(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...”
Showing posts with label University of Texas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of Texas. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
Hidden History of Texas: 1974-1995--Part 18
(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on April 30, 2013)
Between 1970 and 1990 the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 1.4 million to 2 million, but the percentage of Texas residents who were African-Americans remained at 12 percent. More African-Americans lived in Texas in 1990 than in any other state except for New York and California, and 90 percent of African-Americans in Texas lived in towns and cities by 1990.
Although the percentage of African-Americans in Texas who were registered voters dropped from 83 percent in 1968 to around 65 percent during the 1980s, the number of African-Americans who held political office in Texas increased from 45 in 1971 to 472 in 1992. And even though no African-American was elected to serve as a Governor of Texas or a U.S. Senator from Texas between 1970 and 1995, an African-American, Barbara Jordan, had been elected by 1972 to represent one of Texas’s congressional districts in the House of Representatives.
By 1985, 15 African-Americans had been elected to sit in the Texas state legislature, and by 1990 there were 12 African-American mayors and 138 African-American city council members in various cities and towns in Texas. In Austin, the first African-American man to sit on the Austin City Council since the 1880s -- Berl Handcox -- had been elected in 1971.
The first African-American mayor of Dallas, former Texas Secretary of State Ron Kirk (who later became the U.S. Trade Ambassador in the Democratic Obama Administration), was elected in 1995. In addition, between 1990 and 1992, an African-American woman named Marguerite Ross Barnett was the president of the University of Houston, and in 1991 the birthday of Martin Luther King was made a state holiday in Texas.
Yet between 1960 and 1984, the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had decreased from 15,000 to 5,000, and as late as 1993 “the University of Texas at Austin could count only 52 African-Americans among its faculty of 2,300 -- about 2 percent,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. In addition, “in Austin , expansion of the University of Texas into an African-American community displaced people into more crowded neighborhoods” between 1974 and 1995, according to the same book.
Around 30 percent of all African-Americans who lived in Texas in 1990 still lived in poverty; and in 1987, the U.S. Equal Opportunities Commission office in Dallas still received 5,800 complaints of racial discrimination from African-Americans who lived in Texas.
Of the 37,532 people locked inside state and federal prisons in Texas in 1985, 36 percent were African-American prisoners; and 29 percent of all the imprisoned people in Texas who were executed by the State of Texas in the 1980s and early 1990s were African-Americans. Historically, “261 of 316 men executed by Texas between 1924 and 1995 were black,” according to Black Texans.
In addition, while 9 percent of college students in Texas were African-American in 1993, between 1985 and 1991 the percentage of people locked inside Texas prisons who were African-American had increased from 36 to 41 percent. And in 1990, 40 percent of all African-American families in Texas were now headed by women.
The total number of people imprisoned in state and federal prisons in Texas increased from 16,833 to 127,766 (including 7,935 female prisoners) between 1974 and 1995; and, between 1991 and 1996, Texas -- whose imprisoned population grew by 156 percent during these five years -- was the state with the highest percentage increase in the number of people incarcerated during this historical period.
In the 1980 Ruiz v. Estelle court decision, “the entire state prison system” of Texas “was declared unconstitutional on overcrowding and conditions,” according to the ACLU National Prison Project’s 1995 “Status Report: State Prisons and the Courts;” and, in 1996, Texas -- with an incarceration rate of 686 prisoners per every 100,000 residents -- was the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the United States.
Between 1970 and 1985, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 250,000 to 436,000 and “from 1980 to 1990, Austin’s Jewish-affiliated population more than doubled, from 2,100 to 5,000,” according to an essay by Cathy Schechter, titled “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell,’” that appeared in Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth Roseman’s book Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas.
By 1988, around 90,000 people of Jewish religious background now lived in Texas, according to the www.texasalmanac.com website, and of the nearly 17 million people who lived in Texas in 1990, around 108,000 were now of Jewish religious background.
Despite the continued presence of local anti-war movement activists in Austin in the 1980s, “Lockheed Austin Division [LAD] was formed in August 1981 by Lockheed Missiles & Space Companies to develop military tactical support programs and systems” in Austin;” and the programs under development at LAD in the 1980s fell “under two general headings of command and control systems and target location systems,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.
The same book also revealed that “the equipment developed through these programs [was] used to provide military commanders with current information on the location of military units within their operating area”“employment reached 2,000 by July 1984” and a year later the number of LAD employees: had “risen to 2,500.”
Between 1970 and 1990 the number of African-Americans who lived in Texas increased from 1.4 million to 2 million, but the percentage of Texas residents who were African-Americans remained at 12 percent. More African-Americans lived in Texas in 1990 than in any other state except for New York and California, and 90 percent of African-Americans in Texas lived in towns and cities by 1990.
Although the percentage of African-Americans in Texas who were registered voters dropped from 83 percent in 1968 to around 65 percent during the 1980s, the number of African-Americans who held political office in Texas increased from 45 in 1971 to 472 in 1992. And even though no African-American was elected to serve as a Governor of Texas or a U.S. Senator from Texas between 1970 and 1995, an African-American, Barbara Jordan, had been elected by 1972 to represent one of Texas’s congressional districts in the House of Representatives.
By 1985, 15 African-Americans had been elected to sit in the Texas state legislature, and by 1990 there were 12 African-American mayors and 138 African-American city council members in various cities and towns in Texas. In Austin, the first African-American man to sit on the Austin City Council since the 1880s -- Berl Handcox -- had been elected in 1971.
The first African-American mayor of Dallas, former Texas Secretary of State Ron Kirk (who later became the U.S. Trade Ambassador in the Democratic Obama Administration), was elected in 1995. In addition, between 1990 and 1992, an African-American woman named Marguerite Ross Barnett was the president of the University of Houston, and in 1991 the birthday of Martin Luther King was made a state holiday in Texas.
Yet between 1960 and 1984, the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had decreased from 15,000 to 5,000, and as late as 1993 “the University of Texas at Austin could count only 52 African-Americans among its faculty of 2,300 -- about 2 percent,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. In addition, “in Austin , expansion of the University of Texas into an African-American community displaced people into more crowded neighborhoods” between 1974 and 1995, according to the same book.
Around 30 percent of all African-Americans who lived in Texas in 1990 still lived in poverty; and in 1987, the U.S. Equal Opportunities Commission office in Dallas still received 5,800 complaints of racial discrimination from African-Americans who lived in Texas.
Of the 37,532 people locked inside state and federal prisons in Texas in 1985, 36 percent were African-American prisoners; and 29 percent of all the imprisoned people in Texas who were executed by the State of Texas in the 1980s and early 1990s were African-Americans. Historically, “261 of 316 men executed by Texas between 1924 and 1995 were black,” according to Black Texans.
In addition, while 9 percent of college students in Texas were African-American in 1993, between 1985 and 1991 the percentage of people locked inside Texas prisons who were African-American had increased from 36 to 41 percent. And in 1990, 40 percent of all African-American families in Texas were now headed by women.
The total number of people imprisoned in state and federal prisons in Texas increased from 16,833 to 127,766 (including 7,935 female prisoners) between 1974 and 1995; and, between 1991 and 1996, Texas -- whose imprisoned population grew by 156 percent during these five years -- was the state with the highest percentage increase in the number of people incarcerated during this historical period.
In the 1980 Ruiz v. Estelle court decision, “the entire state prison system” of Texas “was declared unconstitutional on overcrowding and conditions,” according to the ACLU National Prison Project’s 1995 “Status Report: State Prisons and the Courts;” and, in 1996, Texas -- with an incarceration rate of 686 prisoners per every 100,000 residents -- was the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the United States.
Between 1970 and 1985, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 250,000 to 436,000 and “from 1980 to 1990, Austin’s Jewish-affiliated population more than doubled, from 2,100 to 5,000,” according to an essay by Cathy Schechter, titled “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell,’” that appeared in Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth Roseman’s book Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas.
By 1988, around 90,000 people of Jewish religious background now lived in Texas, according to the www.texasalmanac.com website, and of the nearly 17 million people who lived in Texas in 1990, around 108,000 were now of Jewish religious background.
Despite the continued presence of local anti-war movement activists in Austin in the 1980s, “Lockheed Austin Division [LAD] was formed in August 1981 by Lockheed Missiles & Space Companies to develop military tactical support programs and systems” in Austin;” and the programs under development at LAD in the 1980s fell “under two general headings of command and control systems and target location systems,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.
The same book also revealed that “the equipment developed through these programs [was] used to provide military commanders with current information on the location of military units within their operating area”“employment reached 2,000 by July 1984” and a year later the number of LAD employees: had “risen to 2,500.”
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
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.”
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.”
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
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."
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."
Monday, April 15, 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Hidden History of Texas: 1940-1953--Part 13
(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on February 18, 2013)
As Texas’s manufacturing industry expanded to produce more weapons and supplies for U.S. government needs during World War II, the need for factory workers in Texas increased; and more people in Texas moved from rural areas into cities and towns between 1940 and 1953.
By 1950, over 7.7 million people now lived in Texas and around 60 percent of all people in Texas now lived in urban areas. By 1950, for example, 596,163 people lived in Houston, 434,462 in Dallas, 408,407 in San Antonio, and 278,728 in Fort Worth; however, Austin's population was still only 132,459 in 1950.
According to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, “World War II almost doubled the number of black industrial workers” in Texas -- from 159,000 to a peak of 295,000 in 1943. But during World War II “the Consolidated Vultee plant” still “segregated its assembly line; and Baytown oil refineries paid blacks less than whites for the same work,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Going To Texas.
Many Texas-born African-Americans continued to leave white supremacist Texas society between 1940 and 1953 for states in the Northeast, Midwest, or West in which racial segregation was not legalized and where they had often been able to find factory jobs during World War II. But in Houston -- where the total population had grown from 384,514 to 596,163 between 1940 and 1950 -- the “black population increased from 86,302 to 125,400” during the 1940s, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow.
And -- despite an anti-black riot by white racist Texans that occurred on June 15, 1943, in Houston -- African-American civil rights activists in Houston and elsewhere in Texas between 1940 and 1953 began to win a few victories in their campaigns for an end to legalized racial discrimination, white supremacy, institutional racism, and interpersonal racism in Texas society and daily life.
In 1943, for example, a Houston NAACP “boycott against Winegarten Store [Sic: Correct spelling is "Weingarten's"] led to the dismissal of one of the store’s security guards, who had struck a black customer” and “an NAACP-led demonstration made it possible for blacks to attend a production of Porgy and Bess at the Houston Music Hall and be seated on the same floor levels as whites,” according to In Struggle Against Jim Crow.
In addition, “on Apr. 6, 1943... representatives of the Negro Committee of the Houston Teachers Association presented the school board with a petition for pay equalization” and “on Apr. 13, 1943, rather than take a chance on a... lawsuit, the Houston school board agreed to make the salaries of black teachers and principals equal to those of their white counterparts who possessed the same credentials and performed the same duties,” according to the same book.
Then in 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Texas’s white Democratic primary law to be illegal in its Smith v. Allwright decision in a legal case that African-American civil rights groups in Texas had initiated. And in 1946 -- when 5,000 new members were recruited into the Houston chapter of the NAACP -- African-American civil rights activists in Texas began to challenge the racist admissions policy of the University of Texas in Austin.
As In Struggle Against Jim Crow recalled:
"Lulu B. White... executive secretary of the NAACP’s Houston branch, and the NAACP’s state director... led fight...to integrate the University of Texas... Urged on by the NAACP and accompanied by Lulu White and other supporters, Herman Sweatt attempted to register at UT in Austin on Feb. 26, 1946. After a discussion with [then-University of Texas] President Theophilus Painter and other university officials, Sweatt left his application at the campus and returned to Houston... Sweatt sued university officials on May 16, 1946 for denying him admission...
"In April 1949, Joseph J. Rhoades, president of Bishop College, organized a mass registration attempt sending 35 black college seniors from across the state to apply to various professional programs at UT... When they arrived at the registrar’s office seeking admission, they were told that they could apply at TSUN [Texas State University for Negroes; later renamed Texas Southern University]. These students then decided to stage a demonstration, marching from the university to the State Capitol. They carried placards... One sign read, `Texas Can’t Afford a Dual System of Graduate and Professional Education' Another proclaimed, `Separate and Equal Education Is a Mockery.'...
"The Supreme Court announced its findings in Sweatt v. Painter on June 5, 1950. In a unanimous decision the Court ordered Sweatt admitted to UT."
Also, “during the summer of 1946... the death of a black man gave rise to the largest mass protest demonstration that the city of Houston had ever witnessed” and “the NAACP... converted the funeral for Berry Branch, killed by a white bus driver, into a rally” in which “all labor unions in the city were represented,” according to the same book.
Yet despite the legal victories, there was still a poll tax in Texas that was utilized to block many African-Americans from being able to vote and the “only civil service positions” African-American residents were allowed to hold in Houston before 1945 “were in the post office,” according to In Struggle Against Jim Crow.
In addition, in 1948 only 15 of Houston’s 503 police officers were African-Americans and the “custom” of “the most blatant among the Houston companies” in its discriminatory policies between 1940 and 1953 -- Hughes Tool -- was still “to hire whites at 60 cents an hour and blacks at 50 cents an hour, although they were performing the same tasks,” according to the same book.
And, “Austin in 1951 changed its city council representatives from geographical districts to an at-large basis which guaranteed control of all seats by the white majority,” according to Black Texans.
The number of African-Americans who lived in Texas only increased from 924,391 to 977,458 between 1940 and 1950, as many African-Americans left Texas for the West Coast, Midwest, or Northeast; and as late as 1945 there were still only about 45,000 people of Jewish religious background who lived in Texas.
But by 1950, the number of Latinos of Mexican descent living in Texas -- 1 million -- now exceeded the number of African-Americans who lived in the state.
As Texas’s manufacturing industry expanded to produce more weapons and supplies for U.S. government needs during World War II, the need for factory workers in Texas increased; and more people in Texas moved from rural areas into cities and towns between 1940 and 1953.
By 1950, over 7.7 million people now lived in Texas and around 60 percent of all people in Texas now lived in urban areas. By 1950, for example, 596,163 people lived in Houston, 434,462 in Dallas, 408,407 in San Antonio, and 278,728 in Fort Worth; however, Austin's population was still only 132,459 in 1950.
According to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, “World War II almost doubled the number of black industrial workers” in Texas -- from 159,000 to a peak of 295,000 in 1943. But during World War II “the Consolidated Vultee plant” still “segregated its assembly line; and Baytown oil refineries paid blacks less than whites for the same work,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Going To Texas.
Many Texas-born African-Americans continued to leave white supremacist Texas society between 1940 and 1953 for states in the Northeast, Midwest, or West in which racial segregation was not legalized and where they had often been able to find factory jobs during World War II. But in Houston -- where the total population had grown from 384,514 to 596,163 between 1940 and 1950 -- the “black population increased from 86,302 to 125,400” during the 1940s, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow.
And -- despite an anti-black riot by white racist Texans that occurred on June 15, 1943, in Houston -- African-American civil rights activists in Houston and elsewhere in Texas between 1940 and 1953 began to win a few victories in their campaigns for an end to legalized racial discrimination, white supremacy, institutional racism, and interpersonal racism in Texas society and daily life.
In 1943, for example, a Houston NAACP “boycott against Winegarten Store [Sic: Correct spelling is "Weingarten's"] led to the dismissal of one of the store’s security guards, who had struck a black customer” and “an NAACP-led demonstration made it possible for blacks to attend a production of Porgy and Bess at the Houston Music Hall and be seated on the same floor levels as whites,” according to In Struggle Against Jim Crow.
In addition, “on Apr. 6, 1943... representatives of the Negro Committee of the Houston Teachers Association presented the school board with a petition for pay equalization” and “on Apr. 13, 1943, rather than take a chance on a... lawsuit, the Houston school board agreed to make the salaries of black teachers and principals equal to those of their white counterparts who possessed the same credentials and performed the same duties,” according to the same book.
Then in 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Texas’s white Democratic primary law to be illegal in its Smith v. Allwright decision in a legal case that African-American civil rights groups in Texas had initiated. And in 1946 -- when 5,000 new members were recruited into the Houston chapter of the NAACP -- African-American civil rights activists in Texas began to challenge the racist admissions policy of the University of Texas in Austin.
As In Struggle Against Jim Crow recalled:
"Lulu B. White... executive secretary of the NAACP’s Houston branch, and the NAACP’s state director... led fight...to integrate the University of Texas... Urged on by the NAACP and accompanied by Lulu White and other supporters, Herman Sweatt attempted to register at UT in Austin on Feb. 26, 1946. After a discussion with [then-University of Texas] President Theophilus Painter and other university officials, Sweatt left his application at the campus and returned to Houston... Sweatt sued university officials on May 16, 1946 for denying him admission...
"In April 1949, Joseph J. Rhoades, president of Bishop College, organized a mass registration attempt sending 35 black college seniors from across the state to apply to various professional programs at UT... When they arrived at the registrar’s office seeking admission, they were told that they could apply at TSUN [Texas State University for Negroes; later renamed Texas Southern University]. These students then decided to stage a demonstration, marching from the university to the State Capitol. They carried placards... One sign read, `Texas Can’t Afford a Dual System of Graduate and Professional Education' Another proclaimed, `Separate and Equal Education Is a Mockery.'...
"The Supreme Court announced its findings in Sweatt v. Painter on June 5, 1950. In a unanimous decision the Court ordered Sweatt admitted to UT."
Also, “during the summer of 1946... the death of a black man gave rise to the largest mass protest demonstration that the city of Houston had ever witnessed” and “the NAACP... converted the funeral for Berry Branch, killed by a white bus driver, into a rally” in which “all labor unions in the city were represented,” according to the same book.
Yet despite the legal victories, there was still a poll tax in Texas that was utilized to block many African-Americans from being able to vote and the “only civil service positions” African-American residents were allowed to hold in Houston before 1945 “were in the post office,” according to In Struggle Against Jim Crow.
In addition, in 1948 only 15 of Houston’s 503 police officers were African-Americans and the “custom” of “the most blatant among the Houston companies” in its discriminatory policies between 1940 and 1953 -- Hughes Tool -- was still “to hire whites at 60 cents an hour and blacks at 50 cents an hour, although they were performing the same tasks,” according to the same book.
And, “Austin in 1951 changed its city council representatives from geographical districts to an at-large basis which guaranteed control of all seats by the white majority,” according to Black Texans.
The number of African-Americans who lived in Texas only increased from 924,391 to 977,458 between 1940 and 1950, as many African-Americans left Texas for the West Coast, Midwest, or Northeast; and as late as 1945 there were still only about 45,000 people of Jewish religious background who lived in Texas.
But by 1950, the number of Latinos of Mexican descent living in Texas -- 1 million -- now exceeded the number of African-Americans who lived in the state.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, January 14, 2013
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.
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.
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