The Southwestern Historical Quarterly and the State of Civil Rights History in Texas Brian D. Behnken (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The first page of Darlene Clark Hine's "The Elusive Ballot: The Black Struggle against the Texas Democratic White Primary, 1932–1945," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (April 1978): 392. University of North Texas Libraries, the Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu. [End Page 482] The Southwestern Historical Quarterly (SHQ) began publishing articles that explored the history of civil rights activism in Texas beginning in the late 1970s. Many of these early studies focused on the activism and agency of Black Texans, while later studies examined the history of other ethno-racial communities, especially Mexican Americans. The activism of these groups predated the period of the civil rights struggle, of course. This begs the question: why did it take until the 1970s for the first major studies to appear? My guess is that ethnic history as we know it today was not a readily accepted part of Texas history until that time. In my own research journey, I was often dissuaded from examining African American and Mexican American civil rights history because "nothing happened here." That was in the 1990s and early 2000s, so I would surmise that if scholars said such things to me, which I somewhat wisely ignored, they surely said them to researchers in earlier periods, which may have discouraged some researchers. To me, the publication history of the SHQ makes those historians who analyzed the history of African American and Mexican American people that much more important. These scholars were pioneers. They shed light for the first time on individuals and groups that heretofore had received [End Page 483] little attention in the pages of the SHQ. And much of this scholarship has stood the test of time. In reviewing the articles published in the SHQ on Black Texans and Mexican-origin people I found myself swamped by feelings of nostalgia. Rereading the important works of Darlene Clark Hine, Michael Gillette, Merline Pitre, Arnoldo De León, and Emilio Zamora, among others, was in so many ways like visiting old friends. In the pages that follow, I demarcate the trajectory of the scholarship on Black and Mexican American people in the state. I began my perusal of old issues of the SHQ going back to the late nineteenth century. My goal was to engage in an exhaustive search, but of course there may be omissions. In particular, this essay focuses on the scholarship on African Americans and Mexican Americans, especially as it relates to civil rights activism. Since much of this scholarship has not been comparative, I first examine the publications in Black history followed by those focusing on Mexican-origin people. I begin with a titan: Darlene Clark Hine. In the April 1978 edition of the SHQ, Hine authored "The Elusive Ballot," an article on the Black struggle against the all-White Democratic primary. Black Texans mounted a concerted and smart legal campaign against the all-White primary. Beyond the primary though, Hine detailed the multiple methods White Texans used to disenfranchise African Americans. Thus, the battle against the primary was actually much larger than the primary itself. What she showed was that Black agency and activism long predated the period of the civil rights movement. "Against seemingly insurmountable obstinance and repeated failures," Hine writes, "blacks persisted in the white supremacy struggle because somehow, the conviction that justice was ultimately color-blind could not be destroyed."1 In the same edition of the SHQ readers were also treated to Michael Gillette's excellent essay "The Rise of the NAACP in Texas." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had a unique history in Texas in that local branches operated as vibrant, locally oriented civil rights groups, even though the NAACP was a national organization headquartered in New York City. Gillette shows how Black Texans made the association work for them and their needs in Texas. Moreover, he credits Black activists such as Antonio Maceo Smith, Lulu B. White, Carter Wesley, Ernest C. Estell, and a host of other leaders with providing the leadership and...
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Jun 23, 2022
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