Guest Columnist: Austin in Denial, Part I

The Battle of San Jacinto, c. 1895, painting by Henry Arthur McArdle

Let’s start at the beginning. Most of you know that three years after Texas wins its independence from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Republic of Texas establishes the new capital at a place along the Colorado River known as Waterloo. The year is 1839, and the new capital is called Austin after Stephen F. Austin.

(Move stage left) The next year, the local press leads the charge for racial exclusion.

September 2, 1840: The Austin City Gazette calls for "a war of extermination" against the Plains Indians. And the call is heard. And after the war of extermination, there were hardly any Indians living in and around Austin. The story of race relations and newspapers in Austin starts with the American Indians and moves on to others.

(Move stage center) We know what follows. The United States annexes Texas as a state. The United States goes to war against Mexico, and Mexico ends up losing the war and half of its territory. Austin families with roots in Mexico become the focus of the local press.

October 14, 1854: The Texas State Gazette reports that a group of White men in Austin form a committee to ban employment of Mexican workers in Austin. Kind of sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The Gazette goes on to say in later editions that the committee has given Mexican families ten days to leave Austin. The Gazette reports that all of the twenty families who have been told to leave move away from Austin before the deadline. And for a long time after that, the number of Hispanic families in Austin is much smaller than you find in other Texas cities that are about as old or as large as Austin is.

W.E.B. DuBois

(Move stage right) And let’s not forget about Austin families who trace their roots to Africa. If you were African-American in Texas in the years of the Texas Republic or before the end of the Civil War, you had to be a slave. The law in Texas was that if your master freed you, you would have to either leave Texas or become a slave for someone else. This law remained in effect for nearly thirty years, from the time of Texas Independence in 1836 until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Actually, a few months after the end of the Civil War, June 19, 1865 to be exact, when African-Americans in Texas were told that slavery had ended.

For a little while after the Civil War, African-Americans and others in Texas were allowed to vote, hold public office, and attend public schools during a time called "Reconstruction". But Reconstruction does not last very long and is replaced after a few years with a policy of racial segregation that goes by the name "Jim Crow." But that’s another story for another day.

(Move stage left) So let’s skip to the early part of the Twentieth Century. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP for short, is founded at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and begins to attract Texans to the fight for racial equality. The first branch of the NAACP in Texas is started in El Paso in 1915.

The very next year, the NAACP receives national attention for its investigative work in Texas. On May 15, 1916, an African-American teenager named Jesse Washington is convicted of the rape of a white woman in Waco. But folks in Waco aren’t about to allow Mr. Washington to return to jail and await a sentencing hearing. As Mr. Washington is escorted out of the McLennan County Courthouse, a crowd of 10,000 people gathers in the courthouse square.

New York Times, circa 1915

Jesse Washington is tortured, burned alive and lynched from a lamppost. The mayor of Waco and police chief watch from their second story offices overlooking the square and take no action to end the violence. These public officials allowed a prominent photographer to take pictures of the lynching and burning of Mr. Washington, and the photographs are sold as post cards and sent to friends and family around the nation.

Shortly after the Waco lynching occurs, the NAACP sends a volunteer, a white woman named Elisabeth Freeman who had been active in the fight for a woman’s right to vote, from its national offices in New York to Waco to investigate the lynching. Since people in Waco feel like they have done nothing wrong, they tell Ms. Freeman exactly why the lynching of Mr. Washington took place. The NAACP publishes her interviews and the photographs from Waco in its magazine, The Crisis. The magazine’s editor, W.E.B. DuBois, helps the NAACP lead the fight for racial equality by chronicling lynching and other forms of violence and injustice throughout the country.

(Move stage right) Over the next three years, the NAACP investigates instances of lynching from around the country. The NAACP’ Executive Secretary John Shillady, a white man and a former social worker, contacts governors anytime a lynching takes place in their state and requests an end to the violence and an investigation of the incident. And the NAACP starts its practice of flying an American flag at half-staff at its New York City headquarters anytime someone is lynched anywhere in the United States.