Texas Redistricting is Defying Decades of Organizing for Interracial Democracy in the State

The Texas legislature is holding its third special session of the year, this one to determine the state’s new voting maps. On Monday, Texas lawmakers released a draft congressional map that would entrench Republicans’ hold on the state.

With Texas the second-most populous state in the union, these district lines will have a major effect on which party controls the House of Representatives over the next decade.

Texas gained two newly-created U.S. House districts — the products of a growing non-White population. Even so, the draft map includes one less Hispanic-majority district and no Black-majority districts, instead prioritizing shoring up White Republican incumbents whose districts have grown more Democratic over the last decade.

But playing to the politics of White backlash is just one of many possible paths forward for the state. A closer look at Texas’s past reveals the state’s potential to foster a very different brand of politics, pointing it toward multiracial, multiethnic democracy instead.

Indeed, not one but two civil rights movements flourished in the last half of the 20th century in Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with each other. African American and Mexican American activists fought the twin caste systems of Jim Crow (the segregation and domination of African Americans by law and customs) and Juan Crow (a similar system of domination over Mexican Americans, backed by state power but often without explicit statutes). They worked chiefly within their own movements, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. Their movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice.

After breaking away from Mexico and forming a republic of slaveholding settlers in 1836, Texas systematically privileged White planters while restricting Indigenous, Mexican and Black laborers. Multiracial insurgencies among the state’s poor forced elites to extend Jim Crow and Juan Crow in the countryside and in the state’s growing cities to maintain control.

The Terrell Election Law of 1903 imposed annual voter registration and the payment of a hefty yearly poll tax, a measure that successfully removed sharecroppers and farmworkers of all races from the voting rolls.

Indeed, not one but two civil rights movements flourished in the last half of the 20th century in Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with each other. African American and Mexican American activists fought the twin caste systems of Jim Crow (the segregation and domination of African Americans by law and customs) and Juan Crow (a similar system of domination over Mexican Americans, backed by state power but often without explicit statutes). They worked chiefly within their own movements, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. Their movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice.

After breaking away from Mexico and forming a republic of slaveholding settlers in 1836, Texas systematically privileged White planters while restricting Indigenous, Mexican and Black laborers. Multiracial insurgencies among the state’s poor forced elites to extend Jim Crow and Juan Crow in the countryside and in the state’s growing cities to maintain control.

The Terrell Election Law of 1903 imposed annual voter registration and the payment of a hefty yearly poll tax, a measure that successfully removed sharecroppers and farmworkers of all races from the voting rolls.