MARTINEZ 1
Agustin Martinez
Texas History 4700-001
Professor Torget
November 23, 2015
Paper Assignment #2
Texas newspapers during the 1950s, had a good understanding of how the strategies of
African Americans and Mexican Americans differed from one another in relation to the civil
rights movements. In this paper I will discuss the strategies each race had, their tactics for
attaining equal civil rights, and how they contrasted from each other. Although both African
Americans and Mexican Americans, had civil rights struggles they did not join forces for the
most part because their attempts to eliminate racism ended up separating them. There were also
prejudices on both sides, and a sense of competition which ended up leaving a bigger gap
between both groups.
African Americans wanted to win legal cases to eliminate discrimination, like the Jim
Crow laws. According to Behnken’s book, “Fighting Their Own Battles”, blacks began to “more
forcibly push for rights”1 when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) arose. One of the ways African Americans challenged racism was by attempting to
establish their own businesses. Since most of the businesses were discriminatory to colored
people, black people wanted to be business owners so this wouldn’t happen. A public
transportation, called “jitney” was put in place to offer a taxi service to black people. In a
newspaper article I found, it stated that, lawmakers wanted to authorize jitney buses to “dodge
MARTINEZ 2
possible integration”2. This would have been a short term solution but not a long term because it
did solve the transportation problem but would not help the segregation issue. In the end, the
jitney service was terminated because white businesses said they were stealing profit from them.
This example shows that whites were so reluctant to be considered equal to blacks. They
didn’t want them to use the same transportation methods but didn’t want them to have their own
business because they were stealing profit from them. In the book it talks about how the cases
were decided and the newspaper gives an insider look at why the case was even considered,
because whites wanted to be separated. In contrast, Mexican Americans also had segregation
within their home cities but were not as harsh because they fought for rights “positioning
