A Minority View: Reynell Parkins and Creative Tension in the Civil Rights Movement of Texas, 1965–1975

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• A Minority View:Reynell Parkins and Creative Tension in the Civil Rights Movement of Texas, 1965–1975
• Moisés Acuña-Gurrola (bio)

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Portrait of Rev. Reynell M. Parkins, circa 1968. Courtesy of Reynell M. Parkins Collection, Corpus Christi Public Libraries.

Two protracted civil rights movements changed the face of Texas politics in the 1960s and 1970s. While African Americans dismantled Jim Crow, ethnic Mexicans grappled with the institutionally enforced methods of discrimination that targeted Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Spanish-surnamed citizens, a system often retroactively referred to as "Juan Crow."¹ Following the Civil Rights and Economic Opportunity Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African Americans and ethnic Mexicans focused their efforts toward breaking down the remaining structural barriers that hindered the quality of life that the new laws promised to deliver. Each group met a unique set of circumstances, but the amount of their overlap regularly compelled ethnic Mexicans and African Americans to cooperate on local issues like educational reform, workplace equality, and neighborhood improvement. The rate of change was slow but steady. A major reason for the slow rate of change was because of leaders' reliance on respectability politics, or what one historian called the "politics of civility," in which the rules of the establishment shaped the movement. Under this strategy, leaders found victory defined by courts, laws, and opportunities for personal upward economic mobility.² Such tactics, according to historians and contemporary radical [End Page 41] activists, resulted often in minority activist leaders eventually falling under the control of Anglo liberal elites.

Radical—often high-school and college-aged—activists who grew impatient with the slow rate of change by the middle to late 1960s created a new language of protest that stressed Black Power and Chicano Power. The language was direct and confrontational. It demanded equal representation in an Anglo-dominated political and economic system, the very one that had historically marginalized both groups. As historian William H. Chafe explains about radical Black activist language, "Black Power was revolutionary precisely to the extent that it rejected traditional White definitions of success, achievement, political dialogues, and social manners" held by the minority community leaders who believed in the effectiveness that gradualism promised.³ Thus, a clash between the leadership of radical youths and "civil"-minded veteran community leaders resulted in a chasm between the two generations.

But from 1965 to 1975, one leader embodied seemingly contradictory characteristics of Texas's civil rights movements of the time: Rev. Reynell Parkins. He was a middle-aged Black man, Latino immigrant, Black-Power activist, Chicano-pride advocate, academic, and college-educated clergyman who demanded immediate social justice. Parkins passionately defending local radical youths from the criticisms of his middle-aged peers and Anglo liberals in a process he termed "creative tension."⁴ With his distinctively assertive attitude—and with a tinge of sarcasm—Parkins professed his take on intergenerational discourse to a group of Texas municipal planners and architects:

We need to teach that the major responsibility of all human beings is to apply the universal transcendent law to the particular situation. For example: 'Honor thy father and thy mother' is no problem except when my father is neurotic and my mother is alcoholic and I'm dependent upon both in their home. In this kind of situation, we need to teach people to live in what I would call productive, creative tensions. Planners and all Americans have rejected a concept of tension and seem to think that when tension exists, something is wrong, that tension is negative. I'm saying that this is not true. There is a creative, productive tension under which we must be prepared to live.⁵

As a leader in both the Black and ethnic Mexican freedom struggles in the "postassassination wilderness" of 1965 and beyond, when young ethnic Mexicans and African Americans fought to escape the "unconscious assertion of white power on the part of white liberals," Parkins consistently confronted [End Page 42] the barriers that gradualists instituted.⁶ A critical investigation of Parkins's activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Texas thus offers historians a new...