Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections During the Civil Rights Era

Chapter 5. The Limits of White Anglo Benevolence

170 5 The Limits of White Anglo Benevolence San Antonio, 1948–1968 Not so many Anglo Catholics hate their brothers of Mexican descent and those who do are not so virulent [as they were twenty-five years ago]. But there are many Anglo Catholics who are silent in the face of grinding poverty, atrocious health conditions, incredibly bad housing, malnutrition among children, general lack of education, and widespread starvation wages. —Archbishop Robert Lucey, San Antonio, 1965 In 1948, an unprecedented coalition of African American, Mexican­ American, and Anglo American liberals contested two local school elections in San Antonio, Texas. A group of youngish, New Deal–oriented men and women, inspired by New England–educated Unitarian minister Bill Lovely, formed the predominantly white Organized Voters League to pursue the more democratic governance the postwar years led them to expect . If they could mobilize enough white voters to work in coalition with the civil rights efforts coalescing around the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), then the city’s majority might elect a more active and responsive city government. The daring effort succeeded. The first black candidate elected in Bexar County since Reconstruction, G. J. Sutton, a funeral home director on the black East Side, gained a seat on the community college board. He shared his triumph and voters with the first Mexican American victor of a citywide contest in the twentieth century, lawyer Gus Garcia, already well known for filing a federal suit against de facto school segregation of The Limits of White Anglo Benevolence 171 Mexican Americans, who won a school board seat.1 “Minorities Combine” warned the headline in the 4 April 1948 San Antonio Light, alerting its readers to the union of Mexican American and African American neighborhoods and ignoring the white participation in the “combine.”2 Journalists would not credit the idea that a white citizen could approve an alliance between “Negro” and “Mexican” that would disrupt the old order of white-dominant politics. The city’s two white-owned newspapers had predicted disastrous consequences if nonwhite groups gained government offices. Only white candidates would “keep our schools free from racial strife,” admonished ads in the San Antonio Express on 2 and 3 April 1948, and “serve the welfare of the entire community.” Mexican American and African American officials held “minority” views grounded in selfish concern for their “race,” a partiality, the ads implied, that white politicians transcended, expressing a view common to the papers’ readership that white people had no special status or interest that would prevent their rationally pursuing the equal welfare of all citizens. In Texas, racial distinctions permeated political power and governance at the start of the civil rights era.3 In San Antonio, whites had a near monopoly on public offices. Ever since white U.S. immigrants had won independence from Mexico and conservative Democrats had reestablished white authority during Reconstruction, white politicians and voters had directed the state’s affairs. The white Democratic Party protected its power through occasional bargains with black and Mexican voters and through racial appeals to mobilize socially dominant white voters. After the 1948 multiracial victory, elite power holders quickly re­ asserted their governing authority in San Antonio. Because the city had a bare white majority in 1950 (54 percent), almost equaled by Mexican Americans (39 percent) and African Americans (7 percent) combined, it took a few years to work out an effective mechanism for guaranteeing the return of a white-run government. First, San Antonio’s white business owners created a city manager reform government that promised, as one historian of postwar Southwestern cities puts it, “efficiency and lower taxes, clear lines of authority and administration, and government by ‘better men’ rather than ‘politicians.’ ” When the new charter did not result in the election of an acceptable mayor, a group headed by the president of the Chamber of Commerce formed the Good Government League (GGL) to select slates of candidates trustworthy because of their past business success or civic activities. The GGL selected the great majority of city office- 172 Living as Equals holders from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s—with the notable exception of Henry B. Gonzalez, elected to the San Antonio City Council by a briefly resurgent minority-white liberal coalition in 1953.4 During the next two decades, the interracial coalition promised by the white liberals of the Organized Voters League remained a distant hope...