Seeking Inalienable Rights: Texans and Their Quests for Justice

Chapter Seven. Elusive Unity: African Americans, Mexican Americans, and civil rights in Houston

In March 1960, African Americans across Texas began sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters, restaurants, and other public facilities. In Houston , local college students engineered these protests. They followed the example of four youths from Greensboro, North Carolina, who began sit-ins in February of that year and sparked a national movement. The Houston Forward Times, a black weekly newspaper, reported that protestors arrived at the lunch counters and “IN LESS than 30 minutes, 1) The white customers departed 2) The waitresses walked away . . . and a ‘closed counter’ sign was posted 3) Negroes then occupied all 30 of the counter’s seats and THE SIT-IN STRIKES rampaging across the south for nearly 40 days had ARRIVED IN HOUSTON.” African Americans hoped Mexican Americans would join their cause. After all, many Mexican Americans experienced discrimination in schools, in housing, at the ballot box, and, depending on skin color and local conditions, in public facilities. But Felix Tijerina, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and a Houston restaurateur, made cooperation impossible. In a patronizing letter published in the Houston Chronicle, Tijerina disparaged the sit-ins and the activists. He claimed to sympathize with blacks because Mexican Americans had encountered prejudice and segregation in the past. But he argued that patient legal activism had eradicated this racism. Tijerina urged blacks to also show patience and contended that protests “cause much more harm than good. . . . The ladder must be climbed one step at a time.” “I am convinced,” he wrote, integration will not “be achieved with pressure, threats, demonstrations or picketing. And I, for one, will not agree to give in to such tactics.” He also hinted that whites could respond to protests with economic reprisals. “The Negro has much more to lose than the white man,” he stated. “For instance, and I pray it never Brian D. Behnken african americans, mexican americans, and civil rights in houston ElusiveUnity chapter seven 124 = elusive unity happens, the employers could decide they could get along without Negro help in their businesses and homes. Such a decision would be a catastrophe for every Negro in Houston and in the South,” Tijerina wrote. Throughout the civil rights era, unification largely eluded African Americans and Mexican Americans. Black protest activism disturbed many Mexican Americans, much as it did whites. Mexican American civic groups almost universally decried these demonstrations as dangerous and unwarranted. But segregation persisted for Mexican-origin people as well, which made some of Tijerina’s assertions seem inaccurate and misguided. His response to African American/Mexican American unity foreshadowed the nature of race relations during the civil rights struggles in Houston. Indeed, Mexican Americans and blacks had a long history of antagonism in Texas. Throughout the twentieth century, Mexican Americans primarily fought for rights by positioning themselves as members of the white race. As Neil Foley, Thomas Guglielmo, Steven Wilson, Clare Sheridan, and Michael Phillips have noted, whiteness granted them the social and political protections of the white side of the Jim Crow system. But as whites, some Mexican Americans practiced antiblack racism, opposed the civil rights movement, and became a part of the group that blacks viewed as the implacable foe of their struggle. While some Fig. 7.1. Sit-in at the Weingarten’s lunch counter, 1960. Credit: Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas. brian d. behnken = 125 blacks regarded Mexican Americans as racially suspect foreigners who took jobs from native-born Americans, they usually did not treat Mexican-descent people in an overtly racist way. Instead, they simply ignored the Mexican American struggle for rights. Two episodes of protest activism indicate the dual Mexican American and African American struggles for civil rights in Houston. The black sit-in movement and the Mexican American response to it, as well as the Mexican American school boycott during the early 1970s and the black response to it, demonstrate that African Americans and Mexican Americans remained largely disunited in an urban environment during the modern civil rights movement. Racial animosities significantly reduced cooperation between these two groups. In pursuing inalienable rights—an all-inclusive term that encapsulates civil, social, and natural rights—mutual suspicions, personal enmities , and racism drove each group apart, despite their common problems. Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, offers a good case study for comparing the civic activism of blacks and Mexican Americans, particularly because of the...