Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
There was no historical precedent for a society's basic institutions being overturned by ballot; democracy possessed very real limits. Neither George III nor Jefferson Davis were deposed in America by elections or legal writ, but by war.
The Negro in Texas had always lived in a separate country, with separate laws, from the dominant white. The change from slavery to elaborate caste was probably as inevitable as a similar situation inevitably created caste in India, Ethiopia, and Hispanic America generations earlier. The tragedy, and error, was that the new caste system provided no means for eventual social elevation and change; it did nothing to provide the Negro the means for eventual entrance into American life on an equal, if separate, basis with white society. But then few caste systems ever do. The faceless slave became the faceless sharecropper and handyman, whose name history continued to ignore.
The existence and the function of the freedmen under tenantry was always anomalous. Most landowners always distrusted ex-slaves, preferring whites. For some years, the system was workable, if not very viable, because there was no other solution at hand. The Negroes were thinly scattered, and even more controllable than they had been as slaves but never so profitable. Then, with the agricultural revolution that began in the last quarter of the 19th century, even the meager security of the sharecropper began to disappear. Slowly but inevitably, the Negro farmer failed to serve any useful purpose, like the tenant white. But the white farmer had avenues of escape, which to the Negro were closed.
Texas agriculture was more pragmatic and adaptable than that of the older South. The squalor of the sharecropper's shack provided his landlord with no measurable profit, and while there were reactionaries in the deep Brazos bottoms who took a sort of paternal pride in the Negroes on their lands, the majority of landowners, sooner than the rest of the South, began to let their Negroes go. Mechanization was not possible for the Negro, who lacked capital and credit; those tenants who survived financed themselves and emerged as respectable farm operators in their own right. The owner who farmed himself, or let his acres to efficient white tenants, made money. From his Negro sharecroppers, in many years, he collected only a few pounds of cotton or a bag of beans. Thus arose a Texas saying in the 1930s, to the effect that "the last one saw of niggers, the first one saw of money again." By 1930, the majority of Texas Negroes were already living in the small cities and towns.
The great boom caused by the exploitation of mineral resources passed the Negro by. Texas had instituted a public school system for blacks in 1870, but in a region where the white rural schools averaged in the bottom third in national ratings, the Negro schools were poor indeed. The black school was marked by untrained teachers, substandard buildings, short terms, and few funds for such things as books. There was no social pressure among the bottom caste for education; education did not fit into their world. They lacked motivation, and the white structure logically saw no reason to educate them beyond their expected station. The majority of Negroes were functionally illiterate at best. They could not compete with the more aggressive, American-ethic-stimulated white farmer in town in any case. In specific cases, both Negroes and whites took the caste system to town; the vast majority of Negroes found employment only in menial jobs.
The black settlements formed almost separate towns beside the white communities. They were rigidly segregated and endured rigid poverty, not so much on the world scale but on the American. Again, in these "nigger towns" scattered throughout the old heartland, the Negro lived in a separate nation, under separate laws. The civil and criminal codes were not enforced rigidly within the black communities by the dominant white power structures, unless the Negro and white man impinged. Here, not earlier, a considerable trend toward Negro crime and violence emerged. The sharecropper was among the most peaceable of men; the compressed town dweller exploded more easily. Texas took an entirely empirical view toward this trend. Negro violence was not severely punished, nor did it much concern white society or politics, so long as it was directed at the Negro community. If a Negro crossed the invisible line—much like the old deadline drawn by the western frontier towns—by harming one of the upper castes, his punishment was usually swift, heavy, and sometimes horrible.
In the first three decades of the 20th century, in which 60 percent of the Negro population congregated in municipalities, Texas—with Oklahoma and certain border states—was peculiarly noted for racial violence. There were several historic uprisings, both white and black. Negro soldiers in the federal service rioted at Brownsville and shot up the town with some fatalities. The national government refused to turn the suspects over to the state authorities, as one Ranger captain demanded, but whole units were dismissed under unfair conditions from the service. A similar rebellion erupted among Negro soldiers in Houston in 1917, and several of the participants were executed by the military authorities at Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio. In the era of nativism of the 1920s, there were several white lynch actions and innumerable smaller persecutions. In one incident, which served as a model for studies in mob psychology, the residents of a Texas town burned down their new courthouse and jail in order to incinerate one Negro prisoner. Actual mob violence was far more prevalent in Texas than in the Deep South, where lynchings were conducted with greater decorum. While all observers stepped warily in explaining this phenomenon, the greater democratization of Texas urban life in these years, with the influx of dirt farmers, probably was a factor. There existed no power structure with either the ethic or the power to deny mob action. Something like the great fear wave of 1860, when western counties lynched slaves whom the planters protected in the east, occurred.
However, the Texas picture changed sharply in the 1940s, from one of the worst situations in the South to perhaps the best. One reason, certainly, was that the burgeoning economy and rapid metropolitanization of Texas—more than half of the population was metropolitan by 1950, almost three-quarters by the late 1960s—broke the patterns of Southern society. All of Texans' biases remained, but the social necessity of maintaining them disappeared. Powerful economic interests became increasingly important in the state; these interests, unlike local municipal officials and country sheriffs, were determined to force law and order even against the prejudices of the white lower and middle classes. Probably more important in the long run, the black population itself began rapidly to decrease.
With World War II, and in the decades that followed, Negro emigration out of Texas became a flood. Some went West, most went northward up the Mississippi Valley. The higher wages in the North and West in those years, plus the hope of escaping the pervading caste system, drew Negroes in torrents. The Northern and Midwestern cities had thousands of openings for unskilled workers, at a time when the Texas Negro's usefulness at home had almost vanished. In time, after millions had gone, the social utility of the Southern Negro in the North also vanished; he had traded the Southern fields of degradation for the Northern cities of destruction. But that, as several Texans commented, was the North's problem; now the North could apply its own morality to it. A growing, horrifying national racial crisis each year, paradoxically, affected less and less the region where it had all begun.
At the end of the Civil War, about one in three residents of Texas were black. By 1950, Negroes comprised 12.7 percent, by 1955, 11.6 percent. The figure stabilized in the 1960s at about 12 percent, with areas of high concentration rarely reaching more than 20 percent. With each announced decrease, the amiability of the white society toward the Negro problem tended to increase. Unlike many parts of the South, and now, almost all great cities in the North, the Negro offered the Texan politician nothing to fear. Thus, in Texas there was little resistance to the long, uneven trend of interference in state affairs by the Supreme Court and federal administrations that now aroused resentment and won few adherents in the South generally.
Texans disapproved of the so-called civil rights movement; few were badly disturbed or frightened by it.
The destruction of the Democratic Party's white primary law in 1944 at first aroused consternation; one reason the Negro had been quiescent in Texas, if far from content, was that since the turn of the century no officeholder had ever made him promises. But the fears of a new wave of demagoguery faded in the census figures. Unlike many states of the old Confederacy, few regions in Texas put up any obstacles to Negro voting. If a Negro paid a poll tax, he could vote without hindrance or let. His vote, except in a few areas, could not be decisive, particularly in a one-party state. Black votes could swing close state elections, as in 1960, but little else.
In 1949, Texas moved strongly, for the first time, to improve Negro education. This effort was designed to justify the 1896 "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation. It came too late, and would not have affected the Supreme Court's decision in any case, since the Court was now operating under the theory of the desirability of social integration of the Negro with the white. However, most Negroes continued to attend segregated schools after 1954, and these were much improved. Equally important, by 1957 there were eight independent colleges, and two state institutions of higher education for Negroes. The level of average education rose dramatically, although the quality still left much to be desired.
The 1954 Supreme Court integration decision again caused consternation, but significantly, little defiance. Polls and referenda and statewide elections, year after year, showed an overwhelming Texan disapproval of federal civil rights enforcement. In 1956, the Democratic primary revealed huge majorities in favor of strengthening laws against racial intermarriage, exempting white students from attending schools with blacks, and interposition of the state laws to offset federal court decisions. Later elections favored retention of the poll tax. But, as each social, educational, and political barrier was dismantled by the national government, the state accepted the changes with a remarkable amount of grace.
Threats of violence attending school integration were quickly stifled by the state government. Governor Shivers sent Rangers to Mansfield in 1956, with orders to remove any troublemakers, black or white. A mob action to bar Negroes from Lamar State College at Beaumont, in deep east Texas, failed miserably. The power structure that had grown up in modern Texas had no belief in integration, but even less belief in civil disorder. In this, Texas resembled Virginia and South Carolina, where the vulgarization of society in the 20th century had become somewhat reversed. Law, not popular sentiments, prevailed.
In 1957, Texas went through the painful, somewhat farcical process of legal interposition, trying to interpose its own laws between its people and the federal apparatus. A law was passed requiring a local election before Texas schools might be integrated, and another, closing any school at which troops, state or federal, had to be stationed. Important progress, however, was made with the 1957 local option law. School segregation under state laws had long worked a hardship on many western and southern Texas counties. Some had been required to build and maintain separate schools for only a handful of students. The vast majority of Negroes had always been found in the older counties of the east, and west Texas generally welcomed the end of segregation with relief.
The single biggest factor causing the general amiability with which the state desegregated was the metropolitanization that had taken place. There were still deep-Southern, diehard counties, predominantly rural, east of the Brazos, but these no longer had much political power. Desegregation here worked a social revolution of a sort. But in the cities, desegregation did not mean integration, and it had almost no effect on society at large.
Texas cities, unlike many of the older South, were rigidly segregated by wards and precincts; the Negro population invariably lived only in certain parts of town. The new, largely 20th-century metropoli were structured on the American plan of city building; neighborhoods and suburbs were defined by income. Education was still divided among local boards, local school districts. When San Antonio desegregated in 1954, without waiting for state sanction, the change moved only a handful of students from former schools. More important, perhaps, the end of legal segregation seemed to give actual impetus to
de facto
segregation. Where there was any large proportion of black students in a school, the white population tended to move out, following a nationwide pattern from Washington, D.C., to Chicago.
The same pattern took place when public segregation or discrimination was barred by law in 1964. Some cities, notably San Antonio, had already largely taken down the bars quietly long before. Fears continued to decrease when the white population realized it would in no case be overrun. In a region noted for its violence in the past, now there was almost none.
Again, several factors were at work, besides the small proportion of black people, almost everywhere below critical mass. One was that the vast majority of unemployed Negroes, or families with no stake whatever in Texas society, had emigrated. Behind remained a far more able and responsible Negro community than most white Texans realized. It was still socially remote, living in its own part of town if not entirely in its own country; nowhere in Texas did or could whites and Negroes intermingle, except in political affairs, or in enclaves around universities. A rising proportion of this residue were middle class, in income and also, immensely more important, in ethic. Houston contained more Afro-American millionaires than any city in the United States. One of these families was descended from the slave who had made shoes for ten cents per pair before the Civil War.