Hidden History of Texas--Conclusion: 1996-2012

(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on June 19, 2013)

Despite the surplus wealth accumulated by some ultra-rich folks in Texas between 1996 and 2011, the number of people living in poverty also continued to increase during these same years. The University of Texas' Texas Politics website indicates the extent to which the economic, educational, and health care needs of large numbers of people in Texas are still not being met by Texas society in the 21st-century:

"In 2007 Texas ranked second among all the states in the percent of its populace that was poor... The poverty rate for Texas in that year was 16.5 percent. The only other state that had higher poverty rates was Mississippi (20.1 percent)... Texas...clearly has the highest poverty rate of any large industrial state... Its poor population in absolute numbers: 3.934 million people... California...is the only state with a larger number of poor people...than Texas...

"Texas therefore has both a large number of poor people and a high percentage of its population living in poverty. In 2007, Texas ranked 9th in the poverty rate for the elderly; it ranked 49th in the percentage of its adult population with a high school diploma; and it ranked first, at 24.4 percent, in the percent of the populace with no health insurance...

"Of the Anglo population, 8.4 percent is poor, while 23.8 percent of the African-American and 24.8 percent of the Hispanic populations are poor. In other words, the rate of poverty among the two minority groups is three times greater than among the Anglo population… If we take the entire poor population of Texas (some 3.9 million people)…23.8 percent of all poor Texans are Anglo, and 15.8 percent are African-American, but well over half (53 percent) are Hispanic...

"...In the entire United States, the two absolutely poorest [counties]... were both along the Texas-Mexico border -- Cameron County and Hidalgo County... Cameron and Hidalgo were the only two counties in the United States with median household incomes under $25,000... Cameron and Hidalgo counties also had the highest poverty rates of any counties in the United States; each had a rate of about 41 percent...

"El Paso had a poverty rate of 29 percent... Of the 10 poorest counties in the United States, Texas had El Paso (sixth) and Lubbock (tenth) in addition to Cameron and Hidalgo. Texas was the only state to have more than one of the poorest ten counties nation-wide..."

And according to a recently-released report of Austin’s Center for Public Policy Priorities, titled "The State of Texas Children 2011," 24 percent of all children in Texas and 22.2 percent of all children in Austin were now living in poverty in 2009, while the poverty level for the total population in Texas increased to 17.1 percent in 2009 (even before the state’s official jobless rate reached 8 percent in December 2010) and 16 percent of all people living in Austin were now economically impoverished.

A May 5, 2011, issue brief of the Economic Policy Institute, titled “Distressed Texas,” also noted that “the African-American unemployment rate in Texas rose from 8.1 percent at the beginning of the Great Recession to a high of 14.8 percent in the second quarter of 2010,” and “in 2010, 13.6 percent of African-Americans and 9.6 percent of Hispanics were unemployed, compared with 6.0 percent of white non-Hispanic Texans.”

And, according to "Ongoing Joblessness in Texas," a May 16, 2013, report from the Economic Policy Institute, "In Texas, where the overall unemployment rate was 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 (compared with a national average of 7.8 percent), African American and Hispanic families continue to bear the brunt of that economic pain."

In a February 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at Austin’s Southgate-Lewis House, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson made the following observation about the extent of perceived white racism in 21st-century Austin, a town otherwise known as a progressive enclave:

"Austin, Texas has been and still it is, I think, a place that is hung up in the late '40s. I think Austin is a very racist city. Matter of fact, even though I have received a lot of the goodness that Austin offers, and I have been blessed, I find Austin to be a real racist place. And I was born in Hearne, Texas, and I know racism when I see it. And it is here [in Austin] greater than it exists anywhere else in this state.

"And there’s just a different kind of a slave mentality here than just other places. There’s also more opportunity here than in most other places. But people here are so hell-bent on seeing themselves a little bit better than the people in Elgin and Giddings because that’s their yardstick. So you don’t have to be a lot better; all you have to be is just alive."

Though there are towns in Texas where racism is certainly more blatant, Austin is a very segregated city and is experiencing substantial displacement of blacks and Hispanics due to gentrification. More overt racism may be found elsewhere in the state, especially in towns like Vidor and Jasper in East Texas that have struggled to overcome histories of KKK-dominated racial violence.

An April 25, 2013, article in Business Insider on the 21 most segregated cities in the U.S. included only Houston (at 20th) among Texas cities. But an August 2, 2012, feature in the same publication, citing a study by the Pew Research Center, called Houston "America's most economically segregated city," citing that "Houston leads the way among the nation's 10 largest metropolitan areas when it comes to affluent folks living among others who are affluent, and poor living with poor."

In Houston, according to the article, "the percentage of upper-income households in census tracts with a majority of upper-income households increased from 7 in 1980 to 24 in 2010. Likewise, low-income households in majority low-income tracts jumped from 25 to 37." Of the nation's 30 top metropolitan areas, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas topped the Pew study's "Residential Income Segregation Index."

According to the Sentencing Project website’s most recent figures, for every 100,000 African-Americans who live in Texas, 3,162 are now imprisoned, while the rate of incarceration for white people in Texas is currently 667 per 100,000. And since 1995 the total number of people of all races locked up inside state and federal prisons in Texas has increased from 127,766 to 162,186 (including 11,620 female prisoners).

So as we enter the post-2012 period of Texas history (and a possible post-2017 “Perry Era” of right-wing political resurgence in U.S. history), the anti-democratic direction of recent Texas history has no yet been reversed; and the majority of people in the state continue to be economically exploited and politically dominated by the white corporate power structure and political establishment of Texas -- which has been the story for the last 190 years of the hidden history of Texas.

Hidden History of Texas: 1996-2011--Part 21

(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 29, 2013)

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people living in Texas increased from 16,986,510 to 20,851,820; and by 2010 the total was 25,145,661 -- an increase of 20.6 percent over the population in 2000. Austin’s population jumped from 656,562 to 790,390 between 2000 and 2010 -- an increase of 20.4 percent. And although there were still 228,300 farmers in Texas in 2000, by 2007 about 86 percent of all residents of Texas now lived in urban areas.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the number of Latinos living in Texas increased by 42 percent, the number of African-Americans living in Texas increased by 22 percent and the number of white Anglos living in Texas increased by just 4 percent. In Austin, for example, the Latino population grew by 45 percent between 2000 and 2007.

An estimated 215,000 Native Americans or people of partial Native American descent still lived in Texas in 2000; and between 120,000 and 131,000 people of Jewish background currently live in Texas in the 21st century. And according to 2010 census figures, 11.8 percent of Texans are now African-American, 37.6 percent are Latino, 3.8 percent are Asian-American, and 45.3 percent are white Anglo.

One apparent reason a few ultra-rich residents of Texas are able to accumulate surplus wealth decade after decade is that wealthy people in Texas (unlike wealthy people in states like New York) still don’t have to pay any state tax on their personal income, to help finance a state government that still generally serves their special class and corporate interests.

Since the ultra-rich folks in Texas, who have dominated the state's politics for most of Texas’s history, still don’t want to pay a fair share of taxes to the state government, Texas has the nation’s fifth most regressive tax structure among the 50 states, according to United For A Fair Economy analyst Karen Kraut.

So, not surprisingly, in February 2011 the Texas Forward coalition of politically dissatisfied Texas residents and activist groups called for the creation of new sources of revenue that are more equitable than Texas’s current tax structure and for the elimination of unwarranted tax exemptions, in order to help finance those state government programs that actually benefit people in Texas.

Other reasons a few ultra-rich Texans are able to accumulate so much surplus wealth might be that: (1) many workers in Texas are still not unionized; (2) the hourly median wage rate of Texas workers has continued to be lower than the national average; and (3) the special needs of economically-impoverished people in Texas are still being ignored and neglected in the 21st century by the state's white corporate power structure and its right-wing political establishment.

According to the Texas AFL-CIO website:

"Texas has more than 1,300 local unions. The largest Texas AFL-CIO affiliates in the state (membership above 5,000) are the Texas AFT, Communication Workers of America, American Federation of Government Employees, United Steel Workers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Fire Fighters, UAW, Transport Workers Union, International Association of Machinists and United Transportation Union."

The same website also notes that in Texas, “some medical professionals, including podiatrists, doctors and nurses have joined unions;” and the Central Labor Councils in Austin, Coastal Bend, Dallas, El Paso, Galveston, Harris County, San Antonio, and Smith County each protect the economic interests of 5,000 or more labor union members.

Yet in 2011 less than 20 percent of Texas public sector workers are covered by union contracts. In addition, of the 10,526,000 people who work in Texas only 220,000 are members of Texas AFL-CIO-affiliated unions, although “Texas has substantial union membership that does not affiliate or pay dues to the Texas AFL-CIO” and “if you add non-affiliates about 500,000 union members work in Texas,” according to the Texas AFL-CIO.

The hourly median wage for Texas workers in 2003 of $12.01 was also still just 88 percent of the national average in 2003, according to an Economic Policy Institute study. And the median income in Texas in 2005 of $42,131 was less than the national median income at that time of $46,242, according to the Texas Politics website. In addition, according to a May 5, 2011, study of the Economic Policy Institute :

"Texas is tied with Mississippi in having the largest share (9.5 percent) of hourly workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage. This compares with just 6 percent nationally...12.6 percent of U.S. workers earning the minimum wage or less work in Texas... Between 2009 and 2010, the number of people working at or below the minimum wage in Texas grew by 76,000."

A 2009 study by the Austin-based Workers Defense Project, titled "Building Austin, Building Injustice: Working Conditions in Austin's Construction Industry," found that in Austin (where the proportion of Latino/a construction workers grew by 13 percent between 2000 to 2007), “50 percent of surveyed construction workers reported not being paid overtime,” and “45 percent earned poverty level wages,” according to an article by Carlos Perez de Alejo that appeared in Dollars & Sense magazine.

As this same study revealed:

"...50,000 Austin residents work in the construction industry... Texas construction workers earn 2 to 3 dollars less than their counterparts in other states who performed the same skilled work... One in five workers reported being denied payment for their construction work in Austin...The large majority of construction workers lacked health insurance (76%), pensions (81%), sick days (87%) or vacation days (73%)... In 2007, 142 construction workers died in Texas, more than any other state in the country... In 2008...construction laborers...earned a median wage of only $10.68 per hour."

Hidden History of Texas: 1996-2011--Part 20

(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 20, 2013)

When George W. Bush became the Republican Governor of Texas, “he arrived indebted to dozens of industries and wealthy patrons” and “repaid some of his supporters with choice political appointments,” according to the Center for Public Integrity’s The Buying of the President 2000.
The same book indicated what the political situation was like in Texas state politics in 2000 -- before Texas’s governor moved into the White House in 2001 after receiving fewer popular votes than the Democratic Party candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election:

"One of the most prestigious political appointments is a seat on the University of Texas board of Regents. The board is filled with Bush’s top-dollar donors. The chair of the UT Regents is Donald Evans, Bush’s old friend and longtime fund-raiser who, as the finance chairman for Bush’s presidential bid, has overseen the campaign’s record-shattering fund-raising drive. Evans is the chief executive officer of Tom Brown, Inc., an oil and gas company based in Midland, Texas.

"In 1989, Bush joined the board as an outside director. He received $12,000 a year plus stock options for attending several meetings and participating in conference calls... Shortly after he was elected governor of Texas, Bush sold his Tom Brown holdings for a profit of $297,550.

"Another regent and top Bush patron is A.R. `Tony’ Sanchez, the chairman and chief executive of Sanchez-O’Brien Oil and Gas Corporation... Sanchez and his mother also own a controlling stake in International Bancshares Corporation, the holding company of International Bank of Commerce, a Texas banking chain founded by his father in 1966. Over [George W.] Bush’s career, Sanchez, members of his family, and employees of his companies have given him at least $230,150, making them his No. 2 career patron…

"Bush owed few people more than Richard Rainwater, the Fort Worth financier... Rainwater launched an investment company in 1994, Crescent Real Estate Equities Company... In 1997, Bush backed a plan to cut state property taxes that would have saved Crescent some $2.5 million in state taxes... Later that year,...Bush signed a bill into law that produced a $10 million windfall for Crescent... Dallas taxpayers were to foot most of the bill for the new sports arena…Rainwater, through Crescent, bought a 12 percent stake in the Mavericks. Under the purchase agreement, Crescent will get $10 million when the arena is completed…

"The Texas Teachers’ Retirement System...sold two office buildings and a mortgage on a third to Crescent in 1996 and 1997 at a $70.4 million loss... At the time of at least one of the sales, Bush owned about $100,000 worth of Crescent stock... The University of Texas Investment Management Company [UTIMCO]...has steered close to $1.7 billion of its assets into private investments; a third of that money has gone into funds run either by...[UTIMCO Chairman Hicks]’s business partner or by Bush patrons...

"Industries that have provided the bulk of Bush’s campaign contributions have gotten his help in a variety of endeavors, from staving off pesky environmental regulations and shielding themselves from consumer lawsuits to driving off meddlesome investigators... According to a study by Public Research Works, Bush raised $566,000 from...polluters for his two gubernatorial campaigns. And from March 4, 1999 to March 31, 1999 Bush raised $316,300... They included: Enron ( Bush’s No. 1 career patron); Vinson & Elkins (Bush’s No. 3 career patron), a law firm that represents Enron and Alcoa, a...polluter; and companies owned by the Bass family (Bush’s No. 5 career patron)."

And, coincidentally, some of the same ultra-rich folks who bankrolled former Texas governor Bush’s campaigns in the 1990s have apparently been donating a lot of money in the 21st-century to fund the campaigns of the current governor of Texas, former 2012 GOP presidential primaries candidate Rick Perry.

Between 2001 and Oct. 23, 2010, for example, Perry (a former U.S. Air Force officer who is the son of former Haskell County Commissioner Ray Perry) received $337,027 in campaign contributions from Lee Bass, $100,000 in campaign contributions from Sid Bass, and 265,000 in campaign contributions from Ray Hunt, according to the Texans for Public Justice website.

The same website also recalled that “as Texas' longest-serving governor, Rick Perry raised $98.9 million from 2001 through Oct. 23, 2010,” and that “Perry raised almost $49 million (or 50 percent of this money) from 193 mega donors who gave him $100,000 or more.”

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 465,622 to 656,562; and the number of people who lived in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area increased from 846,227 to 1,249,763 during the same period.

According to the “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell’” essay by Cathy Schechter that appeared in Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas, between 1990 and 2000, Austin ’s Jewish-affiliated population also increased from 5,000 “to more than 10,000," and “by 2002, the American Jewish Yearbook estimated the city’s Jewish population at 13,500.”

But “the appearance of young `Dellionaire’ Jews who made millions in the brave new world of high-technology took the mellow Austin Jewish community by surprise.” Yet by 2007, Texas billionaire Michael Dell -- with an estimated personal wealth that year of $17.2 billion -- was the wealthiest ultra-rich person in Texas .

But in 2007 Robert Bass was still worth $5.5 billion, Ray Hunt was worth $4 billion, Sid and Lee Bass were worth $3 billion, and Ed Bass was worth $2.5 billion, according to Bryan Burrough's The Big Rich. The same book also noted that in 2007, coincidentally, “Hunt Oil received a lucrative concession to drill in northern Iraq,” and “Sid Bass, whose family, along with the Hunts, ranked among Bush’s largest financial backers, was photographed alongside the president, Laura Bush, and the queen of England...”

Hidden History of Texas: 1974-1995--Part 19

(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 7, 2013)

During the 1970s and early 1980s the folks who inherited the oil industry-based wealth of ultra-rich white Texans like Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt continued to make big money -- and to use that big money to exercise a special influence in both Texas state politics and U.S. national politics.

As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich observed:

"For the state’s actual oilmen, the party that began with the 1973 [Arab oil] embargo, ran for 5 solid years. Drilling boomed. Profits mushroomed. Then, in 1978, things got even better... In just 7 short years prices rose 2,000 percent... By 1976...the children of H.L. Hunt’s two Dallas families and the corporations they controlled, were thriving as never before.

"Thanks in large part to rising oil prices, the Hunts were probably the world’s wealthiest family... Their net worth hovered in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, easily topping the next wealthiest American families, the Mellons and Rockefellers...

"The most successful Hunt during the 1970s was Ray, who began making over his father’s old Hunt Oil Company much as his Reunion project was changing the face of downtown Dallas... In 3 short years he quadrupled the size of Hunt Oil’s staff, increased its offshore leases from 100,000 to 1 million acres... Ray started a new magazine just for Dallas, D... By 1982 Texas Oil had luxuriated in a solid 10 years of record-high prices..."

And, coincidentally, the sixth-largest contributor of campaign funds for one of Texas’s representatives in the U.S. Senate during the 1980s and 1990s, Phil Gramm, came from the Bass Enterprises investment firm that the Bass family relatives of Sid Richardson formed after Richardson’s death, while the seventh-largest contributor of campaign funds for former U.S. Senator Gramm during this period was Ray Hunt’s Hunt Corporation, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s 1996 book, The Buying of the President.

But once the demand and market price for oil began to drop after 1982, many of the independent local oil companies in Texas began to lose money or go out of business; and many could not pay off the loans that major banks in Texas had given them during the boom years of the 1970s and early 1980s. So “in October 1983... First National of Midland collapsed” and “in the next decade 9 of the 10 largest Texas banks would follow suit,” according to The Big Rich.

In 1981, membership in the Texas labor union locals that were affiliated with the Texas AFL-CIO had “peaked at more than 290,000," according to the www.texasaflcio.org website. But the number of Texas workers who were Texas AFL-CIO-affiliated union members “then dropped dramatically during the oil bust of the 1980s;” and by 1995 membership was just 197,462, according to the Texas AFL-CIO’s website.

By the end of the 1980s many of the deregulated Savings and Loan (S&L) thrift institutions in Texas’s banking industry also had collapsed in a big way, after “real estate developers bought thrifts so they could have a private piggy bank to finance office buildings and condos no one needed,” “con artists set up loan scams and used thrifts to launder money,” and “thrift executives cooked the books and paid themselves high bonuses when their banks were actually losing money,” according to the 1991 edition of Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.

As The Buying of the President observed in 1996, “Texas has the unpleasant distinction of topping the list of states with the most S&L failures with 65,” and “the state was second only to California in terms of the value of assets held by failed thrifts: California thrifts had $18,358 billion in assets compared with Texas’s $18,279 billion.”

And, coincidentally, the U.S. president who signed the S&L industry bail-out bill in 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush, was both a former Texas oil industry and banking executive and the father of Neil Bush -- who was sued by federal regulators “for regulation violations that allegedly contributed to the $1 billion collapse of Silverado Banking, a Denver thrift,” according to Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.

Between 1974 and 1995 another son of the U.S. President who launched Gulf War I against Iraq in early 1991 (who, himself, would become the governor of Texas in 1995 and the U.S. President who launched both the endless U.S. war in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the endless U.S. war in Iraq in March 2003) -- George W. Bush II -- also worked as an executive in Texas’s oil industry.

Before joining with the Bass family’s former money manager and other business partners to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, former Republican Texas Governor Bush was an executive at the Harken Oil and Gas firm that both Harvard University and the ultra-rich Bass family financially backed.

Another ultra-rich Texas billionaire, Ross Perot, was able to exercise a special influence on the direction of U.S. presidential politics during the 1990s -- by spending $65 million of his surplus personal wealth to finance his own 1992 campaign to gain control of the White House -- for which over 19.7 million U.S. voters cast ballots in November, 1992 (and for which over 7.8 million U.S. voters also cast ballots in November, 1996).

Perot had gained his initial big wealth in 1966 after his private family business, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), suddenly became super-profitable when Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross -- whose computer/data processing department Perot then headed -- received a lucrative contract from the U.S. government’s Social Security Administration to develop a computerized system for paying the Medicare bills;” and Perot’s Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross employer then gave Perot’s private EDS firm “a subcontract to take over their data processing on the new Medicare program using, of course, the system just developed at government expense” (by the same firm whose computer/data processing department Perot headed), according to a November 1971 Ramparts magazine article.

And it was also during the 1974 to 1995 period of Texas history that a Democrat, Ann Richards, was the governor of Texas (between 1991 and 1995), and that more than 70 people were killed on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day siege and an armed attack by U.S. federal government law enforcement agents on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 17

Between 1950 and 1970, the number of people who lived in Texas increased from 7,711,194 to 11,196,730. Although the percentage of people living Texas who were African-Americans decreased from 13 to 12 percent between 1950 and 1970, the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 977,458 to about 1.4 million during the same period. And by 1970 the percentage of people living in Texas who were Latino was now 18 percent, as the number of Latino people who lived in Texas increased from about 1 million to about 2 million between 1950 and 1970. But the number of people of Jewish religious background who lived in Texas in the early 1970s was still only about 71,000.

By 1970, 80 percent of all people in Texas lived in urban cities or towns. Between 1950 and 1970, for example, the number of people living in Houston increased from 596,163 to 1,232,802 and the number of people living in Dallas increased from 434,462 to 844,401; while the number of people who lived in Austin by 1970 was now 250,000 and around 43,000 students now attended the University of Texas in Austin . Around 317,000 African-Americans lived in Houston by 1970; and by 1970, around 210,000 African-Americans now lived in Dallas . Of  Beaumont ’s residents in 1970, about 30 percent were also now African-American. In addition, over 3 million people who lived in Texas in 1970 had not been born in Texas . But only 1,092,596 of these 3 million “transplants” or migrants to Texas had not been born in the southern region of the United States .

Despite the increase in civil rights movement and New Left student and counter-cultural activism that developed in Texas between 1953 and the late 1960s, during the 1950s some of the ultra-right and/or ultra-rich folks in Texas (who had made big money from Texas’s oil industry in the 1930s and 1940s) apparently began using some of their surplus wealth to both begin building a “New Right” conservative right-wing movement in the United States and to exercise a special political influence over the Republican Eisenhower White House. As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich recalled:


“In 1955, with money raised from his father and friend, including a Houston oilman named Lloyd Smith, [William F.] Buckley would found The National Review, which became the crucible for conservative thoughts…The Old family friend confirmed rumors that [former Columbia University and U.S. President Dwight D.] Eisenhower invested with [Sid] Richardson beginning sometime during World War II… Texas oilmen smelled a winner in Eisenhower. By one estimate Richardson funneled about $1 million into the campaign, not including $200,000 to cover Eisenhower’s various stays at the Commodore Hotel in New York or his expenses during the Republican convention in Chicago …”

Coincidentally, in their 1968 book, The Case Against Congress, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson noted that “the upkeep of the Eisenhower farm” in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania “was paid for by three oilmen,” “during his 8 years in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower did more for the nation’s private oil and gas interests than any other President,” and “he encouraged and signed legislation overriding a Supreme Court decision giving offshore oil to the Federal Government.”

Also coincidentally, Texas Gov. John Connally, who had been employed by Texas oil billionaire Sid Richardson during the 1950s, helped plan JFK’s ill-fated visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 (and was, himself, hit by gunfire on that day). As even the Warren Commission Report noted:

“The basic decision on the November trip to Texas was made at a meeting of President Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson and Governor Connally on June 5, 1963 at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso, Texas…The three agreed that the President would come to Texas in late November 1963…When Governor Connally called at the White House on Oct. 4 to discuss the details of the visit, it was agreed that the planning of events in Texas would be left largely to the Governor…Shots fired from a rifle mortally wounded President Kennedy…Mrs. Connally heard a second shot fired and pulled her husband down into her lap…Governor Connally…cried out, `Oh, no, no, no. My God, THEY are going to kill us ALL.’”

And, a former college roommate of Texas Gov. Connally, Henry Wade, was, also coincidentally, Dallas ’s District Attorney on Nov. 22, 1963. Harrison Edward Livingstone even made the following allegation about the historical role of some influential folks from Texas on U.S. national politics in the 1960s in his High Treason 2: The Great Cover-Up:

“The conspiracy that killed President Kennedy was at least to some extent hatched and operated out of Dallas/Fort Worth. The plotters controlled the police and the city government there. Numerous of their relatives and connections were in the military and in the CIA…Some of them, like General Charles Cabell of Dallas [whose brother Earle Cabell was the Mayor of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963], had been fired by Kennedy. The Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, David Atlee Phillips, and numerous others from the CIA were from Dallas or Fort Worth .”

The Big Rich also indicated the long-range impact that H.L. Hunt’s right-wing LIFELINE radio network of the 1950s and early 1960s apparently had on the drift of U.S. domestic politics after the late 1970s:

“…LIFELINE was in many ways ahead of its time. Its wedding of fundamentalist Protestantism and right-wing politics, not to mention its crusade against `big government’ and Wall Street greed, came 20 years before the Christian Right’s emergence in the late 1970s…By the early 1960s its broadcasts could be heard on 354 stations in 47 states…”

By 1973, corporations like IBM, Texas Instruments, Tracor and Motorola were utilizing the labor of a lot of workers in Texas —and often some lucrative Defense Department war contracts—to make a lot of big money in Texas . Motorola, for example, employed 6,000 workers in Austin by 1973; and Texas Instruments “began business in Austin in 1966 with a Defense System engineering operation” and the first TI-owned building in Austin “was completed in 1968 at 2601 North Lamar and continued the expansion of Defense Systems engineering and drafting,” according to David Humphrey's Austin: An Illustrated History. Yet two years later student and non-student anti-war activists in Austin were still able to mobilize over 25,000 people to participate in the then-largest anti-war demonstration in Austin ’s history in May 1970. But as a result of LBJ’s decision to begin a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia and order hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965, 3,415 people from Texas ended up being killed in action during the Vietnam War.

Coincidentally, during the 1970s Texas Instruments was also the third-largest non-unionized company in the USA . And according to the 1980 edition of Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert Levering’s book Everybody’s Business: The Irreverent Guide To Corporate America, labor organizers who had “spent 25 years and $3 million trying to make inroads” said there was then no union at Texas Instruments because the company had “one of the most effective anti-union operations in the country;” and during the 1970s, “Texas Instruments employees were paid 25 percent less than comparable IBM workers across town,” “had to work mandatory overtime and 2 Saturdays a month,” and “were afraid to talk about a union.”

Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 16

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on April 17, 2013)

Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.

There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.

As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":

“The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.

“The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...

“SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...

“The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS “distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...

“UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].”

But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .

African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:

“In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...

"In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...”

And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:

“I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearne... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...

“And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”

Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."

Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 15

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on April 22, 2013)

In 1966 an African-American, Barbara Jordan, was elected to the Texas State Legislature, and by 1971 African-American City Council members had been elected in Austin, Bryan, Fort Worth, Galveston, Hearne, Houston, Huntsville, Malakoff, Port Arthur, San Antonio, Waco, and Wichita Falls.

But institutional racism in Texas did not disappear during the last half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, despite the victories achieved by local civil rights movement activists in the early 1960s struggle to end legal forms of racial discrimination, white supremacy, and racial segregation in Texas.

In Austin , for example, local residents voted to repeal a Fair Housing Ordinance in a May 1968 referendum; and the U.S. Justice Department initiated a lawsuit against the Austin School District in August 1970 because of the failure of city officials to desegregate Austin’s public school system.

In addition, in the early 1970s the Austin Human Relations Commission reported that discrimination in employment in Austin was still “widespread and well-documented,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

In 1969, the University of Texas administration still only employed one African-American faculty member. And although the poll tax in Texas was finally declared unconstitutional in 1966, as late as 1966 the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency still included no African-Americans.

African-Americans in Texas were still also likely to live in poverty. Around 39 percent of all African-American residents of Texas still lived in poverty in 1970, for example, whereas 90 percent of all white Anglo residents of Texas did not live in poverty.

Dormitories at Texas Southern University that housed African-American students were shot up by Houston police in 1967; and in the late 1960s, “Lee Otis Johnson, who led anti-war protests at Texas Southern University and publicly criticized the mayor and police of Houston at a Martin Luther King memorial rally, received a 30-year sentence for giving a police undercover agent a marijuana cigarette,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

After People’s Party II was formed in Houston in the summer of 1970, its African-American chairman, Carl Hampton, was killed by Houston police on July 26, 1970; and three African-American supporters and a white supporter of People’s Party II were wounded by the Houston police in the same incident.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Negroes in many Texas cities continued to complain that police stopped and searched them without reason, used dogs to move non-violent persons or groups, and still used... profane terms in addressing black people,” according to Black Texans. Not surprisingly, there was an African-American urban rebellion in Midland, Texas, in July 1968 and an African-American urban rebellion in Lubbock, Texas, in September 1971.

Affordable housing opportunities for African-Americans who lived in Texas cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio were also still limited in 1970 because residential segregation still existed in these three cities at that time -- although 26 percent of all Houston residents and 25 percent of all Dallas residents were now African-American in 1970.

And in Austin, “as a result of the Keating urban renewal project in Austin during the 1960s... one-third of the families in the `renewed’ area did not get decent homes, 70 percent paid more rent or higher house payments afterward, and 19 percent of the pre-project home owners had become renters;” and “highway construction in Austin went far toward eliminating the small black enclave called Clarksville on the overwhelmingly white west side of the city,” according to Black Texans.

The official unemployment rate for African-American workers in Texas also continued to be nearly double the official unemployment rate for white workers in the state during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1967 and 1970, the jobless rate for African-American workers in Texas was between 5.7 and 7.6 percent, while the jobless rate for white workers in Texas was between 2.7 and 4 percent.

And as late as 1970, African-American workers were still apparently being excluded from membership in the construction worker unions and skilled trades unions in Texas. And, although in the late 1960s “Negroes formed 20 to 25 percent of the population in Dallas and Houston, they owned only about 3 percent of the businesses in each city” and whites still “owned a majority of the businesses in the black community,” according to Black Texans.

Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 14

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on February 26, 2013)

Between 1953 and 1964, the percentage of non-agricultural workers in Texas who were unionized dropped from 16.8 to 13.3 percent; but the number of labor union members in 1964 in Texas —around 375,000—remained about the same as it had been in 1953. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South observed:

“The main losses in Texas were the OCAW, which had 31,000 members in 1955 and about 20,000 in 1964; and UAW, whose membership had declined from 16,057 in 1955 to about 14,000 in 1964; the carpenters, who had 27,321 members in Texas in 1957 and about 15,000 in 1964; the packinghouse workers, who had 2,035 members in 1955 and 1,200 in 1964; and the textile workers who had 720 members in 1955 and only 185 in 1964. The main unions to gain membership in Texas between 1960 and 1964 were the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the state, county and municipal employees; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.”

Yet between 1947 and 1973, the number of factories in Texas increased from 7,128 to 14,431; and the number of factory workers in Texas exceeded 730,000 by 1972.

By 1960, the number of African-Americans who still lived in rural Texas had dropped to 256,750 and the number of African-American tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Texas had dropped to 3,138; while the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had declined from 52,751 in 1940 to 15,041 by 1960. And “by 1960 only 8 percent of all black workers in Texas remained in rural areas—a sharp decline from the 32 percent of two decades before,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. But, in contrast, the “urban black population in Texas grew from 428,110 in 1940 to 905,089 in 1960,” according to the same book.

Although “Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd made a concerted effort to drive the NAACP out of Texas by suing the association” in 1956, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public school systems was unconstitutional, African-American civil rights activists in Texas continued to protest against racism within Texas society during the 1950s and 1960s; and—despite the political opposition of some white Texans who wanted to preserve legalized segregation in the state—were able to win some of their anti-racist demands between 1954 and 1973. As Black Texans recalled, “protests by local black organizations and court cases brought the integration of publicly owned restaurants, golf courses, parks, beaches and rest rooms in Houston , Beaumont , and other Texas cities during the 1950s.” In 1954, for example, Houston ’s public golf course and public library were de-segregated; and between 1954 and 1956 all major Texas cities ended racial separation on their city buses.

Yet “at Texarkana College in 1955—a crowd of whites prevented blacks from enrolling” and “White Citizens Councils, an anti-desegregation group…appeared in Texas during the summer of 1955 and soon claimed a membership of 20,000,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas, with 250 delegates attending its 1955 convention. And, “although enrollment at UT was fully integrated by 1956, blacks were banned from varsity athletics and relegated to segregated and substandard dormitories;” and “Austin in the early 1950s was still segregated in most respects—restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, drug stores, public schools, parks, swimming pools, hospitals, housing and public transportation,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History. Barton Springs, for example, “was off limits to blacks as late as 1959” and “some residents saw in [former Austin Mayor] Tom Miller’s plans for an interstate highway just an extension of the wall of separation,” according to the same book.

Near Fort Worth, “forceful opposition to school integration at Mansfield” also developed in the fall of 1956 “when over 250 whites stopped the entry of black pupils into formerly white schools” and then-Democratic Texas Governor Shivers “used Texas Rangers, not to disperse the mob, but to remove the students,” according to Black Texans; and “Mansfield schools remained segregated for at least 2 more years,” despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to the same book. Houston also still had the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States in 1957. And while Southern Methodist University [SMU] administrators finally began allowing African-American applicants to attend this college in 1955, Texas Tech, Rice University , Baylor University and Texas Christian University administrators apparently didn’t allow African-American applicants to become students on their campuses until 1960.

So, not surprisingly, anti-racist civil rights protests and demonstrations by both students and non-students in Texas continued during the 1960s. As Black Texans recalled:

“In the early 1960s black and white students from Texas Southern University in Houston , the University of Texas in Austin, and other colleges across the state began to protest restaurant and theater segregation. Bishop and Wiley college students in Marshall undertook one of the first series of non-violent demonstrations in Texas during the spring of 1960. Prairie View students with limited white support boycotted Hempstead merchants in the fall of 1963. Local chapters of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality [C.O.R.E.] also picketed, petitioned and boycotted against segregation in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio…In El Paso, where Negroes formed only 2 percent of the population, the city desegregated public accommodations by ordinance…In some smaller East Texas towns, such as Huntsville and San Augustine, sit-ins and protests remained necessary even in 1965 to bring integration of public accommodations…”

Since University of Texas “dormitories were still segregated” and African-American students at UT were “still excluded from varsity athletics” in 1960, in Austin during the spring of 1960 “black and white students protested UT’s dormitory and athletic policies” and also “picketed nearby restaurants” and “staged sit-ins at downtown” Austin “lunch counters,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History. But the same book also observed:

“Most downtown eateries stood pat…Demonstrations accelerated in December [1960] when groups of 100 to 200 UT students participated in `stand-ins’ at the two movie theaters on the Drag…Hundreds of demonstrators celebrated Lincoln’s birthday in 1961 with stand-ins at both movie houses on the Drag and the State and Paramount theaters downtown…In September [1961] the two theaters on the Drag agreed to integrate…Sit-ins at a white dormitory brought disciplinary probation to several participants…Finally, the regents gave in on integrated housing in 1964…”

At UT in Austin (whose student body included only around 200 African-American students in 1961), the Students for Direct Action campus group (which was founded in the fall of 1960) also picketed in 1962 “the Forty Acres Club, a newly-opened private `whites-only’ faculty club often used for university meetings and entertaining official university visitors,” according to the 1988 “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88) thesis by Beverly Burr that was posted on the www.utwatch.org site. And in the fall of 1962 student activists on UT’s campus also founded the Negro for Equal Rights [NER] and Campus Inter-racial Committee [CIC] civil rights movement campus groups which were apparently successful in pressuring the University of Texas administration to finally hire its first African-American faculty member (an assistant professor of civil engineering named Ervin Perry) in May 1964; and to finally allow African-Americans to become members of the UT faculty’s Forty Acres Club in March 1965.

Yet despite the 1960, 1962 and 1962 civil rights movement protests in Austin, as late as the fall of 1963, Austin’s 24,413 African-American residents “were still barred from half or more of Austin’s white-owned restaurants, hotels, and motels and from business schools and bowling alleys,” “9 out of 10 black elementary-age children attended schools that were at least 99 percent black” and “discrimination in employment and housing was common,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History. So, not surprisingly, Austin’s NAACP chapter held a 6-day civil rights filibuster at an April 1964 meeting of Austin’s City Council to demand that it pass an anti-discrimination ordinance; and Joan Baez even held a “freedom hootenanny” on the front of Austin’s City Hall before an audience of 200 local civil rights movement supporters on the first day of this Austin NAACP civil rights filibuster.

Hidden History of Texas: 1940-1953--Part 12

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on February 11,  2013)

Between 1939 and 1953 the percentage of non-agricultural workers in Texas who were members of labor unions increased from 10.3 to 16.8 percent; and 375,000 workers in Texas were labor union members by 1953. Between 1941 and 1945, CIO-affiliated labor unions “gained nearly 40,000 members in 4 years,” according to F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South. The same book also recalled:

"Membership expansion occurred in petroleum refining, and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where, in 1945, the CIO claimed 25,000 new members in one year. Important victories there included the organization of the huge North American Aviation Company to the UAW, the Armour plant by the packinghouse workers, Conroe Manufacturing by the ACWA, and several steel fabricators by the steelworkers. PWOC Local 54 and storehandlers’ Local 59 acquired bargaining rights under a master agreement with Armour. During the war [World War II], the packinghouse workers’ strength in Texas was confined largely to this plant.
"The CIO had 115 locals in Texas in March 1944, the most numerous of which were: autoworkers, 8 locals; oil workers, 30 locals; and steelworkers, with 12 locals. The textile workers had only two locals in Texas in 1944...

"By the 1942 convention, the oil workers’ organization committee had achieved significant results. The most important victory was the Texas Company at Port Arthur... In March 1942, the OWIU won an election at the Southport refinery in Texas City... It also signed up 84 percent of the workers at Standard of New Jersey’s Humble refinery at Baytown, Texas...

"The UCAPAWA (Canning, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers)’s strongest base in Texas was in Houston, where it had 5 contracts covering over 600 Negro and Mexican-American workers, organized by March 1942. UCAPAWA contracts in Houston covered about 150 employees at the Houston Millinery Company and 400 Negro and Spanish-speaking workers in 4 cotton companies, three of which were owned by the Anderson Clayton company... In addition, UCAPAWA had locals among pecan workers at San Antonio, spinach workers at Mathis, and cannery workers at Sugarland…UCAPAWA…organized fruit and vegetable workers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where its contracts covered 1,000 employees during peak seasons."

As Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas observed, “under the auspices of the National War Labor Board,” Texas labor movement “organizers unionized more of the state’s industries by 1945...” And during World War II, “workers at Shell in Pasadena, Texas” even “struck spontaneously” in June 1943 “to secure the reinstatement of a discharged union member,” according to Labor in the South; and there was also a strike by workers at a B.F. Goodrich plant in Texas in February 1944.

The white corporate power structure in Texas (and its ultra-conservative, white supremacist Texas political establishment in Austin) apparently then began to feel that this growing militancy and level of unionization of workers in Texas threatened both its class interests and its ability to continue to economically exploit and politically dominate most people who lived in Texas.

So after the CIO organized plant after plant across Texas in 1946-47,” the Texas “legislature responded in early 1947 by passing a right-to-work law that prohibited requiring union membership as a condition of employment,” according to Gone To Texas, and “the legislature also passed other anti-union laws, including one that prohibited pickets at strikes from being within 50 feet of each other or the entrance of the plant being picketed.”

Public employees in Texas were also denied the right to bargain collectively in 1947. And following a 1953 CIO-led strike in Port Arthur, the then-Democratic Texas Governor Allan Shivers even “called a special session of the legislature in the spring of 1954, which passed a bill making membership in the Communist Party a felony punishable by a fine of $20,000 and 20 years in the penitentiary,” according to the same book.

Coincidentally, according to Ronnie Dugger’s The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson, in Texas “the program of lobbying against labor was carried forward and financed largely by allies of Lyndon Johnson.” As The Politician recalled:

"The public did not know about an even more significant business convert to Johnson, anti-union contractor Herman Brown who, with his brother George, ran the contracting and engineering firm of Brown and Root... A stream of gifts from the Browns to the Johnsons can be traced through the decade starting in 1940... Lyndon was Brown and Root's kept politician...

"By 1947 Brown and Root was so powerful in Texas it led a many-aspected campaign against unions which made Texas one of the most anti-union states in the Union and the only major industrial state that had a law prohibiting workers from voting to be all-union... The Brown brothers were largely responsible for the enactment from 1947 on, of the state’s anti-union laws."

War Department or Department of Defense contractors like Brown and Root apparently made a lot of money during World War II and the Korean War of the early 1950s from the U.S. government contracts that were thrown their way. But at the same time, “22,022 Texans died or suffered fatal wounds in battle” during World War II and “the Texas Division suffered one of the highest casualty rates of any in the Army -- 3,717 killed, 12,685 wounded, and 3,064 missing in action,” according to Going To Texas.

In addition, “the 19th Division, a Texas unit... suffered nearly 18,500 casualties, including 2,963 killed, many of the deaths coming in close fighting in the hedgerow country of Normandy,” according to the same book. And around 1,800 people from Texas were also killed in action after the Democratic Truman Administration decided to intervene militarily on the side of the right-wing Syngman Rhee dictatorship during the civil war in Korea .

Of the 750,000 people from Texas who served in the U.S. military during World War II, about 88,000 were African-Americans from Texas and about 12,000 were women from Texas; and “Texas, which had 5 percent of the nation’s population, provided 7 percent of those who served,” with most Texans serving in the army and air force and “about one-quarter” serving in the navy, marines and coast guard, according to Going To Texas.

Hidden History of Texas: 1930-1940--Part 11

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on February 6, 2013)

Although “throughout the 1930s, the Communist Party in Texas (Houston included) remained small and ineffectual, with no more than 200 members at any given time,” according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, “by the fall of 1935, the Texas Communist Party was firmly established in Houston, and literature bearing its logo was passed out everywhere along the Gulf Coast, especially where strikes occurred.”

And, coincidentally, 111,000 workers in Texas -- or about 10.3 percent of all non-agricultural workers in Texas -- were now organized and were members of labor unions in Texas by 1939. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South recalled:


"Editorial writers at Austin had formed the first Texas American Newspaper Guild by January 1934. In May [1934] it was reported that the first contract had been negotiated with the Austin American-Statesman and `the three Austin newspapers report 100 percent membership.'...

"The ILGWU organized Petrillo and Company in Dallas peacefully, but three other firms there had signed agreements only after bitter strikes following the ILGWU’s campaign in the fall of 1936. The Ladies’ Garment Workers had about 3,100 southern members in 1939, 2,100 of whom were in Texas... The Sinclair [oil workers union] local in Houston, Texas had 1,157 members in 1939 -- the largest local in the South. The local was the main base for organization on the Gulf Coast, and Sinclair was the only major refinery to sign a national agreement with the oil workers.

"The first major oil workers’ local in the Gulf Coast area was Local 227 at Sinclair in Houston... The Pasadena local had an average membership of 677 during 1939. The oil workers established Local 1229 for Negroes and Local 243 for whites at the Magnolia refinery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1933, but they did not win bargaining rights... Local 23 at Port Arthur, Texas, was reorganized in 1933 and attempted to win contracts from Gulf and Texaco, but the oil workers’ activities in Port Arthur were impeded by conflicts between craft and industrial unions within the refineries... The oil workers did not succeed in winning an election at the important Texas Company and Gulf refineries until 1942..."

Members of the International Longshoremen’s Union [ILA] also held a strike on October 10, 1935; and “in 1938, some 12,000 pecan shellers went on strike, creating the largest labor stoppage in Texas history” and won pay increases as a result of this strike, according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas. The www.labordallas.org website described what provoked the 1938 Pecan Shellers Strike in San Antonio, Texas and what happened during the strike before a settlement was reached:

"Julius Seligman hired 12,000 low-wage Mexican-Americans who labored 60 or more hours a week for an average of $2.50 per week, or about 4 cents an hour. On Feb. 1, 1938, Seligman ordered a 20 percent wage cut. The workers organized and went on strike... Police tear gassed and clubbed peaceful picketers. They invaded homes and threatened to gas people if they did not return to work."

The same Texas Labor History web site also recalled that “Emma Tenayuca of San Antonio... was the most prominent public leader of the pecan shellers’ strike that was called the most important labor action in the Southwest up to that time;” and that, coincidentally, “Tenayuca was a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA).”

In response to protests by farmers, street demonstrations of unemployed workers, and the labor movement activism of the early 1930s around the United States, the Democratic Roosevelt Administration also created federal public programs between 1933 and 1940 like the Works Progress Administration [WPA] -- which provided jobs for “some 600,000... Texans without regard to gender or race” between 1935 and 1943, according to Gone To Texas.

Also, in Austin, the Public Works Administration [PWA] “pumped millions of dollars into Austin’s sagging economy and generated thousands of jobs,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History. The same book also noted that “by 1936 the PWA would provide at least $6 million in grants and loans for Austin, more than for any other Texas city during the same period;” and “the University of Texas also wangled several million dollars out of the PWA, including money for dormitories and a 27-story tower.”

And another reason Lyndon Johnson was able to first get elected to Congress in 1937 may have been that he had previously gained some local popularity with Austin voters -- by helping to provide some federally-funded work opportunities for young people in his appointed position in the New Deal’s National Youth Administration.

Hidden History of Texas: 1930-1940--Part 10

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on January 28, 2013)

In his 2009 book, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, Vanity Fair magazine correspondent Bryan Burrough indicated how ultra-rich Texas folks like Clint Murchison, H.L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, and former Austin American and Austin Statesman (they merged into the American-Statesman) owner Charles Marsh were, despite the Great Depression, apparently still able to make big money from Texas’s oil industry between 1930 and 1940:

"Though he knew nothing about pipelines, Murchison decided to try to build one... Murchison was amazed how simple the business was; once a pipeline was built, all he did was sit back and collect checks... The pipe alone cost 3 million dollars, all of which Murchison got on credit... He coaxed every last dollar he could out of the Dallas banks, then pushed back repayment... By 1932 his debt had grown to more than $4 million dollars, far more than his net worth...

"[H.L.] Hunt used most of his inheritance to buy a 960-acre farm... Negroes worked his land, allowing Hunt to spend much of his time playing cards... By that...summer of 1930 he still hadn’t found a drop of oil in Texas. Then, on Sept. 5 [1930], Hunt took a call... Despite Hunt’s later denials, court documents would show he cut a secret deal with the Deep Rock driller to supply his men with inside information in return for $20,000 in cash...

"Charles E. Marsh, co-owner of several Texas newspapers, including the politically influential Austin-American...was using his spare cash to bankroll several Texas wildcatters... It is a measure of how totally Sid Richardson cloaked his business in secrecy that the name of Charles Marsh, the man whose backing made Richardson’s fortune possible, remained unknown to Richardson’s family...

"Marsh...had begun negotiating a complicated deal involving First National Bank of Dallas... It appears that Marsh agreed to guarantee Richardson’s debt to the bank. In return, the bank agreed to loan Richardson an additional $210,000, followed by another $150,000... By the summer of 1935 Richardson had used most of Charles Marsh’s investment to buy land all around Gulf’s drill sites...

"In 1938, Marsh encountered a sudden...financial reversal... From a single mention in a letter to Richardson -- contained in Marsh’s papers at the Johnson Presidential Library -- it appears that the Internal Revenue Service served Marsh with a request for $1.2 million in overdue taxes... Marsh was forced to repay much of the money. To raise it, he ended up selling all his Texas newspapers.”

Coincidentally, like Sid Richardson, former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson also apparently was backed by former Austin-American and Austin-Statesman newspaper owner Charles Marsh during the 1930s, when LBJ (also using $10,000 that was given to him by the father of First Lady Claudia “Ladybird” Johnson) decided in 1937 that he wanted to get himself elected as Austin’s representative in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1938. As Ronnie Dugger observed in his 1982 book The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson:

"Johnson had a special advantage: the partisanship of the Austin newspapers. Charles Marsh... was owner and publisher of the Austin American-Statesman as well as the dailies in 4 or 5 other Texas cities, and he was for Lyndon from the first. Marsh...had been in oil deals...since as early as 1934... Marsh was also... a director and president of Richardson Oils, Inc., which gave Johnson a direct connection to oilman Sid Richardson...

"Although the Austin dailies did not formally endorse anyone, Marsh turned them into Lyndon’s harmonicas. "These papers went all-out for him" said Edmonds Travis, one of their earliest editors... From the time the Johnsons arrived in Washington they frequented "Longlea," the plantation home of their friend, publisher Charles Marsh, in Culpeper, Virginia...The publisher also flew Johnson about in his private plane."

And, according to The Big Rich, LBJ also “used Texas Oil’s cash to start his march to... power.”

Besides helping to put Lyndon Johnson into Congress between 1930 and 1940 (and into the U.S. Senate and the White House, eventually, after 1940), Texas “oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right;” and “in a very real sense, the influence of Texas conservatives in America today -- in fact, the entire `Texanization’ of right-wing politics that brought George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to national prominence -- can be traced to forces set into motion by restive Texas oilmen during the 1930s,” according to The Big Rich. As the same book also noted:

"By 1935...the Kirby Building in downtown Houston was home to...shadowy, interconnected ultra-conservative groups... The Kirby groups were little more than the Ku Klux Klan in pinstripes, a kind of corporate Klan... One of [former National Association of Manufacturers President John Henry] Kirby’s most active allies was Maco Stewart of Galveston, an attorney who...had seen his wealth mushroom when Humble found oil on land he owned south of Houston... The most extreme of Kirby’s circle was George W. Armstrong, a Fort Worth oilman who owned Texas Steel, which made oil field supplies as well as concrete supports for Texas highways...

"In his definitive study of Texas conservatives, The Establishment in Texas Politics, George Norris Green pinpoints 1938 as the year oil-backed ultra-conservatives took control of the state’s political structure... Pappy O’Daniel’s victory [in 1938] initiated two decades of ultra-conservative rule in Texas. As governor, O’Daniel became Texas Oil’s reliable partner, freezing wellhead taxes and backing oil industry lobbyists’ takeover of the Railroad Commission. His administration was dominated by ultra-conservatives, many of them oilmen, including his key financial backer, Maco Stewart...

"Another ultra-conservative initiative was led by...Texas congressman...Martin Dies, who in 1937 co-sponsored formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]... John Henry Kirby and Maco Stewart were friends and longtime financial supporters of Dies, who was widely viewed as a tool of business and oil interests in the Beaumont area... Dies’s papers indicate he corresponded regularly with Kirby and Stewart."

Hidden History of Texas: 1930-1940--Part 9

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on January 14, 2013)
The oil industry of Texas continued to produce a lot of wealth for out-of-state Eastern investors, some local Texas businessmen, politicians, and investors, and the “non-profit” University of Texas during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But for most people who lived in Texas as farmers or workers between 1930 and 1940, economic survival continued to be difficult.

In an essay, “Women and Work During the Great Depression in Texas,” that appeared in the 2002 book that Donald Willett and Stephen Curley edited, titled Invisible Texans: Women and Minorities in Texas History, Baylor University Oral History Program Director Rebecca Sharpless described what life was like for most people who lived in Texas between 1930 and 1940:
"Cotton families made up most of the rural population in Texas... In 1932, cotton prices hit a low of 5 cents a pound... Farmers spent more money raising their crops than they received for the sale. West Texans, furthermore, endured the miserable conditions known as the Dust Bowl. Between 1933 and 1936, drought scorched the land... Only the fortunate minority had running water in the house. Most rural families used outdoor toilets, known as privies... Most rural and town women still cooked on wood stoves... .

"The majority of Texas farmers worked land owned by someone else... Many landowners... turned their tenants off the land... Between 1930 and 1940 the number of tenants in some parts of the state dropped by half... Many unemployed farmers were forced to go on government relief... By mid-1932, an estimated 400,000 Texans were out of work...

"During the 1930s, more than half a million Texas women worked for wages. In urban areas, this group encompassed about 25 percent of Anglo women, about 25 percent of Mexican women, and 55 percent of African-American women... In 1932, researchers for the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. government found that women in Texas industries worked for the lowest wages in the nation... More than three-quarters of employed African-American women in Texas worked as domestic servants throughout the 1930s."

According to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas:

"The value of farms in Texas would fall from $3.6 billion in 1930 to $2.6 billion in 1940... The state had fewer manufacturing establishments in 1939 than in 1929, and workers... received less in wages. As late as 1940 more than 300,000 Texans had no employment in private enterprises... Black tenants... decreased in number from 65,000 to 32,000... Unemployment among black farm laborers probably ran as high as 90 percent by 1935... An estimated 250,000 Mexicans... left the state between 1929 and 1939."

Most of the Latino people of Mexican descent in Texas who left the state during the 1930s moved to Mexico, and “many left because they were denied access to government relief programs or fell victim to an intense federal repatriation program,” according to the same book.

Around 20,000 African-Americans who lived in Texas also left the state between 1930 and 1940; and “as late as 1937 Negroes formed 25 percent of all unemployed persons” in Texas, though they only “composed 14 percent” of the state’s population, according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

In San Antonio, most of the white Anglo women who had jobs between 1930 and 1940 either worked in shops as sales clerks or in offices as clerical workers, while most of the Latina women of Mexican descent who had jobs worked in light industries, the food canning industry, garment factories, cigar rolling firms, pecan shelling firms or as seamstresses.

Although Houston’s unemployment rate in January 1931 was around 23 percent, “Austin, cushioned by the presence of state government employees and the University of Texas probably suffered the least among major cities” in Texas, according to Gone To Texas. So, not surprisingly, during the 1930s the number of people who lived in Austin increased by 66 percent; and by 1940, 88,000 people now resided in Austin. As the “Women and Work During the Great Depression in Texas ” essay recalled:

"In Austin... young white women could find employment in the state capital, in various places: state institutions and agencies, the telephone exchange, local mercantile establishments, chain variety stores, laundries, hotels and cafes, beauty parlors, canning factories, or binderies...”

But “black women could find jobs only in laundries, domestic service, and sometimes hotels as `scrub women’ or chamber maids,” “Mexican women could gain employment in canning factories, domestic services, laundries, and occasionally as seamstresses in dry goods stores,” and “the supply of rural women wanting work became so great that the local telephone service began to requiring applicants to have a high school diploma and a year of residence in Austin,” according to the same essay.

Hidden History of Texas: 1920-1930--Part 8

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on Dec. 27, 2012)     In 1920 over 741,000 African-Americans lived in Texas. But given the level of KKK influence in Texas and the limited political and economic opportunities that white supremacist and institutionally racist Texas society generally provided most African-Americans between 1920 and 1930, “a good many African-Americans,” not surprisingly, “left the state in the 1920s,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas.     But between 1920 and 1930 the number of Latinos in Texas of Mexican descent increased from over 251,000 to nearly 684,000, and by 1930, 10 percent of Austin’s population was now of Mexican descent.  
Although the number of African-Americans who worked for wages as farm laborers in Texas decreased from 75,000 to 41,000 between 1910 and 1930 (due, in part, to the increasing mechanization of agricultural work), 20,000 African-Americans in Texas still owned their own farms (on which most grew cotton) in 1930.

Yet between 1900 and 1930, the number of African-Americans in Texas who were now just tenant farmers increased from 45,000 to 65,000; and 70 percent of all African-American farmers in Texas were just tenant farmers by 1930. In addition, about 64 percent of African-Americans who worked for wages were at this time employed in non-agricultural work in Texas, mostly as servants or unskilled laborers.

Most workers in Texas -- whether white, African-American, or of Mexican descent -- who attempted to organize themselves into unions were apparently exploited or repressed between 1920 and 1930 by the white corporate power structure in Texas. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South recalled:

"The anti-union campaign was particularly vigorous in Texas. In San Antonio, for example, the chamber of commerce ran a free employment agency which placed over 2,000 non-union workers in 1920, by which time it had become almost impossible for union carpenters to get jobs. Mexican workers were brought in by the thousands, and special schools were set up to train non-union workers.

"In San Antonio, the program defeated union electricians, carpenters, planning mill operators, butchers, printers and others. Beaumont, which had been a strong union town, became almost "open shop" after the anti-union attacks led by a member of the National Metal Trades Association. The anti-union forces in Dallas imported 1,500 strikebreakers, and even the printers were forced to accept non-union conditions. The Southwest Open Shop Association opened a trade school at Dallas to supply workers and persuaded the governor to send militia to Galveston to break the 1920 longshoremen’s strike."

But although “the ILA locals at Galveston surrendered their chapter in 1922, and company union was chartered in 1924” (and miners in Texas also “lost a 1926 strike against a 25 percent wage cut, and the United Mine Workers [then] disappeared” from Texas), “the open-shop movement” during the Roaring Twenties “was not completely successful, however, because the unions at Fort Worth and Houston were able to survive,” according to the same book.

Although most Texas farmers and workers in Texas did not enjoy much economic prosperity between 1920 and 1930, by 1928, “Texas for the first time led all other states in oil production with... nearly 20 percent of the total for the entire world,” according to Gone To Texas.

Besides producing super-profits for out-of-state, eastern corporate interests like the Mellon family and for some local Texas businessmen, politicians, and investors, Texas’s booming oil industry in the 1920s also began to produce super-profits for the “non-profit” University of Texas in Austin (a university that still discriminated against African-American people in the 1920s). As the same book observed:

"Development of the Permian Basin... made the University of Texas... rich. The two million acres of land donated to the Permanent University Fund [PUF] in the 19th century had generated little income... But then in 1923 drillers brought in the Santa Rita wells on university lands in Reagan County..."

According to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History, “the income from the Permanent University Fund... in 1925... amounted to $225,000, gained largely from grazing leases on University of Texas’s 2 million acres in West Texas;” but “by 1927 revenues from oil leases on University of Texas’s West Texas lands poured into the Permanent University Fund at a rate of almost a quarter of a million dollars a month.”

Yet, although Austin’s “non-profit” University of Texas began to accumulate a lot of surplus wealth from its Texas oil industry property by 1927, in 1930 about 25 percent of Austin homes still had no indoor toilets, tubs, or showers, according to the same book.

Hidden History of Texas--1920-1930--Part 7

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on Dec. 12, 2012)

Between 1920 and 1930, the number of people living in Texas increased from over 4.6 million to over 5.8 million; and the percentage of Texas residents who now lived in urban towns and cities with populations above 2,500 people increased from 34 to 41 percent. By 1930, for example, over 292,000 people lived in Houston, over 260,000 people lived in Dallas, over 231,000 people lived in San Antonio and over 163,000 people lived in Fort Worth—although the number of people living in Austin in 1930 was still less than 54,000.

But between 1920 and 1930 the percentage of farmers in Texas who were now just tenant farmers also increased to 61 percent. And in Texas during “The Roaring Twenties,” as Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas recalled:

“Thousands upon thousands of farmers continued to live in destructive poverty as tenants and sharecroppers. Giant corporations still wielded monopoly power because anti-trust and regulatory laws had always aimed more at `foreign’ businesses…Laws protecting children in industry…went unenforced…The doctrine of white supremacy ruled race relations, and in South Texas Anglo bosses exploited Texans of Mexican descent politically and economically…”

  Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, for example, observed:

“…Mob violence increased in the early 1920s with the rise of the new Ku Klux Klan…Klansmen branded a black bellhop in Dallas with acid and castrated a light-skinned Negro accused of relations with a white woman. They raided the office of the Houston Informer and threatened the Dallas Express, both black papers. Hooded groups beat a black youth in Texarkana , removed two Negroes from the Denton jail to flog them, and forced black cotton pickers near Corsicana to end their strike for higher wages…”

  In addition, during the 1920s, “the new Klan, which claimed over 100,000 members in the state, proved powerful enough…to help elect Earle B. Mayfield, a Klansman, to the United States Senate from Texas,” the same book noted. According to Gone To Texas :

“The KKK arrived in Texas in September 1920 when a kleagle came to Houston and recruited 100 men into the state’s first local chapter. `The initial roster represented literally a glossary of Houston ’s Who’s Who,’ wrote one observer. The charter members were silk-stocking men from the banks, business houses, and professions…From its Houston beginning, the Klan spread rapidly across the state. In January 1922, when membership reached more than 75,000, Texas was organized as a realm of the `Invisible Empire’ under its own grand dragon, A.D. Ellis, an Episcopal priest from Beaumont . That same year women…obtained a Texas charter as the Women of the Invisible Empire of America. In June 1923, 1,500 masked and robed klanswomen held a parade through Fort Worth . Eventually male membership alone stood at approximately 150,000.”

  Some opposition to the KKK’s growing influence in Texas electoral politics began to apparently develop within Texas white power structure and political establishment circles (who then backed state-wide candidates that were able to defeat some KKK members who ran against them) by 1924. But as Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow noted:

“The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was a viable force in Houston and throughout the state. In Texas , this vigilante group occupied a position of power and influence unequaled in any other state, giving Texas the designation of Star Klan State . Houston was dubbed as the Star Klan City …In 1921, Houston Klansmen, led by Deputy Sheriff George E. Kimbro, attacked and castrated a black dentist and beat a white lawyer who represented him. Several years later, the Klan tarred and feathered a black physician. In 1928, a Houston mob dragged a black man, accused of killing a white police officer, from his bed in a local hospital and hanged him from a bridge—a murder for which no one was ever convicted. Additionally, a Klan newspaper, Colonel Mayfield’s Weekly, circulated throughout the city.

“[In Houston ] in 1920, backed by a city ordinance, the American Legion excluded blacks from the annual Armistice Day parade. Blacks also were prohibited from voting in the municipal elections of February 1921. In 1923 and 1924, respectively, blacks were banned from standing in the same lines as whites to purchase stamps at the post office and to pay property taxes at the Harris County Courthouse. In 1925, the Electric Company excluded blacks from riding its buses, while in 1926, the Majestic Theater refused to admit blacks on weekends.”

  In 1921, Houston ’s Democratic Party also passed “a resolution allowing only whites to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary;” and in 1923 the Texas state legislature passed a law stating that “only white Democrats and none other” could vote in primary elections, according to the same book.

Between 1920 and 1930, the KKK was also visibly active on the streets of Austin, Texas. In 1921, for example, “500 white-robed and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen from Austin and San Antonio marched single file in silence up and down Congress Avenue, while thousands of spectators looked on,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History. The same book also observed:

“ Capital City Klan No. 81 was organized in 1921 and a year later had 1,500 members including the sheriff of Travis County and apparently other highly placed city and county police officials. The Klan thrived in Austin in the early and mid-1920s…In the mid-1920s the Klan even purchased a sizable piece of property off South Congress Avenue and erected a hall or `Klan haven’…”

  So, not surprisingly, Austin’s “1928 city plan recommended that East Austin be designated a `Negro district’ and that municipal services for blacks, such as schools and parks, be confined to this district” and so “thirteen-acre Rosewood Park in East Austin provided recreational facilities for blacks, but other city parks were closed to them,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History.

Hidden History of Texas--1890-1920--Part 6

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 29, 2012)

During the period between 1890 and 1920 there was much dissatisfaction among Texas workers and farmers with how capitalist society treated them. So it’s not surprising that political support for an anti-corporate electoral alternative third-party to the pro-corporate Democrats and Republicans -- the Socialist Party -- began to develop in Texas by the beginning of the 20th century. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South noted:

“The Texas Socialist Party... was a member of the radical wing of the national party. E.O. Meitzen of Hallettsville, a member of the Grange, who helped organize the Farmers’ Alliance in Fayette County, and edited a German Populist paper (Der Anzeiger) during the 1890’s, was an active Socialist, and was secretary of the Renters Union, formed by Texas Socialists around 1909. Meitzen’s activities were continued by Thomas Hickey, a lecturer for the Social-Democratic Party in the south during the early 1900’s. Hickey published a magazine, The Rebel, from Hallettsville for many years... In 1912, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for President of the United States [got] about 9 percent of the Texas vote...”

  According to the labordallas.org website, the circulation of The Rebel “went over 20,000” before it “was suppressed by the United States government as World War I began and never was reborn.” The same Texas labor history website also recalled that Texas Socialist Party leader Meitzen “was elected County Judge in LaVaca County and... gained 11.7 percent of the votes in the governor’s race” in Texas in 1914, “was shot by a sheriff he had accused of `losing’ important records concerning county monies” that same year, and “survived the shooting and other physical assaults” before he “died in Houston in 1934.”

Dissatisfied feminist white women in Texas also began to organize during the 1890 to 1920 historical period. As Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas observed, in Texas the white feminist movement "stirred slightly in 1903 with formation of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association” and “suffragettes by 1916 formed 80 local chapters and claimed 9,500 members for their statewide organization.”

In Austin, the Austin Woman’s Suffrage Association was founded in 1908; and when the wife of Austin’s then-Superintendent of Schools, Jane McCallum, became the Austin Woman’s Suffrage Association’s president in 1915, this group had 80 members.

So, not surprisingly, the Texas state legislature soon passed an act in 1918 which allowed white women in Texas to also vote in Texas primary elections; and after a May 1919 referendum in Texas, white women also were given the right to vote in U.S. presidential elections, when Texas became the ninth state to ratify the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Ironically, “among those Austinites who supported the women’s voting rights movement was Adele Burleson, wife of Woodrow Wilson’s postmaster general [whose] husband urged the president to introduce racial segregation into the federal civil service,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

The same book also observed that former Austin Mayor A.P. Wooldridge “similarly sought to expand the rights of women while he limited those of blacks” and that “he advised a group of Austin blacks in 1919 [to] `keep out of politics’" and told them not to forget "that whites `will tolerate no idea of social equality.’”

After the Democratic Wilson Administration decided to involve the U.S. military in the European war between UK imperialism and German imperialism in 1917 -- over 197,000 people from Texas were either drafted into the military or volunteered during World War I. And according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, “Negroes provided about 25 percent -- 31,000 men -- of the troops called up from Texas, though they formed only 16 percent of the state’s population” at that time.

Most draftees and volunteers from Texas served in the U.S. Army during World War I and “more than 5,000 men and 1 nurse” from Texas “died while in the service, most losing their lives in the great influenza epidemic of 1918,” according to Gone To Texas.

And the free speech rights and civil liberties of anti-war activists and dissidents in Texas who opposed U.S. military intervention in Europe during World War I were curtailed after the U.S. Congress passed its Declaration of War in 1917. According to the same book, “a special session of the... state legislature... passed espionage and sedition laws that made it a crime to criticize the U.S. government, its officials, the flag, or soldiers;” and the University of Texas regents "fired a well-known anti-war professor."

African-American soldiers who were stationed in Texas after the U.S. military entered World War I also apparently challenged the racism of the Houston police department and white supremacy in Texas in a militant way in August 1917. As Gone To Texas recalled:

“On Aug. 23, 1917, Houston police arrested a black soldier and then fired at and arrested a black military policeman who went to inquire about the first serviceman…The men still in camp... decided to march on the police station to secure the MP’s release... Gathering rifles, the soldiers... moved toward downtown Houston... killing 15 whites and wounding 12 others. Four of the soldiers also died...”

  But the U.S. Army subsequently found 110 of the African-American soldiers involved in this apparently anti-racist protest “guilty of mutiny and riot” and “19 were hanged and 63 received life sentences,” according to the same book.

The police had also “roughed up [a] black woman" on Aug. 23, 1917, according to Black Texans, and the incident “stimulated a retaliatory raid by about 150” African-American troops. So, not surprisingly, after World War I ended, African-Americans in Texas “organized an Equal Rights Association to promote democratic government and equal justice” in Texas in 1919 -- the same year that there were also anti-black race riots by some white Texans in Port Arthur and Longview (where homes of African-Americans were burned), according to the same book.

And according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957:

“The Houston Riot of 1917 served as a catalyst for the establishment of the Houston chapter of the NAACP. Investigating the 1917 riot, NAACP field worker Martha Gruening found the time ripe for organizing a Houston chapter... Shortly after Gruening’s trip to Houston, M.B. Patten, a postal worker... called a meeting of the city’s leading black professionals, clergymen, and business people... Subsequently the Houston chapter of the NAACP was established on May 31, 1918... By the end of 1918, membership in the Houston branch had reached 414...”

  By 1919, according to Black Texans, 31 chapters of the NAACP existed in Texas “with 7,000 members -- over 1,000 in both Dallas and San Antonio.” Yet in Austin -- which at the time was still just the 10th-largest city in Texas -- the following incident happened in August of 1919, according to Austin: An Illustrated History:

“John Shilladay, the white executive secretary of the NAACP... journeyed to Austin in 1919 to assist with legal difficulties encountered by the NAACP’s Austin branch... At mid-morning just outside the Driskill Hotel, John Shilladay was assaulted by County Judge David Pickle, a county constable, and several other Austinites...

  And that same month Democratic Texas Governor Hobby also warned NAACP national officers that “your organization can contribute more to the advancement of both races by keeping your representatives and their propaganda out of this state than in any other way.”

Yet as late as 1910, Austin still “had virtually no public parks or playgrounds, only two paved streets, and few sidewalks, ...refuse accumulated in alleys and was dumped on the banks of the Colorado, [and] the majority of residents still relied on backyard privies in the absence of sewer lines,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History.