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Thomas Alter II

The Texas partys record on black rights was rather poor. It saw how the ruling class used race to divide the working class, yet it offered no specific program to fight racism. Instead, the SP argued that overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist society would automatically end racism.

Debs called on all workers regardless of race to join the SP on equal terms. However, the Texas SP did not even initially do this. In the first years of its existence, it followed Jim Crow practices with segregated meetings. When the Texas SP created the Renters Union in 1911 to organize tenant farmers, it limited membership to white persons over 16 years of age.

However, the racially exclusive membership policy of the Renters Union did not last long. In 1912, lumberjacks in western Louisiana organized by the IWW were making modest gains against the lumber barons through interracial organizing and direct-action tactics. Inspired by this, the Renters Union, at its 1912 convention, eliminated the word white from its membership requirements and called on black tenant farmers to organize separate local unions. Still, from the available evidence, one does not find black farmers forming their own locals of the Renters Union, and very few African Americans joined the Texas SP.

It is hard to say how the Texas SP would have fared had it truly attempted to stand up for black liberation. Following World War I, black Texas veterans returned home determined to fight for their rights, and militant chapters of the NAACP were formed across the state. By this time, though, the Texas SP had been repressed due to its opposition to the war. And after a brief flurry of civil rights activism, the NAACP in Texas was rapidly repressed as well by the state government.

An interracial alliance of workers in the Texas SP definitely would have made our class and the party stronger. At the same time, it would have attracted the full force of white supremacist terrorism, most likely crushing the movement. Yet even in defeat, a black-white alliance of workers in the Texas SP would have provided a shining example and laid an earlier foundation to put us in a better position to win racial and economic justice in our present.

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Texas Was Once a Hotbed of Socialism - Jacobin magazine