A short history of the long road to District 11
Part one of two: The structural racism of citywide voting.
This is the first in a two-part series on the history of Fort Worth’s complex, messy and still ongoing struggle to create a fair electoral system. Look for part two next Sunday.
By all accounts, the creation of Fort Worth’s newest electoral map — which established new boundaries for city council districts — was a grueling affair that split the current council into warring camps. The dispute hinged partly on the shape of District 11, one of two new council seats, and whether it would bolster the political power of Fort Worth’s Latino communities.
But this is not a new fight. Since at least the 1960s, Fort Worth has been marked by periodic waves of Hispanic and Latino activism around the drawing of district lines, and it’s important that people remember why it’s taken so long to get where we are now.
From the beginning, Fort Worth’s electoral system was racist. It was built to concentrate power in the hands of the city’s white, non-Hispanic residents and to keep people of color from electing candidates who looked like them. The historical record is unequivocal: It wasn’t until 1967 that the city got its first black city councilman and it took another decade before Louis Zapata was elected as the first Latino council member.
Today, over a third of Fort Worth’s population is Hispanic or Latino, a percentage that is drastically underrepresented on the council dais. District 11 provides a chance to ameliorate that injustice. Yet the fact that it’s taken nearly fifty years to achieve even the possibility of having more than one Latino on city council is damning.
Lost in Panther City is here to remind folks about things the city would rather forget. So before Fort Worth’s political and business establishment applauds itself for making progress, let’s look at why progress needed to happen in the first place.
Fort Worth’s current electoral map is divided into geographic districts; where you live determines who your council representative is.
But this wasn’t always the case.
For a huge chunk of the twentieth century — from 1924 to 1977 — all Fort Worth City Council members were elected at large. That is, they were elected by a citywide vote, the way the mayor is chosen today. Council candidates ran for “places” on the dais rather than geographic districts, and thus had to appeal to the city’s entire population. This electoral map put black and Latino candidates at a massive disadvantage in a city with a population that was, at the time, majority white.
The magazine Facing South has documented the racist history of this electoral structure in states like Texas:
That at-large voting districts can be racially discriminatory has been well established.
After the Voting Rights Act (VRA) became law in 1965, states with a history of voter discrimination required to obtain Department of Justice (DOJ) preclearance for elections changes — most of them in the South — began to use at-large voting as a less-blatant attempt to weaken the black vote.
While Fort Worth’s adoption of at-large voting came decades before the Voting Rights Act and wasn’t explicitly part of the South’s reactionary backlash to the civil rights movement, the consequences were the same.
Tarrant County College professor Peter Martínez, who has studied the history of Fort Worth’s elections, has mapped where each city council member lived during the mid-1970s. Political power was concentrated squarely in southwest Fort Worth, along the TCU corridor and within wealthy white neighborhoods like Tanglewood, according to his 2017 doctoral dissertation. By contrast, the Northside, where Latinos historically lived and worked, was entirely without representation.
That white power brokers held sway over elections was undeniable. If they didn’t want you in office, you didn’t have a shot.
It was Edward Guinn, a highly educated black doctor with deep roots in Fort Worth, who finally broke the city council’s color line. Both historical and journalistic accounts paint him as someone who was able to get along with the white establishment — though he wasn’t immediately welcomed. According to a Texas Monthly profile of Guinn from the late-'90s:
In 1965, eight years after he opened his practice, a group of black students from Texas Christian University approached Guinn about vying for a city council seat. “They’ll smear you,” his wife warned. He ran anyway and lost. “I was kind of bitter at first,” he remembers, “but also very naive.” He decided to try again. A TCU professor became Guinn’s mentor, instructing him to curry favor with Amon Carter and other members of Fort Worth’s establishment and always to say “gummint,” not “government.” In 1967 Guinn was easily elected for the first of two 2-year terms.
Bob Ray Sanders, former columnist for the Star-Telegram, has said Guinn wouldn’t have been elected without the support of businesses on Seventh Street — i.e., the center of white Fort Worth’s economic power at the time. Martínez makes a similar point in his dissertation, observing that “the likelihood of an African American being elected to a seat on the council was slim unless important/influential members of the white community aided in the election process.”
Latino candidates, on the other hand, were unable to achieve any electoral success in the early '70s. It didn’t help that Fort Worth’s at-large system also actively pitted black and brown candidates against each other.
After Guinn opted not to run for a third term, Leonard Briscoe became the city’s second black city councilman. Briscoe was elected in 1971 and again in 1973, and each time, he emerged victorious from a field of multiple opponents that included Mexican-American candidate Dick Salinas. Though Salinas, the owner of multiple small businesses including a nightclub and record store, pitched himself in campaign ads as a “serious and independent candidate,” he was bested twice by Briscoe, a real estate developer who seemingly secured the same establishment support that lifted Guinn.
Perhaps it was some small consolation that both men easily beat their white opponents, including Charles Jackson, a single-issue candidate whose platform consisted mostly of opposition to school desegregation via busing (something the City Council had no power to regulate). Jackson’s failed 1973 campaign gifted Star-Telegram readers with the following gem, which unfolded during a candidate forum at a black church:
Jackson, who is running on the anti-busing slate, told the black audience he “loved” them and all people in general.
He was then asked why he was trying to unseat the only black man on the council.
Still, no matter who prevailed, both Briscoe and Salinas were boxed repeatedly into an electoral competition that the Star-Telegram once characterized as a referendum on “the effective representation of minorities.” Left unacknowledged was the question of whether it was fair for the city’s entire minority population — Latinos and African Americans were a fourth of the city in 1970, according to Peter Martínez’s research — to have a single council representative.
A turning point came in 1975 when a federal judge ruled that Dallas’s method of electing city council members — also an at-large system that required citywide votes for all council seats — was unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, the City of Hate’s election system was afflicted by the same strain of structural racism, with candidates of color largely unable to break through institutional barriers erected by Dallas’s white, wealthy political elite unless they were endorsed by those same elites.
Here’s how the Dallas Morning News covered the story at the time:
In announcing his ruling, [Judge Eldon Mahon] said testimony in the case had convinced him the current at-large system discriminated against black residents by “diluting” their vote. He said their vote was further minimized by the strength of white-dominated slating groups, “such as the Citizens Charter Association,” and the prohibitive cost of running in a citywide race.”
“Testimony has shown that blacks have run in every City Council election since 1959 with the exception of one race,” the judge explained. “In that time, only two blacks have been elected and each of these two won only after being endorsed and supported by the dominant slating group known as the CCA.”
Fort Worth had actually been debating a move towards a district-based city council system for a few years: The Star-Telegram asked candidates in the 1973 election whether they’d support such a change. But few concrete steps had been taken. The council was weighing whether to endorse a map that would’ve created five districts but retained three at-large council seats (plus the mayor). However they had yet to vote on whether to put this plan before the electorate when the news from Dallas broke.
At which point, Fort Worth basically said, “Oops. Maybe we should do more?”
The city’s mayor, R.M. “Sharkey” Stovall, quickly pivoted, backing a plan to abolish at-large council elections, while black leaders and organizations like the NAACP threatened lawsuits if single-member districts weren’t adopted. Some influential city residents clearly resisted the idea because even as a proposal to enact an 8-1 map — that is, eight districts and a citywide election for mayor — went before the voters, at least one council member who was also on the ballot campaigned against it. Mayor Stovall, who decided not to seek re-election, ultimately reversed himself yet again, coming out vehemently against the idea and arguing that the council would lose sight of the common good if members had to prioritize the interests of their particular domains.
Ultimately, voters had the final say, and the single-district plan passed by a narrow margin of 50.3 percent — 13,336 in favor, 13,171 against. As Martínez observed in his dissertation:
Unfortunately, records do not indicate what kind of effect Chicano voters had on the passage of this plan, but with such a small margin, every vote truly counted.
It was a decision that would pave the way for Latino candidates to finally, two years later, begin making successful bids for city council. This was certainly progress — but the victory would bring with it a new set of political complications and tensions.
That’s it for this issue of the newsletter. But Lost in Panther City will return next Sunday with another installment of “A short history of the long road to District 11” — which is turning out to be a much longer “short history” than I originally anticipated.