In 1957 Texas legislators drafted a plethora of segregationist legislation designed to circumvent theBrown v. Board of Educationdecision outlawing school segregation. Mexican American and African American civil rights activists quickly organized to prevent these bills from passing.* But when a few Mexican Americans associated with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) suggested working with blacks in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), LULAC national president Felix Tijerina sternly reprimanded his colleagues, saying: “Let the Negro fight his own battles. His problems are not mine. I don’t want to ally with him.” Over...

On a warm Monday night in May 1950, a handful of dynamite easily destroyed Robert and Marie Shelton’s American dream. The bomb ripped through the African American couple’s newly purchased home in South Dallas, demolishing their front porch, knocking the house off its foundation, and leaving behind a large hole in the ground. Robert received cuts and gashes about his face from flying debris, while Marie was uninjured. Roughly one month later, a bundle of dynamite exploded along the side of taxi driver Dennis Huffman’s recently purchased home, also in South Dallas. The unoccupied house received only slight damage, but...

In the mid-1950s, G.I. Forum national chairman Hector García dispatched San Antonio county commissioner Albert Peña Jr. to investigate the operation of a segregated Mexican school in the small South Texas town of Lytle. When he arrived in Lytle, Peña asked a resident for directions to the school. Perhaps because of his skin color and slight accent, the person asked: “You mean the Mexican School?” Peña responded caustically, “I didn’t know I was in Mexico.” Stunned, the individual admitted that the Mexican school was across the street from the white school. At the school, Peña found sixty Mexican-descent students who...

In March 1960 black Texans began sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters and other public facilities. Students, ministers, lawyers, young, old, men, and women participated in the demonstrations. They followed the example of four youths from Greensboro, North Carolina, whose sit-ins in February of that year sparked a national movement. TheHouston Forward Times, a black weekly, reported that protesters arrived at segregated lunch counters in the Bayou City and “in less than 30 minutes, 1) The white customers departed 2) The waitresses walked away . . . and a ‘closed counter’ sign was posted 3) Negroes then occupied all...

In August 1967 Father Antonio Gonzalez of the Galveston-Houston Archdiocese described himself as the “Martin Luther King of the Mexicans.” Speaking at a meeting of PASO, the priest detailed his own activism and commended “some of the nation’s rioters” in Houston, Newark, and Detroit.¹ Although he urged Mexican Americans to “join hands politically with Negroes,” Gonzalez frequently waffled in his speech. After praising rioters, for instance, he vacillated and argued that riots were a last resort. Though he advocated African American/Mexican American unity, he later changed tracks, stating that “we intend to join many other organizations, even Negro perhaps.” When...

In the summer of 1964, Houston minister Wallace B. “Bud” Poteat established the Ecumenical Fellowship (EF) to eradicate social problems and racism in the Bayou City. He hoped to accomplish this goal by taking advantage of local and national antipoverty programs, by encouraging minority communities to vote, and, when necessary, by urging these same communities to protest. The EF soon founded its most ambitious program, the Latin American Channel Project (LAC Project). The new project was all grassroots; Poteat and other EF members worked and lived in Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, particularly in the mixed African American/Mexican American ghetto near the...

In a 1969 speech in San Antonio, activist José Angel Gutiérrez told a group of Chicanos: “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to worst we have got to kill him.” Gutiérrez’s words caused considerable controversy in Mexican American leadership circles, although some Chicanos agreed with him. In a similar statement before the Houston City Council in 1970, Ovide Duncantell, of People’s Party II (PP2), the precursor to Houston’s Black Panther Party (BPP), warned that blacks would “exterminate 10 pigs for every black brother [that] is killed.”¹ Like Gutiérrez’s...

In 1970 the Houston Independent School District (HISD) implemented a new integration plan to comply with theBrown v. Board of Educationdecision. This plan integrated only African American and Mexican American schools, which Chicanos and blacks viewed as discriminatory. Chicanos protested by boycotting the HISD and forming separate Huelga Schools (strike schools). They hoped that blacks would join their cause. Indeed, a number of black civil rights groups supported the boycott, especially the NAACP. But African American backing of the Huelga Schools proved largely rhetorical. Since Mexican Americans protested the HISD’s decision to integrate blacks and Chicanos, some African...

The 2001 mayoral race in Houston pitted incumbent Democratic mayor Lee P. Brown against Republican challenger and Houston City Council member Orlando Sánchez. Mayor Brown, an African American political wunderkind, had served as police chief in Houston, police commissioner in New York City, and “drug czar” during the presidency of Bill Clinton before his election as mayor of Houston in 1997. Brown represented liberal, Democratic politics in the Bayou City. He made concerted appeals to Mexican American voters and had appointed a number of Hispanics to positions in his administration. Sánchez, a fair-complected, blue-eyed Cuban American, seemed politically out of...