash against the unadmitted caste barriers in the North.

  This middle class did not turn into what the black community called "niggers"—successful Negroes who tried to become imitation whites, by living and working within the white community. Here, the Southern social ethos, and the clear understanding that race barriers existed, prevented the flight of middle class blacks from their own people, and prevented much of the destructive ghetto atmosphere of the North. There was little fragmentation of the black elites into white suburbs. This might do damage to the integration theory, but it seemed to provide greater stability.

  Certain characteristics of Texas cities made them less prone to racial tensions than elsewhere. They were all products of the automobile age, and mostly built on open prairies; they lacked compression. Dwellings were overwhelmingly composed of single-family units; the crowded apartment houses and tenements originally erected to house immigrants in the Northern cities did not exist. While blacks were segregated, there were no tight neighborhoods, of either whites or blacks. The black areas generally had almost unlimited room to expand; the Texas annexation laws prevented most cities from being choked off by suburbia.

  There were some recorded—and many more unseen—instances in which Negroes from outside Texas tried to rouse interest in demonstrations or public protests in the 1960s. In virtually every case, the local black power structure was hostile to these, and prevented any such action. Significantly, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the spring of 1968, only one racial incident occurred in the entire state, and this was a single instance of breaking and entering.

  One final factor was a generally clear understanding between both black and white communities that the Texas economic and political power structure would not tolerate civic disorder. Few Texas leaders on any level were likely to be gripped by the paralysis that agonized and immobilized Northern political structures in the face of riots. The white community did not believe in social integration, and therefore felt little guilt or hypocrisy about the situation of the races. The white elected officials were rarely dependent on black votes. Texans by and large obeyed the desegregation and antidiscrimination laws because these were the law; they were prepared to enforce local codes as well.

  Caste barriers could not be disposed of by fiat in Texas, any more than the Republic of India could abolish untouchability by legislating against it. There were still hatreds, frustrations, and a thousand reminders of the past, for both races. But many enormous changes were occurring with remarkable ease. The Negroes were emerging rapidly, not into the white community, but into the total community as a strengthening entity. Blacks served on police forces, argued on city councils, sat in the legislature, all without dangerous friction. This was not true integration, but a strengthening of one polarized community vis-á-vis the other. It was the most that was possible at the time.

  The whites had never believed in true integration; significantly, perhaps, the Texas black community was moving rapidly away from it as a goal. Leadership in both communities, with a general realization that the total society was racist and polarized on both sides and would remain so, struggled for empirical working relationships with each other. They might or might not be hammered out. No society in human history had solved the problems thrown up when two highly differentiated populations were forced to live side by side.

  Meanwhile, federal studies described Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and other Texas cities as those least likely of any large metropolitan areas in the United States to experience major disorders.

  Seventy percent of the black population of America had emigrated into some dozen industrial centers, where tragically, the Negro, with his limited skills and remaining caste handicaps, was almost as obsolete as he had become on the sharecrop farm. Texas had not solved its Negro problem, but the state had exported most of it.

  In the same years that the historic Negro migration out of Texas was taking place, another great folk movement was happening. This was also largely unseen. While Texas exported one potential crisis, it was deliberately importing another one, which was inherently more serious. The 20th century saw the beginning of a huge Mexican immigration into Texas.

  The new migration was misunderstood by most Texans and almost all other Americans, because there had always been ethnic Mexicans in south Texas. But statistics reveal a startling pattern. In 1860, there were about 12,000 ethnic Mexicans in all Texas, all in the south-southwest. Between 1861 and 1900, approximately 334 Mexican nationals entered the United States annually; as many departed as entered. By 1900, immigration averaged 100 Mexicans per year. In 1900, 70,000 ethnic Mexicans lived in Texas, or less than 5 percent of the total population; only 5,000 lived in San Antonio, where they were still less numerous than ethnic Germans. By contrast, Arizona contained 14,172 Mexicans, California 8,096, and New Mexico 6,649. No other state had as many as 500.

  The first decade of the 20th century brought an enormous reversal of the trend. The reason was the new development of massive agriculture and the processing of agricultural products in the American Southwest. In Texas, the combination of spreading rails, organized land companies, and extensive irrigation projects invaded the old cattle enclaves along the Rio Grande. Surveyors, in the last great American land rush, laid out vast tracts through the brushland where Rip Ford and Cheno Cortinas once rode. New cities were laid out, too, some on old settlement sites, some on new, such as the Western Land Company's bright new town of Weslaco, in rich alluvial soils a few miles from the Rio Grande. With diverted water, the brasada and the ebonal began to bloom with fields of fruits and vegetables. The Texas citrus industry began; millions of acres were cleared and plowed.

  Until this time, economic gravity along the border lay with Mexico. Matamoros was a rich city; Brownsville, after 1882, had reverted to a sleepy small town. The border, separated by the arid country between it and San Antonio, lay outside the economic boundaries of the United States, except for cattle, and more cattle were shipped abroad than sent North. Mexican money was even dominant; border merchants continually complained as falling silver prices depreciated their stocks of "adobe dollars," or Mexican silver pesos, vis-á-vis United States gold. The new development changed all this; it brought the Southwest back firmly into the United States. Tons of vegetables, fresh and canned, were shipped North by rail; towns and cities swelled. New blood came in, because here was a lusty new frontier, where a man with capital could make
his fortune out of crops and land.

  This entire development was based on Mexican labor. In fact, none of it would or could have taken place without a great mass of low-paid workers from south of the border. Much of the new lands was marginal, and since irrigation and drainage was required, it took enormous investments in capital to develop them. Further, these croplands were separated by immense distances from their markets, almost entirely in the far North and East. The cost of land, irrigation, and crushing freight charges could only be met by using labor cheaper than any other in the United States. Without Mexican labor, the Southwest could no more have been developed agriculturally than the huge cotton plantations could have produced their surpluses for the antebellum South without the Negroes.

  Day wages, even for low pay, offered the Mexican lowest class opportunities it did not enjoy at home. Thousands of Mexicans were recruited below the border; others, sensing a new frontier of their own, poured north. The Anglo-Americans had solved the problems of Indians, transportation, and large-scale agriculture in old Spanish Texas, and until all this had been done, mass Mexican immigration into Texas simply could not take place. In each year after 1900, more Mexicans emigrated into Texas than had gone there during all the generations of Spanish rule.

  These new workers, hardy, gregarious, polite, accustomed to savage suffering, long bound to the soil, arrived not only as adventurous individuals but in whole family and extended family groups. Very few of them were vaqueros from northern Mexico. They poured up from the immense central plateau, where the Spanish had first established the encomienda and hacienda, from the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Nuevo León. They were predominantly Indian by blood, but long Hispanicized, and they fled from the Mexican regions where landholdings were the largest and conditions for the pelados, "the skinned ones," were the worst. Thousands fled to escape debt peonage, as once European peasants fled from manor to town, or took ship for America. These Mexicans entered a new country where most of the land and almost all the means of production were owned by Anglos. They were subjected to fierce exploitation, by American, but not Mexican, standards. Mexican laborers took jobs at 50 cents per day, but still, in a month, some earned more cash than they had seen in their entire lives. No Anglo-Texan could exploit this pelado class to the extent it had been exploited in Mexico for four hundred years.