The white supremacist-controlled San Antonio city government fueled threats of civil unrest and protests in San Antonio in 1968. Protest actions were what changed segregation in San Antonio and not from the invented myth of “good white business men” making it happen. The denial of civil rights, under the leadership of a segregationist mayor, Walter W. McAllister, and the racist political machine called the Good Government League (GGL), prompted threats against the business community with economic losses if desegregation did not take place. Desegregation was accomplished with protests, and threats of arrests and violence. Protests were organized by Rev. Claude Black, the Ghetto Improvement Association (Agency), CORE, the NAACP, SNCC, and many others pressured the white elite to change. Even in 2021, certain folks are going along with the 1968 white version of desegregation in San Antonio which became the false narrative by the business sector of San Antonio. The liberal local banker William Sinkin was friends with local progressives like Rev. Claude Black and others but he still stuck to spreading this falsehood as documented in a book by Sterling Holmesly titled HemisFair ’68 and the Transformation of San Antonio.
In the first chapter of the book, William R. Sinkin wrote this false desegregation origin story which gained a firm footing as the primary history of how San Antonio desegregated. However, it is entirely false. Sinkin’s belief that HemisFair brought the “community together as a cohesive force” was totally misguided. He promoted the idea of the desegregation effort to crediting the business community and to the white supremacist political group known as the Goof Government League (GGL). The city decided to desegregate because of the protests of SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, the Ghetto Improvement Agency, Reverend Claude Black, Harry Burns and hundreds of others. It also included the protests against the murder of Bobby Joe Phillips in May of 1968 by San Antonio Police who beat Phillips to death on a city. Walter McAllister, the ring leader of the segregationists and then the mayor, had racist deed restrictions on his properties when it was legal in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Bexar County Deeds Records, Vol. 2773, pages 502- 506 approx.).
All the while HemisFair was being projected as an economic and social miracle, Black and Brown people were being beaten by SAPD officers and falsely arrested in this segregated setup. The theme of HemisFair 1968 was “The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas.” However, there would be no “Confluence” of cultures in San Antonio as people were displaced and their homes destroyed to build the HemisFair. Ironically, they would not demolish or improve the ghetto across the street known then as the Victoria Courts.
A bomb threat was even called in to blow up the HemisFair tower which was ironically named Tower of the Americas. National guard troops provided protection at the base of the Tower while Mayor McAllister declared that protests were “outlawed at HemisFair. One story had it that some members of a Black Power group in Houston called in the threat, but many others said it was local and the rumor about people from Houston making the threat was typical of McAllister and white supremacist leaders at the time. They often used this age-old racist tactic in attempts to imply that local Black people were “docile” and would never do such a thing. This fact of history was watered down by the white elite and often accepted in the form of accommodations to racism by some of the Black and Brown middle class.
