Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era

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AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS 2017 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Non-Fiction Book Award 2016 Ramirez Family Award, Texas Institute of Letters This book is about the other Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community organizing, liberal politics, and civil rights activism. Beginning in the 1930s, Max Krochmal tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the state’s marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow. Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation’s most conservative states. Blue Texas remembers the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier--and it shows why their story still matters today. Frontmatter Contents Pologue 1 People Are Power: The Mass Uprising and the Maverick Coalition 2 Segregation Is an Economic Problem: Black Workers Win the Right to Vote 3 Forcing Us Together in Self-Defense: The Cold War, the Black Vote, and the Liberal Movement 4 Minorities Combine: G. J. Sutton, Albert Peña, and the Democracts of Texas 5 Unions Are Needed So Desperately Here: The Rebirth of the Labor Movement and the Seeds of the Bexar Coalition 6 We Shall Be Heard: Civil Rights in Black and Brown from the Sit-ins to Viva Kennedy 7 Trying to Reach Substantially Unanimous Agreement: The Latin Vote and the First Democratic Coalition 8 Seperating the Wheat from the Chaff: Intraracial Divides Give Way to Interracial Unity 9 Theyll Never Separate Us Again: The Multiracial Democractic Coalition on the March 10 New Power for Texas Minorities: Winning the Blattles, Losing the War Epilogue: The Multiracial Marcha Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index