Search Results

This chapter examines how letrados wrote their ambivalence toward democracy into the public sphere through distinctions of literacy, education, and barbarism, and how their depictions of the folk reaffirmed lettered authority over language and law. It was in this milieu that Candelario Obeso engaged his peers in an attempt to validate oral culture and to demand inclusion for black citizens.

This chapter describes how the black citizens of South Dallas suffered more than fifteen racially motivated bombings in 1950. Like bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, and other southern cities, the terrorist acts in Dallas stemmed from the migration of blacks out of overcrowded segregated neighborhoods and into areas zoned for white use. In South Dallas, however, two of the main suspects were Mexican American men who felt threatened by the encroachment of African American families into white neighborhoods. One of these individuals, Pete Garcia, later admitted that he had painted “For Whites Only” signs in the neighborhood, threatened black home buyers with a knife, and chased two African American real estate agents out of the area.

This chapter examines how Mississippi's black citizens literally and dramatically entered the national struggle over civil rights. In particular, Clarksdale's activists worked to desegregate Clarksdale itself and they joined statewide campaigns for voting rights, also known as the 1964 Freedom Summer, a massive organizing effort that carried Mississippi into the national conversation in the summer of 1964 in new ways.

This chapter describes Jack Reed’s 1956 speech before an all-black audience at Rust College, a Methodist college in the north Mississippi town of Holly Springs. Reed spoke about his faith and the issue of integration, and concluded with some positive words about the state of Mississippi’s economy and how its improvement would benefit its black citizens.

The chapter focuses on efforts executed to clear the structural barriers in Mississippi to blacks exercising their full political rights. To preserve and protect white supremacy, the state legislature imposed several structural barriers to nullify and dilute black votes. One of the main barriers was the multimember legislative districts used as a racial gerrymandering devise to dilute the black vote and which had become a major concern. The continued struggle against this discriminatory barrier resulted in the Mississippi legislative reapportionment litigation, which replaced multimember districts with single-member districts. The single-member districts ultimately enabled and empowered black citizens in the state and also made way for a dramatic upsurge in black political participation. The litigation proved to be an effective tool not only for the political future of black in Mississippi but also it had been on the forefront of the struggle throughout the southern states.