The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era

1. Not Similar Enough: Mexican American and African American Civil Rights Struggles in the 1940s

ONE Not Similar Enough Mexican American and African American Civil Rights Struggles in the 1940s LISA Y. RAMOS On July 6, 1948, University of Texas professor George I. Sánchez penned a letter to Thurgood Marshall, special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp).1 At the time, Sánchez was a scrappy and stubborn forty-one-year-old scholar-activist who had worked on improving the social and economic conditions of Mexican Americans since his days of teaching in the rural mountains of his native New Mexico.2 Marshall was a forty-year-old distinguished and courageous attorney from Baltimore, Maryland, in charge of the naacp’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (ldf).3 In his letter to Marshall, Sánchez expressed unqualified support for the naacp’s campaign to end segregation. He wrote: “I would be very happy to give you whatever cooperation I can.”4 Sánchez was referring to Marshall’s request for the affidavits of various academics and researchers in the Delgado et al. v. Bastrop et al. Independent School District (1948) school desegregation case, in which ten Mexican-descent parents and grandparents sued four central Texas school districts, a county superintendent , the state superintendent of public education, and the state board of education on behalf of their twenty Mexican American RAMOS 20 children. The families brought suit because these local school districts and state officials refused to allow Mexican-descent children to attend Anglo schools, even if an Anglo school was closer to their homes, and for compelling the Mexican-descent children to attend the Mexican School.5 Now that these two key leaders within the Mexican American and African American civil rights community had connected , why did they not discuss merging their antidiscrimination efforts?6 Both were, after all, in the middle of school desegregation legal campaigns. This failure to join the black and Mexican American civil rights struggles prior to the social revolution of the 1960s has become the center of much debate. According to one side of this debate, Mexican American leaders were wedded to whiteness, meaning they possessed a strong identification with the white race and especially the idea of white racial supremacy over other racial groups.7 This phenomenon demonstrates why no joint black-brown civil rights effort emerged prior to the 1960s. Some scholars argue that politically active Mexican Americans did not abandon a white race identity in favor of a minority status until the late 1960s or early 1970s.8 For instance, legal scholar Ian Haney López writes, “[S]ince the 1930s, members of the Mexican community had insisted, in the face of a strong presumption by Anglo society to the contrary , that Mexicans were white.”9 He suggests that many Mexican Americans embraced this identity until the late 1960s when Mexican American youth began to assert a Chicano, nonwhite (brown race) identity.10 Historian Guadalupe San Miguel buttresses this view when he writes that prior to the 1970s “activist Mexican Americans in Houston and throughout the country had viewed themselves as part of the white or Caucasian race in order to obtain social justice and equal educational opportunity .”11 These scholars distinguish between a pre-1960s white race identification and a post-1960s Chicano identification among Mexican American activists. 21 1. George I. Sánchez, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in the 1940s. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin. 22 2. Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the naacp, 1957. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the naacp Records, Reproduction no. lc-dig-ppmsc-01271. NOT SIMILAR ENOUGH 23 Rather than enveloping themselves completely in white race claims in the pre-1960s period, I argue that key Mexican American middle class leaders, specifically Professor George I. Sánchez , demonstrated an awareness of the limits of whiteness and understood that African American discriminatory experiences shared common traits with their own experiences. Some African American activists, in particular Thurgood Marshall, also understood that the Mexican American and African American legal civil rights struggles could draw upon similar legal arguments and strategies.12 While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the Mexican American and African American legal civil rights struggles were intimately linked prior to the 1960s, it would not be wrong to say that beginning in...