Civil Rights and Beyond

African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States

Brian Behnken

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820349152
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Civil Rights and Beyond examines the dynamic relationships between African American and Latino/a activists in the United States from the 1930s to the present day. Building on recent scholarship, this book pushes the timeframe for the study of interactions between blacks and a variety of Latino/a groups beyond the standard chronology of the civil rights era. As such, the book merges a host of community histories—each with their own distinct historical experiences and activisms—to explore group dynamics, differing strategies and activist moments, and the broader quests of these communities for rights and social justice.

The collection is framed around the concept of "activism," which most fully encompasses the relationships that blacks and Latinos have enjoyed throughout the twentieth century. Wide ranging and pioneering, Civil Rights and Beyond explores black and Latino/a activism from California to Florida, Chicago to Bakersfield—and a host of other communities and cities—to demonstrate the complicated nature of African American–Latino/a activism in the twentieth-century United States.

Contributors: Brian D. Behnken, Dan Berger, Hannah Gill, Laurie Lahey, Kevin Allen Leonard, Mark Malisa, Gordon Mantler, Alyssa Ribeiro, Oliver A. Rosales, Chanelle Nyree Rose, and Jakobi Williams

CHAPTER 1

African American and Latino/a Activism(s) and Relations

An Introduction

BRIAN D. BEHNKEN

In June 1968 José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez founded the first chapter of the Young Lords Organization (YLO) in Chicago. One of the most vibrant Puerto Rican civil rights organizations in American history, the YLO quickly spread to New York City, Philadelphia, and other locales.¹ Jiménez, a confidant of Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP), modeled the YLO in part on the Panthers. The Young Lords fought against police brutality and “slum” clearance programs and for medical service for the poor, among other things. The group also pioneered alliances with other activist groups of the period, including the BPP and the Chicano Brown Berets. These alliances, however, proved tentative and ultimately short lived. As Jiménez recalled, government infiltration and oppression caused people in these groups to start “turning on each other.… There were splits everywhere, splits between the student groups, the Black Panther Party, and a split between the Young Lords Party [in New York City] and the Young Lords in Chicago.” Harassment by the Chicago police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and especially the murder of Panther leader Fred Hampton, decimated coalition building at this time.²

Jiménez and black-Latino/a coalition building reemerged only a few years later, however, in a rebuilt political alliance. Tapping into the activist networks of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jiménez ran for a seat on the Chicago City Council and, though he lost, garnered significant support from Latinos and African Americans. A few years later he was still coalition building, this time uniting behind the 1983 mayoral candidacy of Harold Washington, who also built on the coalitions of the 1960s and 1970s. Latino/as and African Americans propelled Washington to victory.³ Chicago, therefore, is a good example of how black and Latino/a activism and relations worked in the civil rights and post–civil rights era. While coalitions foundered in the early 1970s—unsurprising, given the general climate of the time and the harassment activist groups experienced—the networks built in the earlier period reformed to produce an activist politics that once again united blacks and browns in the 1980s and after.

Civil Rights and Beyond examines the dynamic relationships and activist moments shared by African Americans and Latino/as in the United States from the 1940s to the present day. While a growing body of scholarship has begun to elucidate the nature of black-Latino relations in the United States, this research has tended to focus on the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s and on distinct groups, primarily African Americans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest.⁴ These studies have also been inclined to see the civil rights struggles and race relations of blacks and Mexican Americans, and Latinos more broadly, through the prism of concepts such as cooperation or conflict. This book shifts the focus to the activism(s) and race relations of blacks and a variety of Latino groups and pushes the time frame beyond the standard chronology of the civil rights era. Moreover, the authors in this book utilize activism as the guiding theme by which to view black-Latino civil rights efforts and relations. We thus move the analytical framework of black-brown scholarship away from conflict and cooperation, shift the historical discussion on black-Latino activism(s) beyond African Americans and Mexican Americans, and move beyond the paradigm of the civil rights movement.

Civil Rights and Beyond looks at a host of black and Latino/a community histories—each with different historical experiences and activisms—to explore group dynamics, differing racial geographies around the country, areas of coalition building and their successes and failures, the often divergent paths people followed in the pursuit of group power, an d the broader quests of these communities for civil rights and social justice. The book examines African American and Cuban American relations; interactions between blacks and Puerto Ricans; Mexican American and African American activisms; and more contemporary interactions between blacks and recent Latino immigrants in new gateway destinations, such as North Carolina. This wider focus allows the authors, and the book as a whole, to reframe our understanding of the “civil rights movement,” pushing that concept beyond standard regional, temporal, and ethnoracial boundaries. We also explore the often collaborative, and simultaneously divergent, nature of black-Latino activism in the twentieth-century United States.

The book is framed around the concept of activism. In each chapter, activism is analyzed as a trope that illuminates the multiple ideas, concepts, strategies, and ideologies that African Americans and Latino/as have used to guide, organize, and direct civil rights and social justice struggles. Activism in this sense includes efforts aimed at political, economic, social, legal, and racial change, most often utilizing direct action tactics: boycotts, political campaigns, marches, pickets, and other forms of protest. This framing is, in part, what makes the book unique.

The broad geographical coverage of this volume is also important. To fully understand the historical experiences of Latino/a and African American people, it is important to examine those groups in a variety of places and spaces. There are a number of chapters that focus on black-Latino activism across the United States and several that explore specific—and largely unexamined—locales, such as Camden, New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Bakersfield, California. When the authors do explore more well-known areas, such as Los Angeles or Chicago, they do so in new ways. Our hope is not simply to cover new ground, but also to revise our understanding of established areas of scholarship.

Academic research on comparative civil rights and black-brown relations has exploded in the twenty-first century. A number of historians and social scientists have written important accounts of African American and Latino interactions. A growing body of literature on Mexican American and African American relations, especially in California and Texas, has offered important analysis of cross-racial civil rights efforts.⁵ Explorations of black and Puerto Rican relations have complicated our understanding of the African American–Mexican American dynamic.⁶ Scholarship on Cuban/Cuban American relations with African Americans remains in its infancy, although important work is emerging.⁷ While a number of publications have focused on Latinos and blacks in recent years, most of those texts are sociological studies of the South that focus on the contemporary era.⁸ There is, in short, a critical need to look at black-brown relations and civil rights activism in a geographically broad, but also a methodologically wide, fashion.

Many of the authors in this collection are at the forefront of this developing scholarship. My own work on African American and Mexican American relations in Texas during the civil rights era fits into this pattern. Jakobi Williams has done much to explain Black Power, Chicano Power, and Puerto Rican Power in Chicago. Gordon Mantler has detailed the broad history of interethnic relations during the antipoverty campaigns of the 1960s in his excellent book on the Poor People’s Campaign. Chanelle Rose was one of the first scholars to discuss tensions between African American and Cuban/ Cuban American people.⁹ Other authors in this volume are part of a new and developing cohort of black-brown scholars. Alyssa Ribeiro, Oliver Rosales, and Laurie Lahey are all exploring black-Latino civil rights struggles in parts of the United States where few scholars have yet to tread.¹⁰ Dan Berger, Hannah Gill, Mark Malisa, and Kevin Leonard are all established scholars with a host of publications to their credit who are venturing into the field of comparative race scholarship. In other words, the contributors in this book are many of the pioneers of the discipline.¹¹

In the midst of this explosion in comparative or relational scholarship on African Americans and Latino/as, it seems that two distinct camps are developing in this literature. One camp, I would speculate, tends to see Latino/as and blacks as inherently conflicted, while the other side views the two groups as naturally cooperative. In my first edited collection, The Struggle in Black and Brown, I attempted to warn against this trend, writing that scholars who adhere to either viewpoint “make the mistake of seeing black-brown relations as a zero sum game, as either all good or all bad.… While cooperation and conflict existed … these terms were certainly not mutually exclusive and they unfortunately flatten a varied and exciting history.”¹²

So preoccupied have scholars become with the issues of conflict and cooperation that Laura Pulido and Josh Kun subtitled their excellent collection on Los Angeles “Beyond Conflict and Coalition,” and Rodney Hero and Robert Preuhs subtitled their book on black-Latino politics “Beyond Conflict or Cooperation.”¹³ Some scholars acknowledge conflict while simultaneously dismissing it. For instance, in her pathbreaking book on Puerto Rican and African American civil rights in New York City, Sonia Song-Ha Lee notes that coalitions between blacks and Puerto Ricans were “uneasy,” but goes on to reprove other works that have “tended to see blacks and Latinos as either naturally unified as ‘people of color’ or irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities.”¹⁴ John Márquez in his fine book Black-Brown Solidarity admits that tensions between these two communities existed, but he largely rejects conflict. Márquez seems to read the cooperation of the post–civil rights present back into the past, unmooring the broader history of African American and Mexican American relations from their earlier, and often more tense, Jim Crow origins.¹⁵

Certainly the criticisms of some of the works on black-brown relations make sense, and I encourage scholars to read these critiques carefully. They have merit because, indeed, some scholars seem to see relations between blacks and Latinos as too conflicted. For example, in his book The Presumed Alliance, legal scholar Nicolás Vaca describes black-brown relations negatively as “troubled,” “conflicted,” and “divided.”¹⁶ He also blames African Americans and Latinos for their inability to unite, noting that “the ostensible moral and philosophical bases for coalition politics have largely fallen apart because of competing self-interests.”¹⁷ For him, the concept of black-brown unity is largely a fiction—“the presumed ideological alliance” between blacks and browns.¹⁸ Similarly, historian Neil Foley’s book Quest for Equality has a provocative subtitle: “The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity.” While Foley deals with some coalition building and offers important and well-conceived analysis of black-Latino relations, it remains unclear in his book where the “promise” of black-brown solidarity was made and why, if coalitions did exist, black-brown solidarity was such a failure.¹⁹

While it is important to understand black-Latino civil rights efforts and relations beyond the concept of conflict, it is equally important to remember that African Americans and Latino/as were not always united. It has become something of a cliché, for example, to think that a common experience of oppression has somehow given these groups a natural affinity and an innate sense of cooperation. That thinking is inaccurate. And many of the books on black-Latino civil rights efforts that focus on coalition building, from Mantler to Lee and a host of others—books that are frequently held up as models of the cooperative efforts of these groups—are far more nuanced than that, showing the building of coalitions but simultaneously the tenuousness and tepidness of some collaborative efforts. These issues have even begun to appear in published book reviews. For instance, in her review of Mantler’s Power to the Poor, historian Shana Bernstein offers a critique of conflict while she praises cooperation. “In contrast to the many scholars and commentators who contend that identity politics undermined the possibility for cross-race class coalitions,” Bernstein writes, Mantler “shows how they complemented each other. In this way, he rehabilitates the late 1960s and early 1970s as an era significant to both coalitional politics and community empowerment.”²⁰ But Mantler’s book does much more than that and should be held up not as a model that emphasizes coalition over conflict, but rather as an excellent account of coalition building and intergroup tension and conflict.

To argue that blacks and browns experienced only conflict or cooperation is, of course, simplistic and even silly. In many instances, a lack of cooperation did not mean that conflict existed. If blacks and Latinos had different ideas and differences of opinion—and they did—that does not necessarily imply that conflict existed. Similarly, we should strive to remember that conflict does not mean combat, and tension does not mean hostility. It is also the case that different communities and different civil rights struggles borrowed strategies, tactics, and ideas from one another, but did that mean they were united? Coalitions sometimes proved short lived, but often a variety of factors caused their demise, not just conflict. In my research on Texas I have found numerous examples in which African Americans and Mexican Americans chose not to join forces because of perceptions of ethnic and cultural difference or variances in leadership style or organizational strength, and not because of some inherent disdain or conflict between the two groups. In the South, historian Julie Weise has shown that in the early twentieth century black and Latino/a workers frequently bonded together in labor alliances, which were on occasion fragile but nevertheless real.²¹ Gordon Mantler beautifully illustrates these complexities when he states that in the Poor People’s Campaign blacks and Mexican Americans “constructed their poverties differently because of distinct historical trajectories.… moments of cooperation should be viewed for what they were: unique instances worthy of study but not to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. African American and Latino/a Activism(s) and Relations: An Introduction
• 2. From the “Next Best Thing to One of Us” to “One of Us”: Edward Roybal, Gilbert Lindsay, and Racial Politics in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s
• 3. Civil Rights “beyond the Fields”: African American and Mexican American Civil Rights Activism in Bakersfield, California, 1947–1964
• 4. Beyond 1959: Cuban Exiles, Race, and Miami’s Black Freedom Struggle
• 5. Internationalizing Civil Rights: Afro-Cubans, African Americans, and the Problem of Global Apartheid
• 6. “We Need to Unite with as Many People as Possible”: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization in Chicago
• 7. “A Common Citizenship of Freedom”: What Black Power Taught Chicago’s Puerto Rican Independentistas
• 8. “Justice Now! ¡Justicia Ahora!”: African American–Puerto Rican Radicalism in Camden, New Jersey
• 9. Forgotten Residents Fighting Back: The Ludlow Community Association and Neighborhood Improvement in Philadelphia
• 10. The Next Struggle: African American and Latino/a Collaborative Activism in the Post–Civil Rights Era
• 11. Rainbow Reformers: Black-Brown Activism and the Election of Harold Washington
• 12. Southern Solidarities: U.S. Civil Rights and Latin American Social Movements in the Nuevo South
• Contributors
• Index