During the 1990s profits from Indian gaming seemed a likely source of development capital. The boom began when the Seminoles opened a high-stakes bingo parlor near Fort Lauderdale in 1978. Florida sued because gaming was illegal in the state, but a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the Seminoles’ sovereignty. Other tribes around the country were soon opening gaming operations. In 1988 Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which required tribes and states to agree on ground rules. By the first decade of the twenty-first century about 40 percent of the nation’s 566 tribes were doing a gross annual business of twenty billion dollars, about a quarter of which went to tribal governments. But prosperity depended on location. Ten reservation casinos accounted for more than 50 percent of the take—the Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegans of Connecticut, for example, operated two huge casinos and entertainment complexes within easy reach of Boston and New York. But the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglalas, hundreds of miles from a major urban center, remained the most impoverished community in the nation. Pine Ridge was all too typical. At the beginning of the new century, with the national economy booming, unemployment among adult Indians stood at 15 percent, three times the national average, and a majority of reservation households continued to live far below the poverty line. On the ten largest reservations, 15 to 20 percent of residents had no indoor plumbing, no adequate sewage disposal, and no electricity.
Cherokee casino, North Carolina, c. 1995. Author’s collection.
Problems and controversies endure, but that should not be allowed to obscure the remarkable resurgence of Indian nations since the end of Termination. Tribes founded forty reservation colleges that annually enroll more than thirty thousand students, and many instituted programs to revive the use of native languages. These developments were part of a cultural renaissance and a resurgence of pride among both reservation and urban Indians. “We alerted the entire world that the American Indians were still alive and resisting,” proclaimed activist Russell Means. Declarations of protest joined the clangs of slot machines to answer Reagan’s pioneer song. “We’re still here, and we’re still resisting. John Wayne did not kill us all.”21
. . .
If frontiers happen when cultures collide and attempt to find ways of living together, the postwar period deserves prominence in the annals of American frontier history. Not only were Indians resurgent, but Mexican Americans and African Americans rattled the ethnic and racial order that had been established during the nineteenth century—the ethnic labor system, the segregation of minorities, and their exclusion from the political process. World War II marked a decisive moment when marginalized groups confronted entrenched powers and forced them to renegotiate the terms of their frontier settlement—the laws, rights, and economics that determined the shape and rigidity of the seam that joined them.
Booming wartime industry in western cities, particularly on the Pacific coast, encouraged the migration of African Americans from the rural South and Mexican Americans from the rural Southwest. Men and women from both groups found jobs building ships, airplanes, and new housing. They might have lacked experience, but that hardly mattered. At a southern California aircraft plant, a black applicant was asked if he had any experience building B-17 bombers. “Man, I didn’t know what a P-38 or a B-17 was, but I wanted to learn, I wanted an opportunity,” he remembered. “I was honest and told him I didn’t know if he were talking about a gun, a battleship, or a plane.” Nevertheless, he got the job. Such opportunities, so rare in segregated industries before the wartime emergency, drew thousands. Historians lack precise numbers for the growth of the urban Mexican American population during the war (the Census Bureau didn’t collect data on Hispanics until 1970), but the black population of Seattle, Portland, greater San Francisco, and southern California doubled or tripled.22
Opportunity pulled African Americans west as forcefully as the daily humiliation of life in the segregated South pushed them. “You just don’t know what it was like,” Theresa Waller told an interviewer about life in her native Houston. “They would try to make you feel like you weren’t human.” She dreamed of leaving for California, where she could “be somebody.” In 1943 she and her husband heard of work in the shipyards and canneries of the Bay Area, and he went on ahead to get established. When he called for her to meet him in Oakland, she left Houston “on the Jim Crow car,” then changed trains and boarded an integrated car in El Paso. It was filled to overflowing, and a young serviceman rose to offer his seat. “You can relax now,” he said when he noticed her shock, “we’re at the Mason-Dixon line.” Earlier that summer in the Gulf coast town of Beaumont, only a few miles from Houston, there had been a brutal reminder of why it was difficult for African Americans to relax. Inflamed by false rumors that a white woman had been raped by a black man, a mob of several hundred whites invaded the black side of town, looting, burning, and leaving four hundred injured and three dead.23
The West may have existed on the freer side of the Mason-Dixon line, yet racial discrimination and segregation were realities there, too. The U.S. government interned Japanese Americans during the war, soldiers and sailors pummeled zoot-suiters in Los Angeles riots, and black and white soldiers and workers fought in numerous western cities. “Things were going to be different out here,” remembered Ruth Gracon, a young black woman who migrated to Oakland from Arkansas. “But they weren’t like we thought they’d be. They didn’t have ‘No Colored’ signs or anything like that, but they had other ways of telling you they didn’t want you.” In fact, businesses near western army bases where black units trained posted signs warning, “We Cater to White Trade Only.” Restaurants and hotels refused service to African Americans and Mexican Americans. Theater owners reserved balcony spaces for nonwhites, and municipal authorities banned them from parks and pools (except perhaps for a single weekday, usually just before draining and cleaning). The West was famous for its open spaces, not its open minds. A black serviceman stationed in Salina, Kansas, bitterly recalled being turned away with his buddies from a café by the owner—“You boys know we don’t serve colored here”—a rejection made all the more painful when he noticed a group of German prisoners of war eating at the counter.24
Jobs were abundant, but assurances of equitable treatment were few. African Americans in the wartime shipbuilding industry, for example, were subjected to systematic discrimination—not by the companies but by the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, the American Federation of Labor union that represented workers. The union segregated blacks (though apparently not Hispanics) in auxiliary locals without representation at the higher levels of the international. “We pay our dues but what do we get?” complained one black worker. “Nothing but discriminated against and segregated.” After protests, the union instigated the firing of black activists. With support of the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, African Americans went to court, and in 1944 the boilermakers were ordered to end their discriminatory practices.25
After the war, returning African American and Mexican American combat veterans worked to keep from sinking back to the bad old days. Edward Roybal of Los Angeles told how military service taught him to confront racism. “I was assigned to a barracks full of Texans,” he recalled, and “one of them woke up every morning and cursed Mexicans in general. Then one day he cursed me. So, I turned around and socked him.” To his surprise Roybal found that his commanding officers approved. They placed unit cohesion above expressions of bigotry—“not because they loved us, but because they wanted things to run smoothly. It dawned on some of us for the first time that the Anglos were divided. And if we united, we could win concessions.” Returning to Los Angeles after the war, Roybal ran for a seat on the city council and lost. After the election, he and others founded a group called the Community Service Organization that registered fifteen thousand new Mexican American voters. In a second try two years later, Roybal won the position and became the first Hispanic on the council since 1888. He vividly remembered the council pr
esident introducing him at his first meeting as the “Mexican-speaking councilman representing the Mexican people of Los Angeles.” Calmly Roybal laid aside “the baloney speech” he had prepared and corrected the man: “I’m not a Mexican, I am a Mexican American. And I don’t speak a word of Mexican, I speak Spanish.”26
Edward Roybal of Los Angeles, c. 1950. Roybal Institute for Applied Gerontology, California State University at Los Angeles.
The mobilization of minority voters was one of the most crucial postwar struggles. At first electoral activity focused on the municipal and state levels. Then, in 1961, Henry B. González of San Antonio, who like Roybal had begun his political career on the city council, became the first Mexican American elected to Congress. In 1962 he was joined in the House of Representatives by Roybal, who was elected to represent East L.A. That same year Los Angeles voters in South Central also sent Augustus Hawkins, an African American born in Louisiana who had migrated to southern California to escape “the ruthlessness and ugliness of segregation.” Most African Americans in Texas could not participate in electoral politics until the Supreme Court declared the poll tax unconstitutional in 1966. That year the voters of Houston elected Barbara Jordan to the state legislature, and six years later she became the first African American to represent Texas in Congress.27
Barbara Jordan of Houston, 1976. Library of Congress.
The push for voting rights and electoral victories happened in concert with attacks on segregation. The case of Felix Longoria, a young Mexican American serviceman killed in action, provided an early symbol. After the war, Longoria’s family arranged to have his body moved from an overseas cemetery to one near their home in Three Rivers, Texas, but they were outraged to discover that the local funeral home would not handle the remains of Mexican Americans. The American G.I. Forum, an activist group of Mexican American veterans, appealed to Senator Lyndon Johnson, who arranged to have the body reburied with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Jim Crow in Texas proved unable to defend itself against American heroism, military and otherwise.
The most important arena for desegregation was public education. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) had gone to court to end school segregation in Texas during the 1930s, and although the league lost, their legal briefs aided later efforts. Immediately following the war LULAC offered legal assistance to a group of frustrated Mexican American parents in the southern California citrus town of Westminster, which confined Hispanic children to a separate and inferior “Mexican school.” In a landmark decision in 1947, the California Supreme Court found for the parents, although they tried to limit its national impact by declining to make a broad constitutional ruling. The decision, editorialized La Opinión, the leading Spanish-language newspaper in southern California, was a blow to “those who believe in the anti-Semitic theories of Adolph Hitler.” Families who had sent men to fight and die in an antiracist war abroad were not going to tolerate it at home. Westminster integrated its schools, and other southern California districts soon followed.28
The victory of the Mexican American parents in the Westminster case inspired others to think that the West was perhaps the place to challenge the national system of segregation. “The die is cast in the South, or in an old city like New York or Chicago,” Phoenix activist William Mahoney declared in 1951. “But we here are present for the creation. We’re making a society where the die isn’t cast. It can be for good or ill.” Such flights of fancy (institutional discrimination had been going on in the Southwest for seventy-five years) captured the optimism of the immediate postwar period. People began to believe that the United States might live up to its rhetoric of freedom and equality for all. In 1952 a group of black parents in Phoenix won a state court ruling against segregation of the public schools of Arizona. At the same time black parents in Topeka, Kansas—represented by a group of attorneys that included the descendants of Exoduster pioneers—filed a suit in federal court. Although they lost the first round, they quickly appealed. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that separate schools were inherently unequal, establishing a precedent that applied directly to the South.29
Integrating schools proved difficult in western cities sharply divided by race and class. Blacks, whites, and Mexican Americans lived apart due to intractable patterns of residential segregation. Consider the case of postwar southern California, where the African American population doubled the general growth rate, and the Mexican American numbers increased fourfold. Restrictive covenants barred “non-Caucasians” from an estimated 95 percent of all the housing constructed immediately after the war. In 1947 James Shifflett, a leader of the African-American community in Los Angeles, moved his family to a bungalow in an all-white district of the city. “I remember a marshal ringing our doorbell and handing my parents a notice to move out,” his daughter Lynne recalled. Shifflett’s neighbors had filed suit to enforce the white-only covenant. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that such restrictions were “unenforceable as law and contrary to public policy”—yet the practice continued informally for many years. The California legislature in 1963 passed the Fair Housing Act prohibiting racial discrimination in selling, renting, or leasing property, but the following year California voters, by a margin of two to one, passed a ballot proposition nullifying the act.30
African American and Mexican American newcomers crowded into existing ghettos and barrios, which expanded into fringe neighborhoods as whites fled to outlying suburbs. A study of racial segregation in Los Angeles County during the 1960s found that although blacks and Latinos made up 30 percent of the population, fifty-three of eighty-two suburban communities were 99 percent white, qualifying the county for the dubious distinction of being the most segregated in the nation. At about the same time, a California Department of Education survey found that 57 percent of the state’s Hispanic students and 85 percent of the African Americans attended predominantly “minority schools.” There was more school segregation by the 1970s, found historian Charles Wollenberg, than there had been in the 1940s.
As factory jobs moved to new industrial parks in the suburban fringe, unemployment rose among minorities trapped in the segregated urban core. Southern California was the most industrialized region in the country, yet, as historian Gerald Horne writes, “blacks were left without work, away from higher-wage union jobs.” More than 40 percent of African American families in Los Angeles lived at or below the poverty level. On a hot, smoggy evening in 1965, a minor traffic accident and botched arrest in Watts, the most impoverished of L.A.’s black neighborhoods, ignited an uprising. For four successive days thirty thousand angry people fought with police and the National Guard, looting stores and burning hundreds of buildings within a forty-mile radius. Thirty-four people died in the Watts Riot. Over the next five years—one of the most tumultuous periods in American history—blacks rioted in major cities throughout the West and the nation.31
The uprisings were a national frontier phenomenon. Groups pushed to the geographic, economic, and social margins pushed back. The urban violence produced a militant political movement with a western mainspring—the Black Panthers of Oakland, California. Denouncing the strategy of the civil rights movement, they advocated political change by means of armed self-defense and violent revolution. The Panthers jumped from obscurity to infamy in 1967 when leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, along with a small group of followers, entered the chamber of the California state assembly armed with automatic weapons and dressed in their standard-issue uniform of black leather jacket, black turtleneck, black slacks, and black berets. Membership skyrocketed after this successful media event, and soon Black Panther chapters blossomed in most western cities, with offshoots in the East. As with the American Indian Movement, a concerted assault by local police and the FBI eventually brought down the Panthers, but they contributed to their own demise by peddling in violence and drugs.
Los Angeles police
make an arrest during the Watts Riot, 1965. Library of Congress.
Black Panther Party poster, Oakland, 1971. Author’s collection.
. . .
Although many Mexican Americans found employment in the booming industrial economy of the postwar West, thousands continued to labor in the fields as agricultural workers. Cesar Chavez joined the caravans of pickers following the ripening crops when his parents lost their small Arizona farm in the Great Depression. As a boy in the California desert town of Brawley, he and his brother were refused service at a diner, the waitress rejecting him with a laugh: “We don’t sell to Mexicans.” Incidents like these stung Chavez. The laugh, he remembered, “seemed to cut us out of the human race.” A few years later he was arrested for refusing to move from the white-only section of a movie theater, his introduction to political activism. As a young married man in the barrio of San Jose, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, Chavez went to work as an organizer for the Community Service Organization, a Hispanic rights group, then turned his attention to organizing farmworkers.32
The Mexican deportations of the 1930s and wartime mobilization had left growers short of farmworkers. Pressing the federal government for relief, they secured the passage of legislation permitting the entrance into the country of temporary Mexican farmworkers, or braceros. But the Bracero Program outlasted the war. In league with state and federal officials, growers used the program as a means of keeping a lid on wages and preventing strikes. As one grower candidly admitted, he preferred braceros to domestic workers because “they cannot protest [and] work at half the rate.” The program also stimulated a huge increase in the number of migrants who came across the border illegally. By the early 1950s border patrols of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were apprehending more than half a million illegal border crossers each year, and estimates were that perhaps two or three times that many got across successfully. Chavez and other union organizers argued that the presence of a large pool of politically vulnerable noncitizens severely hampered efforts to unionize farmworkers. Mobilizing both Mexican Americans and liberals, Chavez’s first success came when Congress eliminated the program in 1964.33
The American West Page 47