RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Award-Winning Novelist and Screenwriter Stephen Harrigan

Noted Texas writer Stephen Harrigan in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, September 6, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Award-winning novelist, screenwriter,
and journalist Stephen Harrigan

The author of the New York Times bestseller, The Gates of the Alamo, Harrigan has been selected to write the initial title and centerpiece work in an ambitious 16-volume history of Texas to be published by the University of Texas Press.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / September 17, 2013

Award-winning author, screenwriter, and journalist Stephen Harrigan was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 6, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 6 interview with Stephen Harrigan here:


Stephen Harrigan, the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction,  has been selected to write the initial title and centerpiece work in an ambitious 16-volume history of Texas -- tagged the Texas Bookshelf -- to be published by the University of Texas Press.

Harrigan is the author of  The Gates of the Alamo, a New York Times bestseller and the recipient of the Spur Award for the best Novel of the West. Harrigan's novel, Remember Ben Clayton, also won the Spur Award, as well as the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians for best historical novel.

The Eye of the Mammoth, a career-spanning collection of Harrigan's essays, was published in 2013 by the University of Texas Press.

Stephen Harrigan, left, with Rag Radio's
Thorne Dreyer and Tracey Schulz.

Steve Harrigan is an award-winning screenwriter who has written many movies for television. A longtime contributor -- and contributing editor -- to Texas Monthly, his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of publications.

Also a Faculty Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Steve is a founding member of the Texas Book Festival and of Capital Area Statues, Inc. Harrigan will be featured at the 2013 Texas Book Festival and is one of three writers being honored with the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation's 2013 Illumine awards for excellence in literary achievement.

On Rag Radio, we discuss the special demands of researching and writing historical fiction -- especially when the subject is an iconic event like the Battle of the Alamo, and Harrigan's revealing and often very funny experiences as an "A-List writer of B-List productions," while writing made-for-TV movies.

We also talk about Steve's participation in the massive Texas history project being undertaken by the UT Press; about the unique role that Texas Monthly magazine has played in encouraging and nourishing Texas writers; and about the recent death -- and significant legacy -- of Texas literary giant John Graves.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 20, 2013: Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton.
Friday, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, Newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross.
Note: Our interview with Chicago-based activist Michael James, originally scheduled for Friday, September 20, will be rescheduled on a date to be determined.

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Bob Feldman : Texas Still Ranks High in Poverty and Segregation by Race and Income, 1964-2012

Poverty in Texas has continued to grow in recent years. Image from WebGovernments.

The hidden history of Texas

Conclusion: 1996-2012/Final Section -- Texas still ranks high in poverty and segregation by race and economic status and low in health care and education.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 19, 2013

[This is the final section of the conclusion to Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are some positive signs on the horizon, with major demographic changes likely to transform the state's political complexion. With rapid growth in youth, African-American, and Hispanic populations, and increased clout for the state's urban areas, Texas is projected to change political colors in the next decade or two. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund put it, "changing demographics will have significant impact on [Texas's] social, economic, and political landscape."

But for now, as we enter the post-2012 period of Texas history (and a possible post-2017 “Perry Era” of right-wing political resurgence in U.S. history), the anti-democratic direction of recent Texas history has not been reversed and the people of the state continue to be economically exploited and politically dominated by the white corporate power structure and political establishment of Texas -- which has been the story for the last 190 years of the hidden history of Texas.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Regressive Taxation and Limited Unionization in Texas, 1996-2011

Staff and supporters of Texas' Workers' Defense Project perform at Texas state Capitor inside Capitol at event commemorating Texas workers who have died on the job. Photo by  Jason Cato / Workers Defense Project. Image from the Texas Observer.

The hidden history of Texas

Conclusion: 1996-2011/2 -- Regressive taxation and limited unionization mark era in Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / May 29, 2013

[This is the second section of the conclusion to Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the Texas AFL-CIO website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

As this same study revealed:

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

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Texas Governors Bush and Perry, and Their Network of the Ultra-Rich, 1996-2011

Texas Gov. Rick Perry with then President (and former Texas Governor) George W. Bush at a 2002 campaign event in Dallas. On the left is Texas Sen. John Cornyn. Photo by Larry Downing / Reuters.

The hidden history of Texas

Conclusion: 1996-2011/1 -- Bush, Perry, and their network of Texas ultra-rich

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / May 20, 2013

[This is the first section of the conclusion to Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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 Bas, 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...”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : The Influence of Texas' 'Big Rich,' 1974-1995

Texas oil patriarch H. L. Hunt. The Hunt family was reputed to be the world's wealthiest. Image from The Famous People.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 14: 1974-1995/2 -- The influence of Texas' 'big rich'

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / May 7, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 14 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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

As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich observed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : More African-Americans Enter Texas Politics, Prisons, 1974-1995

Hoe squad from Texas' Clemens Unit in early 1970s. Photo from Texas Prison Museum.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 14: 1974-1995/1 -- More African-Americans in politics, prison

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 14 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : African-Americans and Institutional Racism in Texas, 1954-1973

Barbara Jordan was elected to the Texas State Legislature in 1966.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/3 -- African-Americans elected to office but institutional racism continues

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the third section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peoples Party II leader
Carl Hampton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Civil Rights, SDS, and Student Activism in Austin, Texas, 1954-1973

Massive march against the War in Vietnam, Austin, Texas, May 8, 1970. Image from The Rag Blog.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/2 -- Student Activism and the Anti-War Movement at the University of Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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].

University Freedom Movement rally,
UT campus, 1967. Photo from The Rag.

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 Hearn... 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."

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Texas Civil Rights Movement Wins Big Victories, 1954-1973

White and African American students from Austin area colleges sit in at a segregated lunch counter on Congress Avenue in Austin, April 1960 as part of a concerted effort to integrate lunch counters. Image from Austin History Center.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/1 -- Civil rights efforts to desegregate schools, public facilities, have wide success.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 25, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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 desegregated; 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. [I-35, in effect, created a barrier between downtown Austin and mostly African-American East Austin.]

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 two 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 (CORE) 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 at “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 (1960-1988)" thesis by Beverly Burr that was posted on the UT Watch website.

And in the fall of 1962 student activists on UT’s campus also founded the Negroes for Equal Rights (NER) and Campus Interracial Committee [CIC] campus civil rights  groups which were 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 early 60s civil rights 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 six-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 appeared at a“freedom hootenanny” in 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.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Population Growth and Civil Rights Victories in Texas, 1940-1953

Herman Sweatt was the first African American to attend the University of Texas after a 1950 Supreme Court decision. Photo courtesy of UT Press / Daily Texan.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 12: 1940-1953/2 -- Population growth and some significant civil rights victories.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 18, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 12 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Union Growth in Texas Followed by Crackdown, 1940-1953

After a 1953 CIO-led strike in Port Arthur, Texas Gov. Allan Shivers, here shown addressing a campaign rally in Austin, led a move to make membership in the Communist Party illegal. Image from AlternativeHistory.com.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 12: 1940-1953/1 -- Union growth followed by backlash against collective bargaining.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 11, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 12 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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

Membership expansion occurred in petroleum refining, and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where, in 1945, the CIO claimed 25,000 new members in one year. Important victories there included the organization of the huge North American Aviation Company to the UAW, the Armour plant by the packinghouse workers, Conroe Manufacturing by the ACWA, and several steel fabricators by the steelworkers. PWOC Local 54 and storehandlers’ Local 59 acquired bargaining rights under a master agreement with Armour. During the war [World War II], the packinghouse workers’ strength in Texas was confined largely to this plant.

The CIO had 115 locals in Texas in March 1944, the most numerous of which were: autoworkers, 8 locals; oil workers, 30 locals; and steelworkers, with 12 locals. The textile workers had only two locals in Texas in 1944...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Labor Unions and the Communist Party Are Active in Texas, 1930-1940

Emma Tenayuca, leader of the pecan shellers' strike at the age of 21, stands on the steps of San Antonio's City Hall in 1938. Tenayuca was also active in the Communist Party in Texas. Image from the Institute of Texan Cultures.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 11: 1930-1940/3 -- Labor Unions and the Communist Party gain foothold in Texas.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 6, 2013

[This is the third section of Part 11 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

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.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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