1970s Jim Crow Racism in San Antonio
The murder of a white woman, at the Downtown YMCA in San Antonio, sparked “mass arrests” of African Americans in San Antonio. The murder prompted a barrage of articles in the San Antonio Light and the Express News in November of 1974. Even after the Jim Crow era was supposedly over the use of racist “round-ups” of Black men persisted. With Jim Crow officially gone, racial structures could still invoke powerful racist messaging to impose false arrests and “round-ups” of people only suspected of a crime. From time to time white supremacist methods could be used to stir up hatred amongst whites to create a social climate that pandered to them and reinforced the old plantation master syndrome.
In the San Antonio Light of November 17,1974, the paper associated the crime with Black people by the fact that the victim’s purse was found “in a weed-covered vacant lot on the City’s East Side.” The same article spoke of a “vigilante group” that was being born in a “North Side residential neighborhood in the wake of a flurry of rapes there in recent weeks.” Most telling are the events that took place in the death of Cynthia Kettinger. According to an article the police and the public were armed with a drawing based on the description of a man who unknown witnesses said was lurking outside the YMCA in the 300 block of McCullough.
Newspaper reports bragged about more than 35 Black men who supposedly aroused suspicions and were herded in like animals and questioned. It would up being an excuse to arrest and jail people with traffic tickets and other charges unrelated to the murder case but none the less make SAPD look like the KKK in combat. SAPD Detective Bill Weilbacher was employed to make comments about the case, he was a notorious racist on the Eastside.
Detective Bill Weilbacher had a long reputation of brutal acts against African Americans in the community. The San Antonio Light, all to the dismay of the city’s Black residents offered a $10,000 reward. Many in the African American community were asking “why haven’t there been rewards like this offered for blacks that have been murdered?” City Mayor Pro Tem Lila Cockrell led a conference on rape in the city, but the NAACP passed a resolution condemning the “mass arrests” of Blacks. In a unanimously passed resolution the local NAACP branch on November 17, 1974, at New Hope Baptist Church protested the arrests of “suspicious” persons. The NAACP branch resolved that: “The San Antonio Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People vigorously protests any further harassment of Blacks and other minorities in fashion of massive suspicious arrests as this action constitutes intimidation. The San Antonio Branch of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People strongly requests the City Manager, Mayor, and City Council to authorize the halt of further intimidation and of arrests made in this fashion…”
SAPD sergeant William Weilbacher was a racist brutal police officer that was allowed to victimize blacks on the East Side for years. He was the most hated SAPD officer on the East Side. This officer usually took Black people up to the graveyard next to St Gerard’s High School for beatings. Many community members reported that he was “basically a coward.” He was known to have a suspicious relationship to known drug dealer Bunny Eckert and could be seen going to the hotel in St Paul Square where the drug dealer lived at all hours.
