A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas

Journalist Minutaglio (coauthor, Dallas 1963) delivers a vibrant political history of Texas from the 1870s to the 2020 presidential election. He describes how the former slave owners and Confederate soldiers who settled in Texas after the Civil War put up a “fierce, galvanizing resistance” to Republican governor Edmund Jackson Davis’s creation of a state police force that included freed Black men. Minutaglio also tracks the rise of the KKK as an “immutable political force” in the 1920s; documents Houston NAACP leader Lulu Belle Madison White’s involvement in successful campaigns to open Democratic primaries to Black voters and integrate the University of Texas; and examines how Republican operative Karl Rove groomed George W. Bush to unseat Democratic governor Ann Richards in 1994. Minutaglio packs his brisk history with entertaining anecdotes, including the rumor that Bob Bullock, who served two terms as lieutenant governor in the 1990s, pulled out his handgun to shoot at rats (“real or imagined”) in restaurants, and keeps a close eye on the ways that Black and Latino voters have been marginalized by Texas power brokers. This is a rollicking and richly detailed portrait of the Lone Star state. (May)