Mexican Cival Rights Essay

George I. Sanchez, Ideology, and tweedness in the Making of the Mexican American courteous Rights Movement, 1930-1960 By CARLOS K . BLANTON Let us keep in point that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the genteel liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and diachronic involvements in his case emb take to the woods those of all of the otherwise minority gatherings. Yet, divinity fudge bless the legality, he is white So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the turnout of cultivated liberties for others (who are not so fortunate as to be white and Christian).George L Sanchez (1958) By embracing innocence, Mexican Americans keep back reinforced the color line that has denied people of African descent plentiful participation in American democracy. In move neat rights, Mexican Americans combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racial secernment, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the nigrify civilised rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Neil Foley (1998) 1 HE memoir OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE American SoUTH IS mixed and exciting.The history of Mexican American civil rights is exchangeablely promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of ingenuousness. Both selections above, the first from a Mexican American The epigraphs are drawn from George I. Sanchez to Roger N. Baldwin, August 27, 1958, pamphlet 8, shock 31, George I. Sanchez Papers (Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, Austin) and Neil Foley, Becoming Hispanic Mexican Americans and the Faustian conformity with Whiteness, in Foley, ed.. Reflexiones 1997 invigorated Directions In Mexican American Studies (Austin, 1998), 65.The author would like to thank the Journal of southeastem Historys sextuplet anonymous reviewers and Texas A&M Universitys Glasscock Center for Humanities investigate for their very financial ai dful cerebral guidance on this essay. MR. BLANTON is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. THE daybook OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Volume LXXII, No. 3, August 2006 570 THE daybook OF SOUTHERN HISTORY quick-witted of the mid-twentieth deoxycytidine monophosphate and the last a recently published landed estatement from a historian of backwash and identity, are nominally about naturalness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss egg white differently.The quotation from the 1950s advocates exploiting intelligent ovalbumin to obtain civil rights for both Mexican Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such a dodge as in presentntly racist. The historical figure writes of Mexican Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of overlap civil rights goals the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due(p) to Mexican American whiteness. This line of reasoning is worth further considerati on. This essay examines the Mexican American civil rights causal agency by focusing on the exit and ideas of George I.Sancheza prominent militant and professor of raising at the University of Texasin the thirty-something, 1940s, and 1950s. Sanchez is the most significant knowing of what is commonly referred to as the Mexican American Generation of activists during this period. As a national president of the major Mexican American civil rights establishment of the era, however, Sanchezs political govern within the Mexican American residential district was just as important as his intellectual leadershiphip. Sanchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively engaged them, offering an excellent case study of the making of Mexican American civil rights. First, this work examines how Sanchezs civil rights efforts were vitally certain by an ideological perspective that back up step-by-step, integrationist, liberal reform, a locating that grew out of his activist search on A frican Americans in the South, Mexican Americans in the southwestern unify States, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This saucily Deal ideological inheritance shaped Sanchezs contention that Mexican Americans were one minority group among many needing governmental assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a pettish citizenship dilemma.During the Great Depression and World War II, Mexican Americans strategic violence on American citizenship rhetorically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U. S. minority groups. It also marginalized immi reserve Mexicans. The significance of For more(prenominal) on Sanehez see Gladys R. Leff, George I. Sanchez Don Quixote of the Southwest (Ph. D. dissertation. North Texas State University, 1976) pile Nelson Mowry, A Study of the reproductional estimation and Aetion of George I. Sanehez (Ph. D. dissertation. University of Texas, 1977) Amerieo Paredes, ed.. Humanidad Essays in Honor of George 1.Sanchez (Los An geles, 1977) Steven Sehlossman, Self-Evident Remedy? George I. Sanchez, Segregation, and Enduring Dilemmas in bilingualist precept, Teachers College Record, 84 (Summer 1983), 871-907 and Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, J930-1960 ( unexampled Haven, 1989), chap. 10. WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 571 citizenship was moot within the Mexican American community and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive bod of Mexican Americans civil rights litigation that implemented a legal dodge based on their whiteness.Third, Sanchezs correspondence with Thurgood Marshall of the National railroad tie for the Advancement of Colored flock (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals earlier, fractional connections between the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements. altogether these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness. This essay fuses devil historiographical streams traditional stu dies on Mexican American politics and identity and the raw whiteness studentships interpretation of Mexican American civil rights.In traditional works the Mexican American civil rights friendship is a good deal examined with little sustained comparison to other civil rights experiences. Conversely, the whiteness scholarship re demonstrates a serious attempt at comparative civil rights history. Taking both approaches into account answers the recent call of one scholar for historians to muster even greater historical imagination in conceiving of youthful histories of civil rights from different perspectives. Traditional research on Mexican Americans in the twentieth century centers on generational lines.From the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression, a large wave of Mexican immigrants, spurred by dislocation in Mexico as well as by economic prospect in the U. S. , provided low-wage agricultural and industrial labor throughout the Southwest. Their political identity w as as Mexicans living abroad, the Mexicanist Generation. They generally paid little heed to American politics and eschewed cultural assimilation, as had earlier Mexicans who forcibly became American citizens as a result of the expansionist wars of the 1830s and 1840s.However, mass violence shortly in front World War I, intensifying racial discrimination throughout the early twentieth century, and forced repatriations to Mexico during the Great Depression heralded the rise of a new political ethos. The community had come to believe that its members were endangered by the presumption of foreignness and disloyalty. By the late 1920s younger Charles W. Eagles, Toward New Histories of the polite Rights Era, Journal of Southern History, 66 (November 2000), 848. See Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station, Tex., * 1993)George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993) Benja min Heber Johnson, variation in Texas How a bury Rebellion and Its bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003) and Amoldo De Leon, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (1982 new ed. , Dallas, 1997). 572 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY leadersthe Mexican American Generationurged adoption of a new strategy of emphasizing American citizenship at all times.They strove to speak English in public and in private settings, stressed education, asked for the gradual reform of anti-Semite(prenominal) practices, emulated kernel-class life, and exuded patriotism as a loyal, progressive ethnic group. They also desired acquaintance as ethnic whites, not as racial others. The oldest organization expressing this identity was the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). This ethos of hyphenated Americanism and gradual reform held sway until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Studies of whiteness hold to historians understanding of the interplay of race, ethnicity, and class by going beyond a black-white binary curriculum to seek the subtleties and nuances of race. This new scholarship examines who is considered white and why, traces how the definition of white shifts, unearths how whiteness conditions acts of inclusion and exclusion and how it reinforces and subverts concepts of race, and investigates the psychological and material rewards to be gained by groups that successfully claim whiteness. crime syndicate tension, nativism, and racism are connected to a big whiteness discourse. In other words, this is a new, imaginative way to more broadly interrogate the category of race. Works on whiteness often share a conviction that thoughts or acts capitalizing on whiteness commerce racist power as well as contribute to that deadly powers making. They also generally maintain that notions of race, whether consciously employed or not, divide ethnic and racial minorities from each other and from workingclass whites, groups that would other than share class status and political goals. In recent reviews of the state of whiteness history, Eric Amesen, See Mario Garcia, Mexican Americans George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995) Ignacio M. Garcia, Viva Kennedy Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot (College Station, Tex. , 2000) Carl Allsup, The American G. I. Forum Origins and Evolution (Austin, 1982) Richard A.Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class San Antonio, 19291941 (College Station, Tex. , 1991) David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin, 1987), chaps. 12 and 13 Julie Leininger Pyeior, LBJ and Mexican Americans The conundrum of top executive (Austin, 1997) Juan Gomez-Quinones, Chicano Politics Reality and expect, 1940-1990 (Albuquerque, 1990) and Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. , Brown, Not White school day integrating and the Chicano Movement in Hou ston (College Station, Tex. , 2001). David R.Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness incline and the Making of the American on the job(p) Class (1991 rev. ed.. New York, 1999) Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York, 1994) Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass. , 1998) George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness How White People Profit From Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998). WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS.573 Barbara J. Fields, Peter Kolchin, and Daniel Wickberg offer much review. These historians argue that scholars using whiteness as an analytical tool are shoddy in their definitions, strike too finely and semantically into documents and literary texts, and privilege discursive moments that pretend little or nothing to do with actual people or experiences. More specifically, Kolchin and Amesen argue that many st udies of whiteness incautiously caricature race as an unchanging, omnipresent, and overly deterministic category.In such works whiteness is portrayed as acting concretely and abstractly with or without historical actors and events. Ironically, studies of whiteness can obscure the exercise of power. Fields explains that studying race and racial identity is more attractive than studying racism because racism exposes the hoUowness of agency and identity . . . and it violates the two-sides-to-every-story expectation of symmetry that Americans are peculiarly given over to. Research that applies the idea of whiteness to Mexican American history is fragile and even more recent.Several of these studies focus upon the use of whiteness as a legal strategy while others take a broader approach. historiographer Neil Foley offers the most significant and ambitious arguments by moving beyond an summary of how white people viewed Mexican Americans to look instead at the locution of whiteness in the Mexican American mind. He shifts the perspective from foreign whiteness to internal whiteness and argues that Mexican Americans entered into a Faustian Pact by embracing racism toward African Americans in the course of try to avoid de jure discrimination.Foley claims that Mexican Americans consciously curried the favor of racist whites In pursuing White rights, Mexican Americans Peter Kolchin, Whiteness Studies The New History of Race in America, Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 154-73 Eric Arnesen, Whiteness and the Historians Imagination, International tug and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32 Barbara J. Fields, Whiteness, Racism, and Identity, International Labor and Working-Class History, 60 (Fall 2001), 48-56 (quotations on p.48)Daniel Wickberg, Heterosexual White Male Some Recent Inversions in American Cultural History, Journal of American History, 92 (June 2005), 136-57. *Ian F. Haney Lopez, White By constabulary The Legal Construction of R ace (New York, 1996) Neil Foley, The White Scourge Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997) Steven Harmon Wilson, The Rise of Judicial Management in the U. S. soil Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955-2000 (Athens, Ga., 2002)Wilson, Brown over Other White Mexican Americans Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation equitysuits, Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 145-94 Clare Sheridan, Another White Race Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selection, Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 10914 Ariela J. Gross, Texas Mexicans and the Polities of Whiteness, Law and History Review, 21 (Spring 2003), 195-205 Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual precept in Texas, 1836-1981 (College Station, Tex., 2004)Patrick J. Carroll, Felix Longorias Wake Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism (Austin, 2003). 574 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY combined Latin American racia lism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Missing from such interpretations of whitenesss meaning to Mexican Americans is George I. Sanchezs making of Mexican American civil rights.Analyzing Sanchezs views is an excellent run of Foleys interpretation because Sanchezs use of the category of whiteness was sophisticated, deliberate, reflective, and connected to issues and events. An internationalist, multiculturalist, and integrationist ideology shaped by New Deal experiences in the American Southwest, the American South, and Latin America informed George L Sanchezs civil rights activism and scholarship. Sanchez regarded Mexican Americans as one of many American minority groups worthless racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.Though Sanchez regarded Mexican Americans racial status as white, he also held that they were a minority group that experienced systematic and raci alized oppression. Sanchezs articulation of whiteness was qualified by an anti-racist ideological worldview and supports Eric Amesens criticism of overreaching by whiteness scholars who appreciate neither ambiguity nor counter-discourses of race, the recognition of which would cast doubt on their bold claims. Sanchez was very much a New Deal helping intellectual who utilized academician research in an attempt to progressively transform society.The term swear out intellectual is an appropriate description of Sanchez, who propagated his civil rights activism through academic research with governmental agencies (the Texas State Department of Education, the New Mexico State Department of Education, the U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs) and national philanthropic organizations (the General Education Board, the Julius Rosenwald Eund, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Marshall Civil Liberties Trust).The pinnacle of Sanchezs scho larly contribution as a run intellectual was his evocative 1940 portrayal of rural New Mexican penury and segregation in The Forgotten People A Study of New Mexicans. Foley, Becoming Hispanic, 53-70 (quotation on p. 65) Foley, Partly Colored or Other White Mexican Americans and Their job with the Color Line, in Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, eds. , Beyond Black and White Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U. S. South and Southwest (College Station, Tex. , 2004), 123-44.For an older whiteness study that discusses the external imposition of racial concepts on Mexican Americans and other groups, see Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, chap. 10. Amesen, Whiteness and the Historians Imagination, 24. Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 575 Sanchez particularly seek to transform society through the field of education. In the early 1930s he published blistering critiques of the shoddiness of IQ tests conducted on Mexican American children.Mexican Americans bad just challenged separate instills in Texas and calcium and were told by the courts that because they were technically white, racial segregation was illegal however, the courts then claimed that pedagogic segregation based upon intellectual or linguistic deficiency was permissible. In challenging racist IQ science, Sanchez essentially advocated integration. A decade of service intellectual work came together for Sanchez in Forgotten People. He called for a comprehensive federal and state chopine to up mount downtrodden Hispanic New Mexicans Remedial measures will not solve the problem piecemeal.Poverty, illiteracy, and ill-health are that symptoms. If education is to get at the root of the problem schools must go beyond subject-matter instruction. . . . The curriculum of the educational agencies becomes, then, the magna carta of social and economic rehabilitation the teacher, the bring in agent ive role of a new social order. Sanchez regarded Mexican Americans as similar to Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans, and African Americans. To Sanchez these were all minority groups that endured varying levels of discrimination by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America.Sanchez was uninterested in divining a hierarchy of racial victimization instead, he spent considerable energy on musing ways for these groups to get the federal government, in New Deal fashion, to help alleviate their plight. Even in the mid-1960s when many Mexican Americans had come to favor a separate racial identity over an ethnic one, Sanchez settle down conceived of Mexican Americans as a cultural group, ignoring concepts of race altogether unless discussing racial discrimination. Sanchez engaged the struggles of other minority groups and linked them to Mexican American activism.In 1948, for example, Sanchez (Columbia, Mo. , 1966), 1-6 George I. Sanchez, Forgotten People A Study of New Mexicans (1940 repri nt, Albuquerque, 1996), xvi-xvii. Befitting the service intellectual ideal of freely diffusing knowledge, the Carnegie Foundation gave the book away. Carnegie provided intravenous feeding thousand dollars for Sanchezs research at the same time it supported work on a much larger study on African AmericansGunnar Myrdals classic An American Dilemma The pitch blackness Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944). Carlos Kevin Blanton, From Intellectual Deficiency to Cultural Deficiency Mexican Americans, Testing, and Public School Policy in the American Southwest, 1920-1940, Pacific diachronic Review, 72 (February 2003), 56-61 (quotations on p. 60). Sanchez, Forgotten People, 86. George I. Sanchez, History, Culture, and Education, in Julian Samora, ed.. La Raza Forgotten Americans (Notre Dame, 1966), 1-26 Mario Garcia, Mexican Americans, 267-68. 576 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY published through the United States Indian Service a government study on Navajo problems called The People A Study of the Navajos. In 1937-1938 Sanchez transferred his New Deal, reformist ideology across borders as a Latin American education expert with a prestigious administrative post in Venezuelas national government. penning to Edwin R. Embree, director of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Sanchez described his work as the chief coordinator of the countrys teachertraining programme in familiar New Deal terms the hardest tax is breaking down social prejudices, traditional apathy, obstructive habits (political and personal) and in-bred aimlessness. His first program report was appropriately titled Release from Tyranny. During World War II Sanchez was appointed to the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson A. Rockefeller, where he continued work on Latin American teacher-training programs as part of the war effort. Sanchez was deep committed to progressive reform in Latin America that would lift educational and living well-worns. Sanchez also took on A frican American issues. From 1935 to 1937 he worked as a staff member with the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Eund.This philanthropic organization was have-to doe with with African American rural education in the South, and in this expertness Sanchez collaborated with Eisk Universitys incoming president, the eminent sociologist Charles S. Johnson, on preparing the massive abstract on Southem campestral Life. Sanchez was listed in the studys compute as the highest-paid tec for the 1936-1937 academic year with a $4,500 payment and a $2,000 travel budget. Sanchezs work with the Rosenwald Eund also come to numerous activities beyond his role as the groups pedagogical expert.In November and December 1936 he lobbied the lah State Department of Education on behalf of a Dr. Sanchez Seeks Fulfillment of U. S. Promise to Navajos, Austin Daily Texan, November 16, 1946, in George I. Sanchez Vertical File (Center for American History, Austin, Texas hereunder this show will be cited a s Sanchez Vertical File and this alluviation as Center for American History) George I. Sanchez, The People A Study of the Navajos (Washington, D. C, 1948). G. I. Sanchez to Edwin R.Embree, October 17, 1937, Folder 4, encase 127, Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives (Special Collections, John Hope and Aurelia Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee hereinafter this collection will be cited as Rosenwald Fund Archives and this repository as Franklin Library) (quotation) Embree to Sanchez, October 29, 1937, ib. Sanchezs work for the Instituto Pedagogico occurred just after its foot in 1936 during a brief liberal phase of Venezuelan politics. For more on its creation, see Judith Ewell, Venezuela A Century of Change (Stanford, 1984), 75.Dave Cheavens, Soft-Spoken UT professor Loaned to Coordinator of Latin-American Affairs, Austin Statesman, December 3, 1943, in Sanchez Vertical File Texan Will Direct Training of Teachers, Dallas Morning News, November 3, 1943, ib. Georg e I. Sanchez, Mexican Education As It Looks Today, Nations Schools, 32 (September 1943), 23, ibid. George I. Sanchez, Mexico A Revolution by Education (New York, 1936). WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 511 Rosenwald teacher-training program and the broader issue of school equalization.Equalization had been the primary avenue of African American activism that culminated with the Gaines v. Canada decision of 1938, which mandated that the University of Missouri either admit a black law student or create a separate, equal law school for African Americans. Sanchez also lobbied in Washington, D. C. , in February 1937, consulting with the Progressive Education sleeper and various government agencies on Rosenwald jump outs. As one of his duties on the collection project, Sanchez studied rote learning for rural African American children who lived in main offices lacking in formal education.This study was inspired by Charles Johnsons mentor at the University of Chicago, Rober t E. Park. Johnson, Sanchez, and other young researchers such as noted historian Horace Mann Bond were to look at ways to educate populations disable by the lack of books and a tradition of formal education in the home. This venture was affiliated with the Tennessee Valley Authority and chiefly concerned with ski lift the cultural level of poor, rural African Americans more effectively than standard textbooks and pedagogies developed for privileged students in other parts of the country.The project aimed to raiment teachers to integrate the knowledge which the school seeks to inculcate with the experiences of its pupils and with the tradition of the local community. Sanchezs comparable work with bilingual education in New Mexico and Latin America fit well within the scope of the new undertaking. Sanchezs biggest project with the Rosenwald Fund was creating a well-recognized teacher-training program at the Louisiana lightlessness average and Industrial Institute at Grambling .Charles S. Johnson later described this Grambling teacher-training program as among the most progressive of the community-centered programs for the education of teachers in the country. He praised the Grambling travail for offering African American teachers opportunities for the development of creativeness and inventiveness in recognizing and solving * Charles S. Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, October 16, 1936, Folder 1, buffet 333, Rosenwald Fund ArchivesEmbree to Johnson, October 23, 1936, and enclosed budget manuscripts Supplementary Budget on Rural Education Compendium and Rural School Exploration, Tentative Budget 1936-37, ibid. undated project time sheet October 7, 1936 to April 27, 1937, Folder 3, Box 127, ibid. Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 15 Compendium on Southern Rural Life with Reference to the Problems of the Common School (9 vols. Chicago? , 1936). Charles S. Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, January 21, February 25, 1937, Folder 5, Box 335, Rosenwald Fund Archives Johnson to Dorothy Elvidge, June 23, 1937, and study proposal by Robert E. Park, Memorandum on Rote Learning Studies, March 3, 1937, pp.2 (first and molybdenum quotations), 3 (third quotation), ibid. Sanchez left shortly after the project began. 578 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY the problems to be found in rural communities, homes, and schools . . . . Sanchez oversaw this project from its inception in September 1936 until he left for Venezuela in the middle of 1937. He set up the curriculum, the budgets, the specialized staff (nurses, agricultural instructors, home economists, and rural school supervisors), and equipment (the laboratory school and a bus for inspections).These duties involved close coordination with Grambling administrators, Louisiana health officials, and state education and agriculture bureaucrats. Difficulties arose due to Sanchezs departure. One Rosenwald employee summarized the programs problems, As long as George Sanchez was here he was the individual who translated that philosophy to the people at Grambling, and I am sure that you agree with me that he could do it far more effectively than the rest of us.But now that Sanchez sic is not here it is the job of the president of the institution to do both this interpretation and this stimulation. . . . I do not believe President Jones knows them. Fisks Charles S. Johnson was elite company for Sanchez. Johnsons lay waste to attacks on southem sharecropping influenced public policy and garnered praise from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He and others spurred the creation of Roosevelts Black Cabinet. Sanchez practiced a similar combination of academic research and social activism.When he began his work at Grambling he had recently lost his position in the New Mexico State Department of Education due to his pointed advocacy of reform as well as his discernment for hard-hitting, publicly funded academic research on controversial topics such as the segregation of Mexican Americans in schools. He had long sparked controversy with his research on racial issues. What especially limited Charles S. Johnson, Section 8The inkiness Public Schools, in Louisiana Educational Survey (7 vols, in 8 Baton Rouge, 1942), IV, 216 (first quotation), 185 (second quotation).A copy of this volume is in Folder 5, Box 182, Charles Spurgeon Johnson Papers (Franklin Library). A. C. Lewis to G. I. Sanchez, October 14, 1936, Folder 13, Box 207, Rosenwald Fund Archives Sanchez to Dr. R. W. Todd, September 28, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to Miss Clyde Mobley, September 28, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to J. W. Bateman, September 28, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to Lewis, September 28, 1936, ibid. Edwin R. Embree to Lewis, September 29, 1936, ibid. Sanchez to Lewis, September 30, 1936, ibid. Dorothy A. Elvidge to Lewis, November 27, 1936, ibid. Lewis to Sanchez, July 9, 1937, Folder 14, Box 207, ibid. i. C.Dixon to Lewis, March 17, 1938, Folder 15, Box 207, ibid, (quotation on p. 2) Sa nchez, The Rural Normal Schools TeacherEducation Program Involves . . . , September 17, 1936, Folder 16, Box 207, ibid. Sanchez, Suggested BudgetGrambling, April 9, 1937, ibid. Sanchez, Recommendations, December 9, 1936, ibid. John Egerton, Speak instantly Against the Day The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994), 91-92 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, ? 913-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 543, 544 (quotation) Matthew William Dunne, Next Steps Charles S.Johnson and Southem Liberalism, Journal of Negro History, 83 (Winter 1998), 10-11. WHITENESS AND MEXICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS 579 Sanchezs future in New Mexico was a 1933 furor over his distribution of another(prenominal) scholars Thurstone scale (a psychometric technique developed in the 1920s) on racial attitudes to pupils in New Mexicos public schools. regulator Arthur Seligman publicly demanded that Sanchez be ousted and that the General Education Board (GEB) cancel the gran t funding his position in the state bureaucracy.Partly due to the influence of New Mexicos U. S. senator Bronson Cutting, a progressive Republican champion of Mexican Americans, Sanchez survived an ugly public hearing that resulted in the resignation of the University of New Mexico might member who devised the scale. Nevertheless, the incident severely constrained Sanchezs future in the New Mexican educational and political arena. But Sanchez was not pushed into African American education simply out of desperation for employment. He apprehended the opportunities that the Rosenwald Fund provided to broaden his activism as a service intellectual beyond the Southwest. He was direct about this to his most ardent supporter.President James F. Zimmerman of the University of New Mexico Im sorry the Rosenwald Fund is virtually veto from extending its interests and experiments into the Southwest. This is the only disappointment I feel in connection with my present work. I feel it keenly, however, as you know how deeply I am bound up with that area and its peoples. At the same time, though, being here has given me a wider viewpoint and experience that may well be directed at my first love sometime. Zimmerman was disappointed he had groom Sanchez for a faculty and administrative future at the University of New Mexico. notwithstanding the uproar in 1933 Sanchezs talents were in high demand, however, as GEB agent Leo Favrot and Rosenwald director Edwin Embree coordinated which agency would carry Sanchezs salary with the New Mexico State Department of Education in early 1935 (GEB) and during a yearlong research project on Mexican higher education from 1935 to the middle of 1936 (Rosenwald Fund) until he joined the staff of the Rosenwald Fund on a full-time basis for his work at Grambling. * G. I. Sanchez to Leo M. Favrot, April 27 and may 11, 1933, Folder 900, Box 100, G.