On this episode of Texas Matters:
- LGBTQ candidates on Texas ballots for the 2018 midterm elections.
- Nazis on Texas college campuses (08:14).
- Old Texas folk yales of Lincoln visiting slaves (19:03).
LGBTQ Candidates On Texas Ballots
Early voting for the Texas primaries starts Tuesday. Democrats and Republicans are picking who will be their nominees for the Nov. 8 general election — and there are a record number of members of the LGBTQ community on the ballots.
Rice University political science Professor Mark Jonessays the rise of LGBTQ candidates is a reaction to the failed Texas "bathroom bill."
"An overwhelming majority of these LGBTQ candidates are Democrats and it’s part of a rise of Democrats that we’ve seen coming out of the woodwork in part a response to Donald Trump and then specifically here in Texas in response to the 'bathroom bill.' " – Prof. Mark Jones
Nazis On Texas College Campuses
College campuses across the nation are reporting a spike in number of pro-Nazi hate speech flyers, banners, pamphlets and demonstrations in the last year. And Texas college campuses could be experiencing this more than in other states. Texas universities are grappling with how to deal with this issue while still protecting free speech on campus. The eruption of Nazi messaging and hate speech shows no signs of going away, in fact it’s growing.
Candice Bernd and Jordan Buckley write about the problem of Nazi messaging on Texas College Campuses for the Texas Observer. Bernd is also an editor and reporter for Truth-Out.
"Texas is really taking the brunt with more incidences of this kind of white supremacists propaganda than elsewhere in the country." – Candice Bernd
Old Texas Folk Tales of Lincoln Visiting Slaves (19:03)
There are many stories about Abraham Lincoln. More books have been written about the Great Emancipator than any other American. But there are stories about Lincoln that aren’t in the history books — stories about his secret visits to slaves in Texas. William R. Black writes about these folk tales and their deeper meaning for the Atlantic.
"What we see in these stories about Lincoln coming down, being in disguise as a peddler, or a beggar and snooping around, seeing what’s going on and conspiring with the slaves and often making a fool out of the slave owners, tricking them almost like a Brer Rabbit figure, it tells us that these survivors of slavery saw emancipation that was neither top-down or bottom-up but something that had to be done with actual people and Lincoln had to get his hands dirty and come down South." — William R. Black
David Martin Davies can be reached at dmdavies@tpr.org or on Twitter @DavidMartinDavi
