Blue Texas

Blue Texas wonderfully illustrates the scholarly re-centering of coalition building in the civil rights movement. By placing African and Mexican activists and progressive whites at the center of the struggle for a more democratic society in the Lone Star State, Max Krochmal demonstrates that this coalition was focused on destroying Jim Crow not only to produce an integrated society but also to gain labor and political rights and economic justice. Although Texas is commonly referred to as a “red state,” given its Republican political traditions, this study is about “blue Texas”—the other Texas. It is about the hidden Lone Star State tradition of community organizing, civil rights, trade liberalism, and multiracial coalition building. Krochmal skillfully weaves the theoretical with the empirical to produce a brilliant piece of scholarship. Blue Texas tells “how an otherwise ordinary group of diverse activists organized on separate bases, then crossed the color line to find one another, and together connected their freedom struggles to the labor movement and electoral politics” (p. 2). The book's premise is that “race remains one of the central dividing lines in this country,” and that to solve this problem marginalized and working people must create coalitions (p. 6). Utilizing a variety of strategies—voter registration and mobilization drives, staging numerous direct action demonstrations—a multiracial coalition brought a degree of democracy to Texas

Civil society · Community organizing · Democracy · Liberalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Premise · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society

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