Blue Texas

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552 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 24 halftones, 5 maps, notes, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-2675-8
Published: November 2016
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6151-3
Published: August 2020
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-2676-5
Published: October 2016
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-4764-5
Published: October 2016

Justice, Power, and Politics

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Justice, Power, and Politics Website

Awards & distinctions

2017 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians

Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association

National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Non-Fiction Book Award

2016 Ramirez Family Award, Texas Institute of Letters

This book is about the other Texas, not the state known for its cowboy conservatism, but a mid-twentieth-century hotbed of community organizing, liberal politics, and civil rights activism. Beginning in the 1930s, Max Krochmal tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the state’s marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow.

Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation’s most conservative states. Blue Texas remembers the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier--and it shows why their story still matters today.

Sponsored by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas

About the Author

Max Krochmal is associate professor of history and the founding chair of the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University.
For more information about Max Krochmal, visit the Author Page.