San Antonio—Just Like the Rest of the South

San Antonio was seething with racism just like any other racist slave owning southern city—except they tried to hide it here in the 1960s and 1970s. The murder of a young 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, racism could still invoke powerful 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 to create a social climate that reinforced the old plantation 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.” They would often say “the Eastside” to hide the fact they were talking about the Black community. 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 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. Homicide Detective Bill Weilbacher was employed to make comments about the case has he was a notorious racist on the Eastside.

Bill Weilbacher, the king of racist brutal acts against Black people led the charge for whites. This SAPD cop often kidnapped Blacks and beat them in back of St. Gerards High School at the cemetery. 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 resolution the local NAACP branch on November 17, 1974, at New Hope Baptist Church at 1909 Nebraska Street (now Martin Luther King Street), protesting 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 and the destruction of such records on individuals involved and no action taken in these cases, thus ceasing the unrest of Blacks and other minorities in the San Antonio community . . . .”