Texas native James Farmer is one of the "Big Four" of the turbulent 1960s civil rights movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. Farmer might be called the forgotten man of the movement, overshadowed by Martin Luther King Jr., who was deeply influenced by Farmer's interpretation of Gandhi's concept of nonviolent protest.
Born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920, the son of a preacher, Farmer grew up with segregated movie theaters and "White Only" drinking fountains. This background impelled him to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. That same year he...

No Texas archetype is more indelibly stamped on the public perception than the Texas oil man--a shrewd, flamboyant figure captured most recently in the character of J. R. Ewing in the long-running television series "Dallas." During the 1980s when this program was playing worldwide, reinforcing the stereotype of the oil man as a conservative, unprincipled rogue, another Texas oil man named J. R.--in this case, J. R. Parten--was quietly concluding a remarkable career that spanned most of the twentieth century. Although J. R. Parten shared some characteristics with the fictional J. R. Ewing--he...

Winner of the Texas State Historical Association Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History, this authoritative study of red-baiting in Texas reveals that what began as a coalition against communism became a fierce power struggle between conservative and liberal politics.