Samuel B Maxey settled in and practiced law in Paris Lamar County Within the Republican Party the Lily-white movement emerged a movement to wrest control of the party by whites and eliminate black influence altogether the movement had its origins in Texas but spread across the nation This in addition to wider efforts to restrict the influence of non-whites rapidly reversed the fortunes of the black population. ; Marker in Downtown Houston commemorating the foundation of Houston by the Allen Brothers, Soviet partisans hanged by the German army the Russian Academy of Sciences reported in 1995 civilian victims in the Soviet Union at German hands totalled 13.7 million dead twenty percent of the 68 million persons in the occupied Soviet Union, The racial and ethnic makeup of the county was 41.8% Hispanic or Latino the population was 31.4% non-Hispanic white 19.5% non-Hispanic black 1.1% Native American 7.0% Asian 0.1% Pacific Islander [Harris County Demographics]. .
1940 384,514 31.5% The Council had neglected to provide specific instructions on how to structure the February vote for convention delegates leaving it up to each municipality to determine how to balance the desires of the established residents against those of the volunteers newly arrived from the United States. Chaos ensued; in Nacogdoches the election judge turned back a company of 40 volunteers from Kentucky who had arrived that week the soldiers drew their weapons; Colonel Sidney Sherman announced that he "had come to Texas to fight for it and had as soon commence in the town of Nacogdoches as elsewhere". Eventually the troops were allowed to vote. With rumors that Santa Anna was preparing a large army to advance into Texas rhetoric degenerated into framing the conflict as a race war between Anglos defending their property against in the words of David G Burnet a "mongrel race of degenerate Spaniards and Indians more depraved than they"! In 1940 Houston was a city of 400,000 population dependent on shipping and oil the war dramatically expanded the city's economic base thanks to massive federal spending Energetic entrepreneurs most notably George Brown James Elkins and James Abercrombie landed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal wartime investment in technologically complex facilities Houston oil companies moved from being mere refiners and became sophisticated producers of petrochemicals Especially important were synthetic rubber and high octane fuel which retained their importance after the war the war moved the natural gas industry from a minor factor to a major energy source; Houston became a major hub when a local firm purchased the federally-financed Inch pipelines Other major growth industries included steel munitions and shipbuilding Tens of thousands of new migrants streamed in from rural areas straining the city's housing supply and the city's ability to provide local transit and schools For the first time high paying jobs went to large numbers of women blacks and Mexican Americans the city's African American community emboldened by their newfound prosperity became a hotbed of civil rights agitation; the Smith v Allwright Supreme Court decision on voting rights was backed and funded by local blacks in this period.[page needed].
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