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In Fighting Their Own Battles Summary

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In the 1950s, Texas was at the forefront of two major, but very different civil rights movements—the African-American movement and the Mexican-American movement. Fighting Their Own Battles by Brian Behnken describes and compares the separate battles for rights of the two movements. People in Texas knew what was happening and newspapers reported about the different events that occurred throughout the 1950s. In hindsight, and with the help of Behnken’s book, one is able to see the subtle influences of both civil rights movements in the Texas newspapers. At the time however, these differences in strategy between the African-American and Mexican-American movements were not so easily understood. Based on Behnken’s books and Texas newspapers from …show more content…

Even though they were essentially fighting many of the same battles for equality, they never united and fought together. Behnken describes the Mexican-American movement in the 1950s as being primarily focused on fighting “for rights by positioning themselves as members of the white race in order to avoid Jim Crow.” LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) had a very specific strategy for the Mexican-American civil rights movement—the whiteness strategy. This strategy, had been successful in granting other nationalities and races (“Jews, Irish, and Eastern Europeans”) the recognition of being white. LULAC hoped to adopt this approach and eradicate Mexican-American Jim Crow. Behnken describes how the Mexican-Americans with LULAC’s support were able to utilize the whiteness strategy in order to win court cases and integrate Mexican-Americans into white schools. However, Behnken also describes that the whiteness strategy of Mexican-Americans in the 1950s led to disunity between the Mexican-Americans and the …show more content…

Behnken describes that the African-American equality movement was “primarily focused on winning legal battles to eradicate some of the most offensive aspects of Jim Crow segregation.” The African-American movement wanted to totally annihilate Jim Crow and all segregation in the United States. The movement was spear-headed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which led African-Americans into a series of strategic legal battles to eliminate segregation in schools, starting with higher education, because black schools were separate, but very unequal. Behnken describes the case that was taken by the NAACP to the Supreme Court, Sweatt v. Painter, in order to show how the African-Americans were able to use the already present segregation in local schools to influence change in legislation at the national

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